Dr. Vivek Murthy, a hospitalist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, is a passionate advocate for reforming the health care system. When he’s not seeing patients, teaching, or conducting research, he’s encouraging his colleagues to lobby state and federal lawmakers on health care issues ranging from the need for more loan repayment programs for physicians to the importance of federal funding for preventive health services.
In 2008, he helped start "Doctors for Obama," a group of about 10,000 physicians and medical students who supported then presidential candidate Barack Obama and his health reform platform. A year later, the group was reborn as "Doctors for America," a nonprofit organization that now boasts more than 15,000 members. It has no official ties to President Obama’s reelection campaign or to any political party. During 2009-2010, Doctors for America mobilized physicians to ensure their ideas helped to shape the content of the Affordable Care Act. The group is now launching a campaign to train physicians around the country to educate the public about the impact of the health reform law.
Courtesy White House
Dr. Vivek Murthy shaking hands with President Obama
In addition to his role as president of Doctors for America, Dr. Murthy serves on the President's Advisory Group on Prevention, Health Promotion, and Integrative and Public Health, a group that provides policy recommendations on chronic disease prevention and management, health promotion, and integrative health care practices. In an interview with Hospitalist News, Dr. Murthy explained why physicians need to be politically active, and how his political activism has changed his interactions with patients.
Hospitalist News: Why did you decide to start Doctors for America?
Dr. Murthy: I decided to start Doctors for America during the 2008 presidential election, when health care was a priority issue. Like many others, I recognized that familiar players, such as insurers and pharma companies, would play a role in sharing the health reform platforms of the candidates and ultimately a health reform bill. However, I was struck by how few physicians were organizing and gathering their ideas to actually make an impact on the candidates’ platforms and, ultimately, on a health reform bill. A few colleagues and I began Doctors for America with a simple belief that physicians should play a leadership role in designing and running our nation’s health care system. That started with enabling physicians to shape and inform what would become the next major health reform law.
HN: Why is it important to you to be politically active?
Dr. Murthy: I haven’t really been politically active for most of my life. I didn’t even follow policy very much. But what became apparent to me a few years ago was that the only way we physicians were going to create a health care system that functioned well for patients and for doctors was if we got involved in helping to build it. It’s not that as physicians we know all the answers; we don’t. But what’s important is that we do have a unique view of the health care system. As individual physicians and also as leaders in our community, we can play a role in helping to give more voice to the perspective of physicians and patients. If these perspectives are missing as our health care system is being redesigned, then we’re not going to have a system that ultimately works.
HN: How does your activism impact or inform your interactions with patients?
Dr. Murthy: My interactions with patients are my greatest source of learning because they help illuminate to me not just what the problems are, but also whether solutions really make sense and are going to work for regular people. I think there are a lot of solutions that sound really good on paper but when it comes down to it, the question is, are they really going to work for patients? Are they going to fit into their day-to-day lives? So having a chance to continue working with patients has been very helpful to me in sparking new ideas and seeing what patients think about proposed solutions.
HN: Do you think more hospitalists should get involved in political activism?
Dr. Murthy: One thing I’ve realized is that most doctors don’t understand just how powerful their voice really is. They don’t realize how much power they have just by virtue of their own experiences and the kind of work they do in society. For example, I was speaking to a congressman’s staffer one day, and he told me that his office gets calls all the time from constituents, but if they get a call from just one doctor, that’s something notable. If 10 doctors call in, that means something major has happened.