Resident physicians from the Committee of Interns and Residents/SEIU Healthcare came together with activist doctors, nurses, and medical students from across the country in Philadelphia today to outline their vision for a “more perfect health care system.”

From their vantage points on the front lines of the nation’s safety net hospitals, representatives from health care unions and progressive doctors’ organizations shared insights about what real reform should look like.

“In the absence of reform, we have seen costs spiraling out of control, crushing our patients and their families, not to mention the safety-net hospitals many of us work in,” Dr. Toni Lewis, president of the Committee of Interns and Residents.  “The truth is, giving everyone an insurance card won’t be enough. We need fundamental reform.”

As the debate heats up around the country about how to expand health care access to all, these doctors, med students, nurses and other practitioners are publicly coming forward to support key components of health care reform: providing a public plan option to compete with private insurance, reducing disparities of care based on race or socio-economic background, protecting safety net hospitals, and emphasizing primary care and preventative medicine.

“We often think of Pennsylvania as a state with a low rate of uninsured, but nearly 3 million Pennsylvanians under the age of 65 went without health insurance for all or part of 2007 and 2008,” said Marc Stier, PA state director for Health Care for America Now. “We have a serious problem that can't be fixed without nationwide health care reform.”

At the event, speakers touched on all the principals in the preamble to the constitution:

• To establish justice, by eliminating disparities in access and quality of health care resulting in inferior outcomes based on race, ethnicity, language, and culture.
• To ensure domestic tranquility, by adequately funding safety-net hospitals in underserved communities, protecting them from damaging budget cuts at the state and city level, and fighting to prevent hospital closures in overburdened communities during these tough economic times.
• To provide for the common defense against preventable chronic illness by investing in preventative care, patient wellness and prevention programs, children’s health insurance, sufficient staffing, better equipment, health information technology, language services, and medical research.
• To promote the general welfare, by developing a physician workforce that’s representative of the population of the country, making medical school and residency sustainable and affordable for people from all racial and economic backgrounds, and start solving the primary care crisis by a dramatic increase in compensation for primary care physicians.
• And to secure the blessings of good health and liberty to ourselves and our posterity by urging Congress and President Obama to finally pass a comprehensive health care reform bill this year.

“It’s appropriate that we’re here in Philadelphia, just feet away from the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall,” said Dr. Toni Lewis of CIR.  “Just as the signers of the Constitution, which included two medical doctors, came together in this city 222 years ago to come to begin to build a more perfect union, we are here to put forth our vision of a more perfect health care system, one where quality health care is not a privilege for some, but a right for all.”

Watch a video of the event here.