PCC’s Signature Campaign to Improve the Nation’s Health
The Better Health – NOW (BHN) campaign is a broad-based effort led by diverse PCC members to enact federal policy changes that will improve Americans’ health by expanding access to primary care. Comprised of 43 PCC members, the campaign brings together a broad group of voices to advocate for common sense, nonpartisan solutions. Additionally, nonmember organizations have formally expressed support for BHN’s policy goals.
Evidence has shown that access to primary care can help lower costs, boost outcomes and improve people’s health. But far too few Americans have access to primary care: nearly 30% of Americans lack access to a usual source of care, and 22% of Americans (74 million) live in areas where there’s a shortage of primary care clinicians.
Better Health – NOW is committed to advancing policies that will improve the health of all Americans by strengthening primary care – changes that will ensure all Americans have access to the high-quality care they deserve. BHN has embraced the National Academy of Sciences Engineering and Medicine’s payment recommendations as a blueprint for its policy work.
Primary care is responsible for nearly half of all physician office visits — but accounts for less than 5% of all health care spending. The Better Health – NOW campaign supports policy reforms that would strengthen primary care investment.
Better Health – NOW has partnered with Patients for Primary Care to help patients share their own transformative experiences with high-quality primary care. These testimonials provide real-world examples of how essential primary care is to promoting better health for all Americans.
Our Community’s Aspiration
The Better Health – NOW Campaign is committed to promoting an advanced model for primary care that is inspired by seven Shared Principles of Primary Care endorsed by more than 380 diverse organizations. These principles are PCC’s north star in our policy, communications and collaboration efforts.
Primary care is focused on the whole person – their physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual well-being, as well as cultural, linguistic and social needs.
Dynamic, trusted, respectful and enduring relationships between individuals, families and their clinical team members are hallmarks of primary care.
Primary care addresses the whole person with appropriate clinical and supportive services that include acute, chronic and preventive care, behavioral and mental health, oral health, health promotion and more.
Interdisciplinary teams, including individuals and families, work collaboratively and dynamically toward a common goal. The services they provide and the coordinated manner in which they work together are synergistic to better health.
Primary care integrates the activities of those involved in an individual’s care, across settings and services. Primary care proactively communicates across the spectrum of care and collaborators, including individuals and their families/care partners.
Primary care is readily accessible, both in person and virtually for all individuals regardless of linguistic, literacy, socioeconomic, cognitive or physical barriers.
Primary care achieves excellent, equitable outcomes for individuals and families, including using health care resources wisely and considering costs to patients, payers and the system.
Leveraging Payment Policy
A 2021 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine (NASEM) on improving primary care recommends changing the way the government pays for primary care in Medicare and Medicaid and investing more in primary care to achieve better health. PCC also strongly recommends that commercial payers take up the NASEM recommendations – alignment across public and private payers is critical to achieving bold transformation.
Using the NASEM report as inspiration, PCC has adopted a framework to achieve Better Health – Now in three steps:
Subscribe to PCC’s mailing list to receive our quarterly updates and webinar offerings. You can also check out the 2021 report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine that provided recommended reforms that serve as the foundation of Better Health – NOW’s agenda.
Better Health – NOW calls on policymakers to design and support a higher-value, lower-cost, equitable health care system that prioritizes primary care:
Expand access to high-quality, comprehensive primary care by leveraging Medicare’s influence to change how and how much we pay for primary care.
Strengthen the Primary Care Safety Net, with a focus on Medicaid and CHIP and health care access and payment in rural and underserved communities.
Champion whole-person primary care by supporting health promotion, behavioral health integration, and multidisciplinary teams
To support the Better Health – NOW campaign, organizations are asked to sign the Concordance Recommendations, which are drawn from the NASEM payment recommendations. PCC member organizations that do so are invited to shape policy at the BHN table.
We win when diverse organizations come together around shared goals
Members of Primary Care Collaborative (PCC) represent primary care clinicians, practices and professional societies, patient and consumer advocates, health equity and community advocates, health plans and other stakeholders who want to improve the health of our communities through primary care.
Better Health – Now is comprised of PCC Executive Members and additional campaign supporters. PCC is the only national multi-stakeholder organization focused on whole-person primary care. PCC operates as a convener and leader in the primary care community to bring together its current members and other key health care and patient-oriented stakeholders to push for payment reforms in primary care with a unified voice. PCC’s theory of change achieves results. This approach worked with adoption of the PCMH and is now working with primary care payment policy.
