A policy imperative for primary care: Reflections on keystone II

The Second Advanced Forum in Family Medicine (Keystone II) revealed that family practice and primary care continue to meet resistance to their approaches and methods within academic medicine, despite the demonstrated need for primary care and its demonstrated success in practice. It is futile to respond to this resistance by continued academic argument and pleading. Instead, primary care should turn its efforts toward questions of national health policy in the political realm. Ironically, academic success is more likely to result from new political initiatives than from new academic ones, as primary care shows its willingness to take on the difficult problems of care for the underserved in the face of cost constraints.