Yesterday Health Dialog had an off site meeting for the company and the guest speaker was Matthew Holt the founder of "The Health Care Blog"
http://thehealthcareblog.com/
Matthew did a great job engaging the participants with a ton of information on trends and thoughts on our current Health Care situation. His analogy that we are currently a stalled bus sitting on the road is pretty accurate for the US. I am sorry for my question on defensive medicine.... ;) When half of your family are medical professional and then another group of them are litigation lawyers, what do you expect from a guy who is a compliance dork? When you said defensive medicine was only a small portion of the problem I will disagree with you because in the next breathe you stated that liability reform should have been included also in the ACA. I think defensive medicine has a bigger impact than some people want to give it credit for. If 30% of the test and procedures are a waste why do you think they are being done? A good chunk of them is because the doctor is afraid of being sued. But now we have created a culture of being pro-actively "safe" along with it being a good deal financially for the medical community since they get paid for those additional items.
Saying sorry for a mistake by a doctor may make sense but when you have 1000's of lawyers trolling the internet and TV looking for litigants the system is screwed up. Europe doesn't have this problem since most of their stuff is capped or they have to pay damages if they lose. It's just a piece of the puzzle that needs to get addressed.
Other than my 2 cents I think Matthew did an incredible job talking about where we are headed down the road.
P.S Matthew your red jacket is a true fashion statement.
Thanks for the fashion compliment (I think)
ReplyDeleteAs for defensive medicine, 2 republicans who were trying hard to prove the point (inc Mark McClellan later head of CMS under Bush) studied it hard and the most they could get it up to was 8% of health spending.
And as (as my talk showed) we basically spend double everyone else in the world, my talk was focused on the other 42%!
I agree it should be fixed, but unlikely in our current political toxic swamp!
Thanks Matt!
ReplyDeleteIt's was definitely a good discussion. Too bad it was too short. I'm a part time political commentator in NH just an a fyi. The sad fact is most folks in politics really have no idea about all the issues that face healthcare. I was with a sitting US congressman last year talking to one of his constituents who really had no idea of what of the issues she was dealing with. It wasn't his fault because the situation is so complex. The political environment is miserable. The ACA was forced down the throats of the Republicans with little debate or consideration. Now its payback time, which is unfortunate because there were some good parts of the act. The real logger jam is in the Senate where Harry Reid won't pass a budget. The Senate finance committee really wants to fix a bunch of things and has considerable bi-partisan support on it. But if you can't bring a bill to the floor to vote on it won't go anywhere. The US Senate has the best chances to fix a bunch of the issues and then pass a bill to the house for a vote. The house is the real problem where competing special interest groups can really influence congressmen on either side. However I really do think there is a possibility of getting some reform done this year(mainly because of gun control and immigration providing cover for votes