Scorecard Finds ‘Chronic Lack of Support’ for Primary Care

‘Our healthcare system is wildly out of balance and in critical need of reform,’ said Christopher Koller, president of the Milbank Memorial Fund. According to the first national primary care scorecard, which was jointly funded by the Milbank Memorial Fund and the Doctors Foundation, there is a persistent dearth of funding for the expansion of high-quality primary care throughout the country. For instance, from 2017 to 2021, little over 0.2 percent of National Institutes of Health funding was given to family medicine departments, remaining constant. The baseline trend data for the country and, when available, for states are provided in "The Health of US Primary Care: A Baseline Scorecard Monitoring Support for High-Quality Primary Care" for four important dimensions: financing, access, workforce development, and research. The scorecard was created in partnership with academics at the Robert Graham Center of the American Academy of Family Physicians, who claim it offers a measurement tool that has been long overdue.