AHCJ conference recap

I attended AHCJ's rural health conference last Friday in Portland, Ore. Key takeaways for me were:

• Health outcomes for urban and rural populations are more alike than they are for suburban populations. Surprisingly, these seemingly disparate populations face similar challenges. 
• Dental therapists are contentious within the dental community. 
• There is a shortage in health care providers of all kinds, but the shortage is especially pronounced in rural areas. 
• There is less of a financial incentive for medical school students to become family practitioners than surgeons. A surgeon typically makes three times what a primary care physician makes. 
• Community health workers — the gatekeepers — are as powerful in the U.S. as they were to me as a health educator with the Peace Corps in Turkmenistan.
• States that opted for local state marketplaces and expanded medicaid had twice the number of new ACA enrollees as states that opted for the federal exchange and declined medicaid expansion.
• The U.S. spends more money than many other developed countries for health outcomes that are not as good. In other words, our health care is more expensive and less effective.
• Americans pay for health transactions, not health.

I learned so much in just a few hours. I hope to blog more about some of the presentations this week. I want to thank AHCJ for sponsoring my travel for this conference.