California Pharmacists Association Statement on Health Care Reform.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- The broken health care system in California needs to be fixed and it needs to be fixed now. We can no longer wait for future and federal solutions.

Pharmacists know just how lucky we all are to have things like medications, screenings, tests and best-practice guidelines that have transformed how we live with illness. Thanks to these valuable tools, illnesses which 20 years ago used to be a death sentence, can now often be managed as chronic conditions that people can live with for decades. In some instances, thanks to these tools, illnesses can even be cured or better yet, prevented in the first place.

Pharmacists also know however, that we have a lot of room for improvement in how we employ these valuable tools. For example, it has been estimated that only half of us take our medication as prescribed. And according to the National Committee on Quality Assurance, the US could avert more than $9 billion in lost productivity and nearly $2 billion in hospital costs if we only had more consistent delivery of best-practice care.

The bottom line is that too often when it comes to managing chronic conditions we know what to do, and we have the tools to do it, but we don't! The reasons for this are many, but perhaps the biggest reason is that our healthcare system - and our society in general - is built on a crisis management mentality.

Crisis management healthcare worked fine 100 or even 50 years ago, when the only need for healthcare was to get treatment for an acute injury or infection. But now, with the aging of our population, the increasing incidence of chronic disease and advancements in medical technology; crisis management healthcare just doesn't cut it. We can no longer expect people with chronic conditions to get the results they deserve at costs we can all afford by having a single healthcare provider deal simply with just one "chief complaint" at a time.

What we need is a team of healthcare providers. A team which includes the patient and puts them in the center. A team which includes a variety of healthcare providers who can each leverage their own specific strengths whether they be physical assessment, behavior modification, or medication management.

We must work together to get ahead of the curve, to stop treating high-cholesterol with bypass surgery, high-blood pressure with stroke care, and diabetes with amputations and kidney dialysis. All of these things can be prevented and that is what we must do. We have no doubt that a greater emphasis on chronic care and prevention is our key to ensuring affordable, quality healthcare for all Californians. It is for this reason that we are happy to participate with the California Chronic Coalition and support their vital cause.

The California Pharmacists Association is the largest state pharmacy association in the nation and the professional society representing all pharmacists in California. The mission of the Association is to act as the leader in advocating the role of the pharmacist as an essential provider of health care and to support pharmacists in providing optimal pharmaceutical care.