A few common sense ideas. Is anyone willing to step up to the plate?
Arizona needs to bring a new university medical school in Phoenix to full operation and should support private alternatives that could train more doctors and nurses. And Gov. Janet Napolitano should reconsider her veto of a bill last year that would have made it harder for patients to successfully sue for malpractice. A task force she appointed to deflect criticism of that veto has recommended such a reversal.
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If patients do not have access to primary care doctors and instead seek their acute care through overburdened emergency rooms, why does it seem necessary to conclude that opening a medical school is the answer? Is the access problem a result of overcrowded doctors officed and lack of appointments, or inadequate insurance and inability or unwillingness to pay for non-emergency-room based care (which isn’t free either, very much the opposite, but is frequently not paid for by ER users)? Building a teaching hospital makes residents available to see patients, but doesn’t necessarily get patients into private doctors’s offices and out of the ER.
This is political. The fact is the University of Arizona (in Tucson)has opened a branch campus in Phoenix in conjunction with ASU. there are many good hospitals in which the students can rotate and have residents (Good Samaritan, St Joseph’s, Maricopa County, not to mention Mayo Scottsdale). There is also a DO school in Phoenix. The fact is some of the Phoenix powerbrokers think that ASU should have it’s own med school and not a UA branch campus. Either way, a new med school will have little help to today’s ER patient’s. The article is right about Napalitono vetoing the medical malpractice bill
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