Sen. Steven Thayn, R-Emmett, noted that the U.S. has higher medical costs than most countries. He asked Dr. Steven Dunn, a longtime family doctor in Sandpoint, who was testifying to lawmakers by phone, “Why should we trust medical professionals to solve this problem if they haven’t solved it in the past?”

Dunn responded, “The short answer is it’s a long answer. There are many factors that contribute to this, which include things like pharmaceuticals and imaging, and population aging, as well as expectations. Expectations in the U.S. right now are that we expect we will get any and all available treatment, regardless of the cost. And in many other countries, they don’t have that same expectation. But the No. 1 thing that determines the cost of care and the effectiveness of the health care system is the percentage of family doctors in your workforce. So every other developed nation in the world has at least 50 percent of their workforce in medicine in primary care. … In the U.S. we have now about 22 percent of doctors in primary care, family medicine, and it’s going down. So we have a lot of access to very expensive health care, but not very much access to very efficient health care.”

He added, “What we showed in the medical home pilot is we saved Medicaid $2 million in only two years. … We know primary care works. We just have to have the workforce to provide it, and we have to have patients who have insurance so they can access it.”