Get to know Dr. Hank Abrons, our latest unsung hero of healthcare reform! This project of HEAL California highlights the hard work and dedication of individuals who are working – often in the background – to win Medicare-for-All in California and the nation.
With more than 30 years of helping patients, Dr. Hank Abrons has seen it all. He took care of people on Medicaid and people with no insurance, all the while fighting to get good care for his patients. This included needed medications, tests, and home-support services. All of the things that would allow his patients to have the best chance in recovering from or improving and coping with their health conditions.
The now-77-year-old doctor’s hard-earned, first-hand experience led him to the conclusion that there was only one solution: a single-payer system.
“We have a healthcare system that functions in a way that has enormous disparities based on economics, based on race, ethnic group, where people live,” he said. “There’s a tremendous amount of unfairness. We are not the land of equal opportunity when it comes to healthcare.”
Dr. Abrons is a board member for Physicians for a National Health Program, a national organization of physicians and other healthcare workers and advocates supporting Medicare for All, as well as a board member of California OneCare, a Medicare for All advocacy group in California. He was an associate professor of medicine at West Virginia University, where his research focused on epidemiology, physiology and clinical features of occupational lung disease. His clinical practice focused on critical care, chronic lung disease and cystic fibrosis.
Prior to his appointment at WVU, he worked three years in the U.S. Public Health Service. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College, medical degree from Case Western Reserve University, and master’s of public health degree from the University of Illinois.
Abrons was in medical school during the tumultuous late 60s. The civil rights movement, anti-war protests and social inequality prompted him to become more politically active and pay closer attention as his concern over the direction of the country grew. (He took a year off while in medical school to join the peace movement. He returned and graduated in 1970.)
“With my work as a doctor, I began to focus at first on environmental and occupational health,” he said. “An area where medicine connects with broader social issues of community health and worker safety, and the effects of the lack of responsibility of business and government to place appropriate of safeguards over dangerous chemicals and dangerous working conditions.”
While working in public institutions, such as city and county hospitals, as well as teaching medical students, Abrons moved to California in 2001. In around 2005, he started to do less patient care and became more involved in health healthcare reform and healthcare policy. His frustration also included how the drug companies misused their access to doctors.
“I had long been aware of how much money is wasted and the ethical conflicts concerning pharmaceutical companies,” he said. “Where drug companies are basically bribing doctors to use their medications instead of the most effective and most cost effective one for the patient.”
As a medical student, he remembered his whole class getting a free doctor’s bag, with a stethoscope, reflex hammer, and other items, all stamped with the name of the drug company that donated them.
“We started talking to each other and saying that a drug company is taking money that they are charging patients and giving us this for free,” Abrons said. “We refused it and gave it back. That was the first time it had ever happened.”
Now things have changed much over the years. That type of blatant free “gift giving” wouldn’t happen. But drug companies still get access to doctors, just in different ways.
“If they’re giving you useful information that’s one thing, but if what they’re really doing is giving you biased information that is partially true, it’s like advertising. It’s not telling the true story,” Abrons said.
He recalled a colleague who had went to a conference, paid for by a drug company. They spent an hour listening to a talk and the rest of the day playing golf.
“Over the last 35 years, this type of behavior has become more public and we are more sensitive to it, but we’re not done with it yet,” Abrons said. “We still have problems in research, where drug companies will sponsor research and then only publish results if they are favorable. If the research is unfavorable, they suppress the results. And the fact that a drug produces harm rather than good gets hidden until people get injured and then patients file lawsuits.”
Doctors spend a lot of time and energy, trying to take good care of their patients, and they are bothered by it all because they want to give every patient good care, Abrons said. He noted that it was a myth that most doctors in the U.S. opposed single payer. It’s a myth promoted by a minority associated with certain medical groups and others dependent on the current system, he added.
With single payer as the solution, it would allow talented providers to bring the benefits of science, the huge investments and who work very hard to bring good healthcare to their patients, he said.
(Several surveys over the past decade have indicated a clear majority of doctors support a single-payer system https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN31432035, https://khn.org/news/doctors-warm-to-single-payer-health-care/)
“Many students are already interested in single payer,” he said. “They don’t want to spend their careers in this dysfunctional and in some ways corrupt system, and they want to change it. Doctors have legitimate questions. But in the end most doctors now agree single payer is the best direction for the future. Some agree, because it’s the right thing to do. Others, because what are the alternatives? As doctors, we need to talk to other doctors, and other clinicians, to gain their support. Their voices are needed to change this broken system.”
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