First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, shown on stage with Medical
Dean Joseph Martin, said that Medicare, the federal government, and all
health plans should support academic health centers.Commencement
First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, shown on stage with Medical
Dean Joseph Martin, said that Medicare, the federal government, and all
health plans should support academic health centers.
In her Commencement address at the June 4 Class Day ceremony on the Quad, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton acknowledged many of the challenges the medical and dental graduates will face, saying that the greatest is keeping the pledge in their class oath that "the health of my patients will be my first concern."
From the focus of this patient-doctor bond, her talk expanded to a perspective on ethics, research funding, medical record privacy, Medicare, patient rights, and health insurance. The First Lady mentioned some of the President's initiatives, of course, and worked within his political agenda. Yet she was convincing. She issued a defense of academic health centers, which, incidentally, an Association of American Medical Colleges survey has found to be underappreciated even by most Congressional health committee staffers.
The First Lady said that all Americans have a stake in the President's proposal for a 21st century research fund to boost the budget of the National Institutes of Health "at least by 50 percent over the next five years." To ensure that technology does not run wild, however, ethics should always keep pace with science, she noted.
The Human Genome Project offers a mixed blessing with ramifications for the patient-doctor relationship. "You should be able to look your patients in the eye and say information about your genes will be used to heal you, not deny you a job or affordable health insurance," Mrs. Clinton said.
Three missions of academic health centers have helped make American health care the best in the world, she said. The first two she listed were research and training, traditional legs of academic medicine's three-legged stool. The last was a more finely wrought form of the third leg, patient care: "the care for the most vulnerable." The First Lady said, "It is time for us to recognize that paying for those academic health centers and their vital missions is in the best interest of us all." She specifically called on all insurers to chip in on the academic mission.
Perhaps her most impassioned moments came when addressing health care access and insurance. "Let's be clear," she said, "as a nation, we have to continue to work toward universal, affordable, quality health care for every single American."
The full text of Mrs. Clinton's speech is available on the Web at http://www.med.harvard.edu/grad98.
--Robert Neal