March 12,2017
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, Coverage vs. Care, Interview with Dr. Alieta Eck on Halo Health where she discuses ,why insurance coverage is not the same as access to medical care and offers some interesting ideas could help.
Dr. Alieta Eck, M.D. graduated from the Rutgers College of Pharmacy in NJ and the St. Louis School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO.
She studied Internal Medicine at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, NJ and has been in private practice with her husband, Dr. John Eck, MD in Piscataway, NJ since 1988.
In 2003, they founded the Zarephath Health Center, a free clinic for the poor and uninsured that currently cares for 300-400 patients per month utilizing the donated services of volunteer physicians and nurses.
Dr. Alieta Eck is working to enact NJ S94 in New Jersey whereby physicians would donate their time caring for the poor and uninsured in non-government free clinics in exchange for the State providing medical malpractice protection within their private practices. She is convinced that this would relieve taxpayers of much of the Medicaid burden currently consuming 1/3 of the NJ budget.
Alieta Eck has been involved in health care reform since residency and believes that the government is a poor provider of medical care. Dr. Alieta Eck testified before the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress in 2004 about better ways to deliver health care in the United States.
In 2013, Dr. Alieta Eck put her name forward in the Republican primary race to win the party’s nomination for a temporary seat on the U.S. Senate. Confident she could make a change in Washington she ran on a platform of shrinking the federal government and repealing ObamaCare – President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
Despite losing her bid for Senate, Dr. Alieta Eck pushed forward, running for Congress in 2014 but, lacking enough votes to win the predominantly Democratic 12th Congressional District, came second to Bonnie Watson Coleman, the first African-American female member of New Jersey’s congressional delegation in state history.
Dr. Eck is a long time member of the Christian Medical and Dental Associations and in 2009 joined the board of AAPS, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which advocates the preservation of the practice of private medicine.
In addition, she serves on the advisory board of Christian Care Medi-Share, a faith-based medical cost sharing Ministry and is a member of Zarephath Christian Church. She and her husband John have five children, one who is now an ophthalmology resident in St. Louis, MO.
