Issue link: https://tmcpulse.uberflip.com/i/745998
t m c » p u l s e | n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 6 6 Everything gets politicized during campaign season. But health care has been in the hot seat since 2010, when President Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare. At the Texas Medical Center, the triumphs and challenges of health care in America are present all day, every day, to patients, researchers and health professionals. In this election month, Pulse posed one question to several members of the TMC community: DAV I D L . C A L L E N DE R , M . D. President of The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston "From my perspective, the biggest problem is equitable access to health care. We know today that a patient's environment and their socioeconomic status has a huge impact on health. We don't exactly understand why, but there's some great research to help us understand how the environment interacts with our genetic code and our behavior. I'd love to see our state think more about that, and work with the federal government, CMS [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] in par- ticular, to explore how we could more broadly engage those populations that don't have great access to care. Perhaps we just approach it as a set of proj- ects—something to improve access and test what we're doing. Some patients are so economically and financially challenged they can't even get to a treatment site. Maybe we need to think about how to get to them. Everybody has a cell phone. Can we use technol- ogy more effectively?" would address improving the rates of HPV vaccination for boys and girls, keeping tobacco and nicotine products out of the hands of minors, providing smoking cessation treatment for those who wish to quit, educating adults and children about sun safety to prevent skin cancer, and encouraging cancer screening for early detection. With growing momentum and awareness of the national Cancer Moonshot program, our country has a real opportunity to effectively address the needless suffering experienced by millions of Americans from cancer. The time to act is now to address great health challenges of the nation through disease prevention." R E BECC A ESPA R Z A Cancer survivor "I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2001 at age 30. At the time, I had no health insurance because I was THE FUTURE OF HEALTH CARE RONA L D A . De PI N HO, M . D. President of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center "Cancer prevention should be one of the most important public health priori- ties of the federal government. Up to 50 percent of all cancers could be elimi- nated by implementing evidence-based initiatives in policy, public and profes- sional education, and services at the community level. The next president of the United States should consider establishing a significant national effort to address one of the great disease challenges of our time through wide-ranging pre- vention strategies. Effective programs If you could direct the future leaders of the country to fix one major problem in health care, what would it be?