But Dr. Hunter “Patch” Adams has no intention of fading into the shadows. Rather, he’s a man on an important mission: to extend his reach as a compassionate, caring physician by training new legions of doctors to be less clinical and more human in their approach to treating patients; to raise the capital necessary to fund his vision, the Teaching Center and Clinic at the Gesundheit! Insititute; and to do what he can to promote reform of the American system of health-care delivery.

The latter item, for now, has much of his attention, given the state of debate stalling out in Congress over health-care reform.

“The health-care reform we’ve seen so far are pathetic non-solutions, bent on discouraging us,” Adams says. Encouraging people to fight the status quo, he says, “there cannot be justice until all citizens are covered as a first step.”

Adams will bring his views on the state of health care to Kansas City on March 26 as the keynote speaker for Ingram’s Magazine’s 2010 Healthcare Awards Breakfast, recognizing the magazine’s Heroes in Healthcare among working professionals and volunteers. The program also will honor this year’s winners in the inaugural Fittest Execs and Fittest Companies Challenge, which concluded in January.

Some might argue that Patch Adams’ ideas about reforming health care border on the radical, such as his call for Cuban-style medical schools “where schooling is free for students who will go out and serve underserved communities,” he says. And he’s a well-known—and outspoken—opponent of the health insurance industry as it is currently configured.

Whatever his orientation, though, Dr. Adams has an intense focus where he clearly believes doctors should place their
own: on the patients. He’s been advocating free health-care delivery, and exploring mechanisms for achieving it, since he was part of the Gesund-heit! Institute’s founding in the early 1970s.

To further its mission there, he’s issued a grass-roots challenge to find 1,000 people who will donate $1,000 each—it’s a safe bet he wouldn’t decline larger contributions—to help fund initial work on the teaching center. There, he envisions a place where health-care professionals can generate new strategies for changing the system. That will be followed up with a major-donors campaign to raise $9 million more.

Dr. Adams hope is that the center will address a key component of what, in his view, is wrong now. “Medical and nursing schools prepare students to become part of the current health-care system, which has proven its inadequacy,” Adams de-
clares. “Where are the educational facilities that prepare us to creatively problem solve towards desirable health care systems?”

One answer to that, Adams says, is the planned Teaching Center and Clinic at the Gesundheit! Insititute in West Virginia, which he says could—if funded and built now—deliver health-care services to those in need for 10 percent of the cost of traditional care in the United States.