The Right Care Alliance Vision

The U.S. health care system is dysfunctional and betrays its humanitarian roots as well as its health mission. The medical-industrial establishment continues to consolidate, ignoring the health needs of people who have been transformed into customers rather than patients in distress. Medicine is now a lucrative business for the few and unaffordable for the many. The pressure is unrelenting to see more patients in less time. Overreliance on technology forces us to do more to the patient and less for the patient. The result is overtreatment, undertreatment, and mistreatment.

We are tired of health professionals being called providers and patients referred to as consumers. Health care is not just another business. Our vision is of a transformed system in which the pursuit of health is a right and health care is based on healing relationships, close to home, affordable, effective and just. We all deserve a system in which health professionals and patients alike experience the care they give and receive as necessary and meaningful.

The system we seek is one in which:

  1. Health care is a right, not a commodified privilege, and access to health care is universal, equitable, and affordable. Everybody in, nobody out.
  2. Our current hospital-centric system of “sick-care” is radically redesigned and transformed.
  3. Primary care is the bedrock of a re-organized system that is community-based.
  4. Prevention of illness and disability have priority, focusing on proven lifestyle changes rather than the overuse of tests and
  5. Attention is concentrated on the social, economic, and educational factors that are the major drivers of health.
  6. The way we teach and train our health professionals is changed to restore passion and idealism, removing expensive barriers to entry, shortening the curriculum, and redirecting medical education to meet the needs of their patients and the communities they serve.
  7. There is meaningful public transparency around costs and outcomes that matter to patients and communities.
  8. Patients are informed decision-makers about their own health care.
  9. Communities are informed and empowered to control the systems that serve them.
  10. The conduct of medical science, the regulation of medical products, and the practice of medicine are free of commercial bias and the profit motive