Did you know today is National Doctor’s Day? There’s an official proclamation from President George H.W. Bush and everything. Today is the day us non-physicians are to take time to thank the physicians in our lives for poking and prodding us or for giving us the straight-talk about needing to exercise more (I’m working on it.), but for Avi, Annie, and myself, National Doctor’s Day means so much more.
Every day we come in to the Doctors for America office and see just how wonderful physicians and future physicians really are in this country. We’re the lucky staffers who get to help and support the over 16,000 physician and med students who make up Doctors for America in their efforts to improve the healthcare system they see fail their patients far too often. They’ve taken that frustration and put it to work.
In addition to spending their days and/or nights treating their patients, they spend their free time fighting for their patients outside the exam room.
Whether it’s fighting the campaign of misinformation about the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”), working to expand Medicaid to their low-income patients and neighbors, fighting to ensure action is taken to prevent gun violence, making their communities more walkable, or going on a 2-week bus tour demanding politicians put Patients Over Politics, we’re constantly amazed by the time and effort Doctors for America physicians and med students put in to fix that system.
We’re always saying thank you to the DFA family who really plan and drive this entire organization (I’d love to insert a medical metaphor showing how important you all really are, but I’ve never taken an anatomy course.), but we’d like to take time today to really say a special thank you.
Thank you to the amazing Dr. Alice Chen who is not only the Executive Director of Doctors for America, but also a practicing hospitalist at UCLA as well as Dr. Vivek Murthy who is a practicing physician and the President/Co-Founder of Doctors for America (I’m still not sure how you both do it).
To the Executive Board, our State Directors, Regional Leaders, State Co-Directors, bloggers, educators, petition-signers, LTE-writers, and all the other physicians and medical students who make up the Doctors for America family: Thank you.
Thank you for taking those anatomy classes to become physicians.
Thank you for seeing a broken system and fighting to change it.
Thank you for inspiring us every day.
We can’t wait to see you at our National Leadership Conference in April.