Agreement on Healthcare Reform

The healthcare debate continues front and center with every last group weighing in on what needs to change, what needs to stay the same. In fact I'd be willing to bet that for every position in favor of change or status quo you can find the opposing view from another group.

But there are some core principles that I think some level of agreement:

• Elimination of Waste
• Improve Patient Care
• Care for Everyone (Life sustaining not lifestyle sustaining)
• No one should be bankrupt paying for Care

Based on a totally unscientific poll with friends and colleagues who represent from both sides of the aisle there was agreement with the above principles. No doubt the devil is in the detail but if we can agree on some basic principles and start with agreement rather than disagreement perhaps there is some hope for much needed reform of our healthcare.

Each of these issues is complex and as I wrote in my other blog on a recent incident involving abuse of services for a bee sting it may seem obvious in this case but the problems arise when you look at cases that are not so obvious. The level of waste is staggering - based on this report from Price Waterhouse Coopers:

more than half of the $2.1 trillion spent on healthcare every year is

This is spread across many areas and reasons why but as they point out in looking at one large facility - John Hopkins which is representative of the complexities facing the other 4,500 hospitals around the US:

About 700 different organizations, health plans, and employers pay the bills at Johns Hopkins Health System in Baltimore. Each one has different rules about what’s eligible for payment, how much to pay and when to pay....Reducing the redundancies could save the hospital more than $40 million annually, and that’s only “numbers we could identify if we could just get computers talking to each other”

This is basic stuff and these savings alone could go along way to help pay for some of the proposed reforms that, on principle, we agree are desirable such as care for all. In the words of one reporter in the UK: US Healthcare - the Biggest waste of Money in the World. I might not go that far but the idea we are getting any degree of value for money. What is interesting in the breakdown shown is the public/private split of payment


Interesting since in this view it would appear that the number in the US is skewed so high in excess cost because of the Private Costs. Maybe focusing on fixing the excess cost int eh private system might be a place to start on cutting waste.

I look forward to hearing the President's address and hope he can focus on the areas we agree on and set a framework that unites people to overhaul the system for the benefit of everyone.

What do you think - can you agree on the principles above or are these even subject to disagreement?