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The importance of primary care to patients and to the survival of safety-net systems

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April 25, 2012 Guest Blog by Mitchell H. Katz, M.D.Director, Los Angeles County Department of Health Services

When I was being recruited to take on running the immense Los Angeles County health care system, I asked to see the organizational chart.   As a primary care doctor and administrator attuned to the emphasis of primary care within the federal health reform legislation, I wanted to see how ambulatory care was structured.  I couldn’t find it on the chart.  When I asked where ambulatory care reported to, I was told “the hospitals.”  Maybe that’s why Los Angeles has an underdeveloped outpatient system, I thought.

No hospital administrator can focus on outpatient care when he or she is dealing with immediate life and death matters like not enough ICU beds or critical overcrowding in an emergency department, and frankly, I wouldn’t want them to.  And the skills for organizing outpatient care are different than for inpatient care.

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Health care reform update

January 30, 2012 Carmella GutierrezPresident, Californians for Patient Care

I recently returned from Health Action 2012, the Families USA Conference in Washington, D.C., where healthcare policy leaders gather every year to discuss the progress being made in healthcare, as well as to discuss the industry’s most immediate challenges.

It is hard to ignore the contentious political nature of healthcare reform. To put it simply: liberals want universal coverage to ensure that everyone can get healthcare while conservatives generally contest the government’s authority to require anyone to have health insurance and certainly don’t want to pay for the costly care of people they don’t know. I’ll agree that this is may be an oversimplification of the issues, but they are representative of the major differences in philosophy when it comes to healthcare in this country. (The Wall Street Journal “point/counterpoint” does a great job comparing both ideologies.)

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Spreading the word about affordable care in California’s communities

April 5, 2011 Carmella GutierrezPresident, Californians for Patient Care

This weekend in Sacramento, thousands of people waited for hours to receive free medical, dental and vision care, no questions asked. The first-of-its kind event in Sacramento was hosted by the non-profit Remote Area Medical and dozens of medical professionals who gave their time and services to help people who would otherwise not be able to afford the care they needed.

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