It Takes a Balanced Health Care System to Get It Right

Using different foci and methods (and coming from both sides of the country) these 2 reports contribute to the growing awareness of the urgent need to redesign medical care and medical education in the United States.¹⁵ What will it take to move from our current expensive but inadequate approach that overemphasizes disease-oriented subspecialty medicine to a balanced sustainable patient-centered health care model that optimizes the capacities of an abundant well-trained health care workforce? To answer this question physicians — especially primary care physicians at the frontlines of medicine — will need to work together on behalf of the well-being of the people of the United States.