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1. Essential health benefits bulletin. Balti-more: Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, December 16, 2011 (http://cciio.cms.gov/resources/files/Files2/ 12162011/essential_health_benefits_bulletin .pdf).

2. Closing the quality gap: hypertension care

strategies: fact sheet. Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, April 2004. (AHRQ Publication No. 04-P018.)3. Freedman KB, Kaplan FS, Bilker WB, Strom BL, Lowe RA. Treatment of osteoporo-sis: are physicians missing an opportunity? J Bone Joint Surg Am 2000;82-A:1063-70.

4. Kaiser Family Foundation. Medicaid bene-fits: online database (http://medicaidbenefits .kff.org/index.jsp).

5. Ruger JP. Health and social jus-tice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Copyright © 2012 Massachusetts Medical Society.

Fair Enough? Inviting Inequities in State Benefits

becoming a physician

What Life Is Like

Nicholas J. Rohrhoff, B.S.

T

he summer before I began medical school, the handy-man working in our kitchen told me exactly how many more refrig-erators he needed to repair in or-der to afford his coronary-artery bypass surgery. My excitement about having achieved a lifelong dream was suddenly displaced by doubt. What if the healing touch of my prospective colleagues re-mained out of this man’s reach? As if in search of an answer, I’ve spent the past 5 years playing different characters in this unique-ly American health care tragedy.Most medical schools seek to augment anatomy with humanity through a concurrent curriculum. At the University of Miami, this includes a lecture from university president Donna Shalala, a for-mer U.S. secretary of health and human services.

During her visit to our class in 2007, recounting a conversation she had with a young worker at a nail salon about employer-sponsored health insurance, Ms. Shalala encouraged us to ask peo-ple what their lives are like. The notion was as innovative as it was simple. It was exactly what I had done in the kitchen with the handyman a few months earlier. And it was my first inkling that caring for patients should begin with caring about them.

Through the Mitchell Wolfson Sr. Department of Community

Service, University of Miami Mil-ler School of Medicine students have the opportunity to gain early clinical experience, with faculty supervision, at our student-run health fairs and clinics that reach into some of the most under-served communities in the coun-try. We colloquially refer to this exercise as “seeing patients.” In reality, our fund of knowledge as first-year medical students limits us to asking people what their lives are like.

In the conversations we had, it became clear that some of our patients were eligible for but not enrolled in federal and state health insurance programs. So we added a station at each health fair to supplement access to us with access to the system. After the mother of our first enrollee in the State Children’s Health In-surance Program let her grati-tude shine through her tears, ask-ing people what their lives are like became a habit for me. It has been so ever since.

Sometimes I have encountered polite but palpable resistance. Of-ten people’s immediate reaction went unspoken: What could you, an upper-middle-class white kid, possibly know about my life? Though I’ll nev-er know for sure, that sentiment probably often manifested as cas-ual agreement with requests that I later learned were preposterous.How can you eat more fruits and vegetables if your neighbor-hood doesn’t have a grocery store? How can you take your medicine every day if getting it requires 2 hours of public transportation each way to drop off the pre-scription and then an encore to pick it up the next day? With un-employment above 13% in the construction industry,1 what is the difference between a sick day and a resignation letter? What could I possibly know?

The conversations proceeded in fits and starts because of my “un-conscious incompetence.” I could readily recite the 11 criteria for identifying lupus. I didn’t know that once it prevails over the kid-neys, Medicare pays for the neces-sary dialysis. I could effortlessly name the complications of a myo-cardial infarction and the medi-cines necessary to prevent anoth-er. I didn’t know that versions of most of those drugs are available at Walmart for $4 per month.2 And I could easily remember that a glycated hemoglobin level great-er than 10 is an indication for insulin therapy. I didn’t know that homeless patients with dia-betes usually don’t receive insu-lin because they don’t have refrig-erators. I had answers for my patients — but no solutions.Suddenly, each exam room be-came my kitchen. The handyman was never there, but his story al-ways was. Though I tried to adopt

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his perspective in each encoun-ter, I didn’t realize that his story was each of ours — until it be-came my own.

