RCHC Community Project Abstracts

Thinking about Health Care in the USA: A Health Care Primer
Date of project: 8/3/2009

Health care reform has been one of the big political and social topics of 2009. With a president committed to reform and an equally committed opposition the tenor of the debate has been flooded with misinformation and intentional misunderstanding. The physicians at Dunes Family Health Care felt that their voices needed to be heard on the subject and that it was in part their responsibility to educate their patients. To do this they wanted to develop a tool that they could use to talk to their patients about the basic traits of the US health care system and the key elements of proposed reforms. Patient literacy levels and sophistication are limiting factors in this discussion. A health care primer was developed in a tri-fold color pamphlet form in order to help the physicians with their discussion. A significant effort was made to simplify the presentation of this complex issue. But, ultimately the level of discussion in the finished pamphlet requires an amount of education or literacy that makes it inaccessible still to many of their patients. This seems unavoidable to a certain extent because the health care system is at some point irreducibly complex and can only be simplified so far before the discussion becomes dishonest or meaningless.

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