By MICHAEL MILLENSON
The annual Lown Institute Conference advocates for the “right” kind of patient care, as in “the correct course of action.” But the political meanings of “right” and “left” also echo, sounding like a healthcare version of the recover-lost-glory demands of Donald Trump and the moral crusade of Bernie Sanders.
The program for this year’s meeting, held in Chicago, urged attendees to “take back health [care];” you could almost hear a Trumpian, “Make medicine great again!” In an opening address, the institute’s senior vice president, Shannon Brownlee, proclaimed, “We are gathered out of a shared sense of moral purpose and a shared sense of outrage at the state of American healthcare.” The targets of that outrage that “we” need to take back healthcare from comprised a Sanders-type litany of the “pharma, biotech and device companies…[who] have illegally marketed products.”
There was one more villain, very carefully defined. That would be “a culture of overtesting and overtreatment…[that] harms patients, clinicians and communities.” Got that? While Brownlee’s acclaimed 2007 book, Overtreated, repeatedly highlights the abuses of fee-for-service medicine, the Lown Institute’s namesake founder and its president are academic physicians. And so, the doctors and hospitals responsible for and often profiting from overtreatment magically become just one more set of victims of the “culture.”
Ideological blinders notwithstanding, the institute’s work celebrates and highlights an impressive array of individuals working diligently for every conceivable kind of “right care.” There was Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, a Camden, NJ family physician whose description of his dogged, data-driven efforts on behalf of the poor and sick brought a standing ovation. And Dr. Joanne Lynn, a long-time advocate for the frail elderly, explaining why a MediCaring community model that mixed medical and social services was what the vulnerable old and their families really needed.
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