Why Medical Students Believe in SB 840 by Senator Kuehl and How It Can Save California $8 Billion per Year and Guarantee Quality

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Parker A. Duncan
MS4/MPH(c), UC Irvine
Student Board Member, California Physicians Alliance

On a blustery, but blessedly sunny, Monday in January over 350 medical and other health professional students amassed on the north steps of the capitol, creating a sea of “white coats” that enveloped keynote speaker Senator Sheila Kuehl with a deafening round of applause. The group then swarmed the Capitol, holding over 100 legislative visits with almost every Senator and most Assemblymembers, expressing their specific and exclusive support for SB 840.

The question: Why would so many students miss class (many rescheduled anatomy dissections; several rearranged exams), travel from all over California (150 of whom boarded buses in Irvine and LA at 4.30 a.m. the day before in order to also attend a 6-hour workshop, hosted at UC Davis) to meet with their legislators about a bill the Governor keeps promising he’ll veto if Senator Kuehl mounts the temerity to place it on his desk again?

First the hubris: as healthcare professional students, we are the future of healthcare, which affords us both a special privilege and responsibility to fill a seat—and a large one--at the table of healthcare system reform. The system created today is the one we manage tomorrow; thus, our voice is crucial to the success of any reform.

Further, we know what we are talking about. We have actually studied (that’s what students do!) our current non-system hodgepodge. We have educated ourselves about the reality—we call it evidence-based medicine--of the world we are about to enter. (Granted it does not require a professional degree to comprehend: Walter Cronkite, the great avuncular voice of American broadcasting, said it succinctly, “The American healthcare system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.”).