National Physicians Alliance
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The National Physicians Alliance (NPA) is founded to restore physicians' primary emphasis on the core values of the profession: service, integrity, and advocacy. The NPA offers a professional home for physicians seeking creative collaboration and mutual support. As a diverse physician community, the organization works to improve health and well being, and to ensure equitable, affordable, high quality health care for all people. Of note, the organization takes no money from the pharmaceutical industry, or other entities that may cause a conflict-of-interest situation to arise.
Watch the NPA's introductory video to learn more about the organization and the reasons for creation.
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[edit] Guiding Principles
See the organization's Guiding Principles
[edit] National Meeting
The NPA's annual meeting, Making Medicine Ours Again: Patients and Doctors United for Health was held in Washington, DC from March 10-12, 2007. Speakers included Paul Farmer, Sanjay Gupta and Ron Pollack, the Executive Director of Families USA. The NPA worked closely with the American Medical Student Association to organize the conference.
[edit] Issues
The NPA has selected a number of policy areas based on our guiding principles, most notably the importance that these issues have on the lives of our patients.
[edit] Ensuring High Quality, Affordable Health Care for All
The NPA seeks to mobilize physicians locally and nationally in the fight for a just, equitable, caring, and effective health care system. In the United States, formidable barriers currently stand between patients and ideal medical care. Doctors are uniquely positioned to lead in the work of reform-reform that will benefit patients and doctors alike. The NPA embraces the principles for health care reform advanced by the Institute of Medicine:
Health care coverage should be universal. Health care coverage should be continuous. Health care coverage should be affordable to individuals and families. The health insurance strategy should be affordable and sustainable for society. Health insurance should enhance health and well-being by promoting access to high-quality care that is effective, efficient, safe, timely, patient-centered, and equitable. Inspired by those who have led the way in fighting for high quality, affordable health care for all, the NPA offers America's 800,000 physicians a home from which to develop and stage a coordinated and effective campaign for reform.
[edit] Restoring Integrity and Trust in Medicine
For good reason, the public has steadily lost faith in the medical profession over the last several decades. As the health care system has been yielded to large corporations, a business ethic threatens our foundational ethic of care. Corporate influences have compromised the doctor-patient relationship and medical organizations have unfortunately been complicit in this unraveling. The National Physicians Alliance is founded to restore trust in the medical profession by refocusing medicine on our core values: service, integrity and advocacy. The NPA not only represents doctors, but also collaborates with patients and strictly refuses financial entanglements with the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries. We aim to regain our patients' trust by earning it. The NPA believes that patients should never have to doubt the motives of their doctors.
See NPA's Issue Briefs on Sale of Physician Prescribing Data and Integrity.
[edit] Reforming Malpractice, Promoting Safety
The medical malpractice system in the United States is broken. Only one of every hundred patients injured by negligence receives compensation. At the same time, many malpractice suits brought against doctors don't actually involve any negligence at all. Rather than deterring malpractice, the current system actually promotes it by causing doctors and hospitals to hide their mistakes for fear of being sued. Clearly, this culture of worried secrecy undermines patient safety. How can health care providers learn from a mistake they never heard about? The National Physicians Alliance believes that everyone's interests will be better served by embracing dramatic reform to the existing system. One among several interesting proposals under consideration involves the creation of medical injury compensation funds. Doctors who contribute to a fund would no longer be vulnerable to malpractice lawsuits, while patients who have been injured during their medical care would be compensated from this fund based on the severity of their injury. Local patient safety councils will investigate how the injury took place and what changes could be made in the system of care to prevent future injuries from occurring. This is only one possible approach to the problem, but it illustrates the scope of the reform that will be necessary to bring doctors and patients together in solving this crisis. The NPA aims to develop a new system that will improve safety, increase efficiency, promote fairness, discourage frivolous suits, compensate a greater percentage of injured patients, and do it all for less money than we currently spend in acrimonious battle.
See NPA's Issue Brief on Malpractice Reform.
[edit] Eliminating Health Disparities
Different demographic groups in the United States do not share equal quality of health or equal life-spans. Attempts to remedy these disparities have focused primarily on documenting the problem and seeking changes in medical curricula around "cultural competency" for physicians. While knowing how to relate to patients across religious, racial, and cultural lines is critically important for any physician and is not innate knowledge, the NPA believes that our response to America's health disparity crisis must go farther than cultural competency training. We must understand and address the root causes of Americans' terrible health disparities. To focus on this problem, the NPA will begin by working with leaders of affected groups and communities to develop a comprehensive long-range strategy for building up the health of every American. The solutions will come from the pooling of our wisdom and courage-from the grassroots to the think tanks-and from the trust and synergy that grows with genuine collaboration.
[edit] Protecting Medicaid
Medicaid, the Federal program designed to provide health insurance to the economically disadvantaged, helps over 50 million people receive the medical care that they need. One in four children rely on Medicaid for everything from vaccinations to critical care. Over half of all nursing home residents will rely on Medicaid to help pay for their care. Recent federal budget cuts have targeted Medicaid-slashing the program's budget by $ 4.8 billion. Most states are also considering drastic changes to their Medicaid programs. These changes threaten to cut medical services to those who can least afford to pay on their own. The NPA believes that the gutting of Medicaid is short-sighted and morally wrong. More people will become sicker as a result of Medicaid cuts. The cost in human suffering and national productivity should not be underestimated. The NPA will fight to protect Medicaid at the federal and state levels. The United States should be seeking ways to stabilize and improve healthcare coverage, not undermine it.
[edit] Fighting High Deductible, High Co-Pay Insurance
Patients today are paying for a larger and larger share of their health care. Not only is it difficult for many people to acquire health insurance, but even those with coverage are seeing costs rise. At a time when patients and their families are already overwhelmed by the financial, emotional, and time demands of interacting with today's healthcare system, a movement is underway to make the situation even worse. Insurers and corporations are sneakily shifting the financial burden onto everyday Americans by driving patients into high deductible, high co-pay plans that offer little protection when a person actually needs medical care. Half of all bankruptcies are now due to medical problems, and in most of these cases, the person declaring bankruptcy had medical insurance. This trend of burden-shifting has been promoted under the misleading label of "consumer-directed health care." Make no mistake: these plans benefit influential insurers and payers, at a high price to actual consumers. Their momentum is growing. The new Medicare drug plan and "health savings accounts" are two prominent examples of this effort to shift healthcare costs to patients-and both are contributing to the dissolution of what it even means to be insured. The United States may be approaching a time when the word "insured" is nothing but an empty shell, useful for political tabulations but meaningless for patients. In contrast, the NPA seeks to establish true patient-driven health care by resisting high-deductible health plan proposals and prioritizing accessible, high quality health care for all people.
See NPA's Issue Brief on Health Savings Accounts.
[edit] Organizational Structure
[edit] Membership
Membership is open to all physicians who have graduated from a medical school accredited by the Liasion Committee for Medical Education or who are practicing medicine in the United States.
[edit] Executive Committee/Board of Directors
The NPA's leaders represent a variety of medical specialties and practice locations. Many current leaders within the NPA were former members, or leaders, of the American Medical Student Association.
[edit] Council of Consumers
An important part of the NPA's structure is the Council of Consumers. This body ensures that the NPA will continue to prioritize the interests of patients.
[edit] Advisory Board
A number of physician-leaders serve on the NPA's Advisory Board
