An internal medicine resident at Atlanta-based Grady Memorial Hospital penned a letter in STAT to HHS Secretary Tom Price, MD, asking him to remember the many "Grady stories" he collected during his time as a resident and faculty member at the hospital and to keep those patients and their stories in mind as he crafts the nation's healthcare policy.
As a Grady Memorial Hospital physician, Allyson Herbst, MD, an internal medicine resident at the safety net hospital, acknowledged the struggle most physicians working at safety net hospitals face is obtaining the resources necessary to provide patients with quality care. According to Dr. Herbst, America's public hospitals understand the tragedy "intimately" — safety net hospitals across the nation treat a substantial portion of the 28 million Americans who remain uninsured, the 29 percent who cannot pay their medical bills and the 27 percent who postpone medical treatment or who refuse to pay $10 to fill a 90-day prescription because they cannot afford it.
For Dr. Herbst, those statistics have come to life in nearly every patient she has encountered during each stage of her medical career. One of her patients, Audrey, experienced a seizure after checking herself out of the hospital against Dr. Herbst's recommendations because "she was so terrified of the medical bill she was accruing in the intensive care unit." Hector, a man in his fifties Dr. Herbst cared for while in medical school, waited "until the last minute" to treat his end-stage lung disease because he "feared losing his apartment and new dining set[,] both [of which] could be taken away if he didn't pay his rent during hospitalization." Dr. Herbst said she decided to apply for a residency position at Grady because she read about a 53-year-old woman who "arrived at the hospital with a plastic bag containing her cancerous breast which had fallen off at home" because she couldn't afford health insurance.
In voting against legislation such as the Violence Against Women Act, funding for AIDS and tuberculosis research and expanding the budgets for the Children's Health Insurance Program and the National Institutes of Health, among other key pieces of legislation, Dr. Herbst questioned whether Dr. Price has "forgotten some of the basic training [residents] get at Grady." Dr. Herbst said Dr. Price's support of the Empowering Patients First Act and the defunct American Health Care Act as repeal and replacement measures for the ACA would have made the millions of Americans who gained coverage under the ACA "[lose] the dignity of health insurance" and that "should [have been] unacceptable" to a former Grady resident and faculty member.
As the third physician to lead HHS, Dr. Price has "the power to shape healthcare that few [medical professionals] will ever achieve," wrote Dr. Herbst. As a former Grady Memorial resident, he has "lived the same kinds of Grady stories" Dr. Herbst and her colleagues have and she implored Dr. Price to "take the lessons [he] learned at Grady and use them to improve the health of all Americans."
More articles on hospital-physician relationships:
Henry Ford physician hurt after stopping to help car crash victims dies
Dartmouth College selects medical school dean: 5 things to know
Hospitals 'rushing' to obtain accelerated visas for foreign medical students