New Podcast: Dr. Robert Phillips Discusses the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Recent Report, ” Implementing High-Quality Primary Care”

Among numerous other statistics, despite spending approximately twice what comparative countries spend on healthcare, the US has highest rates of preventable deaths.  Even wealthy Americans are more likely to, for example, die during childbirth, from cancer and from heart attacks than those in 12 comparative countries.  This is substantially due to the fact primary care in the US, as the National Academy of Medicine report states in its opening, is “slowly dying.”  The report further notes despite the fact primary care’s value is beyond dispute, approximately 25% of Americans do not have a primary care physician and 80 million Americans live, per  HRSA, in primary care health professions shortage areas.  In turn, this is largely due to the fact only 5% of healthcare spending goes to primary care despite such visits accounting for 40% of all medical office visits.  Translation: primary care physicians are substantially undercompensated that contributes to a growing shortage of primary care clinicians.