C. Everett Koop '37, Senior Scholar of the Koop Institute at Dartmouth and former U.S. Surgeon General, told a crowd of about 100 people in the Rockefeller Center for the Social Sciences that "the face of medicine will never be the same."
Koop was invited to speak about health care reform by the Nathan Smith Society, a group of undergraduates planning on pursuing careers in medicine.
Koop said there is a crisis in American health care, one that may not be dealt with for months to come. He predicted "reform won't be meaningfully discussed until fall, if even then."
According to Koop, the most significant changes in reform will come in health education.
He said President Bill Clinton's efforts at health care reform last year had a number of flaws that made it almost impossible to get through Congress.
"The size of the document was enough to kill it," he said.
Koop said the part of the bill identifying problems with the current system was "superb" but it was "the remedies that we could not reach a consensus on."
"Most Americans are satisfied with their health care," he said. "They are also not good at prevention. Americans are very crisis-oriented."
Koop said this tendency has increased the cost of the system.
Koop also blamed divisiveness in Congress and Clinton's unpopularity for the defeat of health care reform.
"We are getting health care reform as I speak because [health care] players are struggling to be in the right positions for reform."
In spite of this, Koop said reform is "not a dead issue."
Koop identified "government medicine" and "private medicine run amuck" as pitfalls future plans must avoid.
Koop also talked about the role of the Koop Institute, which he said seeks to create a "new kind of doctor who treats medicine not just as an art, but also as a science and who is interested in caring as much as curing."
One way to satisfy this need is "to make medical school what college students expect it to be" so students spend more time with patients, he said.
This will make future doctors better educators, Koop said. "Seventy percent of a doctor's work is health education," he said.
