The elderly are just one of a growing number of patient groups whose needs are not being adequately met. “When you look at the elderly and Medicare, the disparities among ethnic minorities, as well as just access—47 million people without insurance, or even worse, the underinsured—and then you look at the chronic disease we can’t care for …,” Lord trails off. “I don’t know. The list goes on and on.”
And that is the primary reason why AANP and AAPA are encouraging all members of the professions they represent to take action.
A Right and a Privilege
The right to vote is, of course, a privilege granted to all American adults, but for a health care provider it can hold additional import. Besides being a private citizen with his or her own belief system and priorities, each PA or NP is a professional whose right to practice is legislated and regulated to an extent greater than that for many other careers. And the laws that affect them have an impact, by extension, on the patients they serve.
“As health care providers, when you look at our vision and our mission and the reason that our whole profession was established—to take care of patients—unfortunately, it’s not just about the ‘do good’ and the medicine,” Lord points out. “If we don’t exercise our right to vote, then we truly will have—we’re seeing it now—trouble practicing medicine and caring for our patients. And our patients always come first.”
That dedication to patient care makes NPs and PAs great clinicians—but often, reluctant politicos. “It’s not a natural activity for most people who go into health care,” Gara notes. “They want to take care of patients and make them better. They don’t want to deal with politics and politicians. I think it’s only when they realize how important this is to everyday life that the little light goes on and people start to say, ‘Oh, I can do this and I should do this.’”
“This” begins with exercising the right to vote—although Towers, Gara, and Lord emphasize the importance of being an informed voter. With that in mind, AAPA—which Lord describes as “much more proactive over the last several years”—has launched “PAs for a Healthy America: Vote 2008.” A section of the organization’s Web site, available to both members and nonmembers, provides links to the presumptive Democratic and Republication nominees’ health care platforms (and, hopefully soon, responses to a five-item questionnaire AAPA sent to both candidates), as well as information on who is running for election to Congress.
AAPA “is trying to provide easy resources,” Lord explains. “As an individual, you’ve got to make a decision. And those who say, ‘I don’t have time for this,’ that’s a choice they make. We’re trying to show them this is a choice you need to make, and it’s an easy thing to do.”
Towers encourages NPs to review the information on the candidates’ Web sites, which “tells you a lot about what a candidate does and doesn’t know. Once you look at those things, you get a better grasp of whether or not they’re really tuned in to the issues that affect NPs and their patients.”
Even better, for those who can manage it, is attending town hall meetings or fundraisers that provide an opportunity to ask questions of the candidate directly. Clinicians “need to be asking about what candidates perceive to be the health problems in their state and their district and what they think the resolution should be,” Towers says. From there, you can inquire as to the candidate’s knowledge of NPs or PAs and how he or she would address specific issues that PAs or NPs have.
You Decide
Leaders from AANP and AAPA want you to vote, and they want to make it easy for you to make a decision. But they don’t want to make that decision for you. “I don’t think anybody should be ruled out,” Gara says. “Everybody can be persuaded of the facts, and everybody can be approached. I’m definitely not a one-issue kind of person, so I really hate to see people make decisions based on a single position that somebody has taken.
“[Health care] is really not a partisan issue, you know,” she concludes. “It’s really for everybody.”