Not long after the financial meltdown, my dad lost his job. According to the Commonwealth Fund,3 almost three quarters of adults who become uninsured when they get laid off have prob-lems getting care they need (see graph). Tapping the resources set aside for a modest retirement, my parents debated whether they could beat those odds. Even be-fore the health care reform law passed, the newly unemployed could keep their group health insurance for a limited time by paying the full premium. But no provision specifies how to make the payments without an income.At most medical schools, the only formal lesson that students receive about health insurance is that they themselves are required to have it. Aspiring doctors are not taught that for every 1% in-crease in the national unemploy-ment rate, about 1 million people enroll in Medicaid and another million become uninsured.4 De-spite my well-intentioned attempts

at empathy, I couldn’t walk in the shoes of my patients until the Great Recession slipped them on my feet.

Having uninsured parents while caring for uninsured pa-tients convinced me that learn-ing medicine isn’t the same as understanding health care. To compensate, I spent a year in Washington, D.C., as the govern-ment relations fellow at the American Medical Association. In that role, I sat in rooms full of powerful people who made deci-sions that instantly affected mil-lions of patients. Most of them had never treated community-acquired pneumonia, explained the potential lethal complications of a necessary surgery, or con-soled a grieving family in the in-tensive care unit. Often, I was the only person in the room who had ever provided direct patient care.Outside the Beltway, medical students were focused on the next exam, but their concern for the next generation of Americans was increasing. Some support the Affordable Care Act (ACA), while others do not. Most just want to know how the ACA is going to affect their patients and the pro-fession. A student in Little Rock wants to practice family medicine in northeast Arkansas, where he grew up. One in California dreams of becoming an orthopedic sur-geon in San Francisco. Though an electoral map would suggest otherwise, he was for the ACA, she was opposed. The medical profession, like America, is re-markably diverse.

Each generation of physicians has no choice but to assume re-sponsibility for learning the sci-ence of how best to care for

p atients. But fiscal and demo-graphic circumstances dictate that this generation must also bear the burden of developing policies that create the best system in which to provide that care. To-day, Medicare costs consume 5.5% of the gross domestic product. When I become eligible for the program in 2050, it will be 12%.5 That’s not politics; it’s math.

The fate of the ACA is out of our hands, but the impetus for it remains: a lower-cost, higher-quality health care system acces-sible to the handyman, my pa-tients, my parents, and every other

What Life Is Like

Percentage of U.S. Adults Who Had Problems Getting Needed Care after a Layoff.Data are from the Commonwealth Fund.

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American who needs it. Tomor-row’s physicians must lead us from the system that we have to the system that we need. If we don’t help save money in the right places, Washington is full

of people ready to cut spending in the wrong ones.

At every teaching hospital in the country, medical students ask patients how they are doing. In these difficult times, we must not forget to also ask how things are going. In confronting the central challenge of our time, no amount of studying can replace asking people what their lives are like.Disclosure forms provided by the author are available with the full text of this arti-cle at NEJM.org.From the University of Miami Miller School

of Medicine, Miami.1. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. Construction: NAICS 23: work-force statistics (http://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/

iag23.htm#workforce).

2. Walmart. Retail prescription program drug list (http://i.walmartimages.com/i/if/

hmp/fusion/customer_list.pdf).

3. Collins SR, Doty MM, Robertson R, Gar-ber T. Help on the horizon: findings from

The Commonwealth Fund Biennial Health Insurance Survey of 2010. Washington, DC: The Commonwealth Fund, March 2011 (http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/ media/Files/Publications/Fund%20Report/ 2011/Mar/1486_Collins_help_on_the_ horizon_2010_biennial_survey_report_ FINAL_v2.pdf).

4. Holahan J, Garrett AB. Rising unemploy-ment, Medicaid and the uninsured. Washing-ton, DC: Kaiser Family Foundation, January 2009 (http://www.kff.org/uninsured/upload/ 7850.pdf).

5. Congressional Budget Office’s 2011 long-term budget outlook. Washington, DC: Con-gressional Budget Office, June 2011 (http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/122xx/doc12212/ 06-21-Long-Term_Budget_Outlook.pdf).

Copyright © 2012 Massachusetts Medical Society.

What Life Is Like