The Deloitte Center for Health Care is best known for being headed by Paul Keckley, recently of the Center for Evidence Based Medicine at Vanderbilt, and a minor actor in Michael Moore’s recent spat with CNN. (CNN didn’t come clean that Keckley has consulted for lots of health plans and, horror of horrors, is a Republican). I personally thought that Moore won that spat pretty convincingly, in that CNN couldn’t spend 12 seconds googling Paul.
The joke is that some of what Paul said was exactly what Moore said. Health care that is free at the point of care is not without cost, as it’s paid for out of general taxation (or some variant of it). Of course, it’s pretty shallow to say Americans don’t like paying tax, but then ignore the fact that they are otherwise (via reduced wages) forced to pay a "private tax" in health costs which massively exceeds that paid in tax to governments in other countries (after all there it adds up to 10% of GDP, here 17%). And I thought Moore was pretty clear in the movie twice (once with Tony Benn in the UK, and once when he went to visit the well-off French couple) that Europeans accepted higher taxes so that they can take care of the poor. Of course they probably don’t realize that in paying higher private taxes they save money overall.
However, the good folks at Deloitte are moving on, led by Paul, to talk more about the problems within the US system, and I suspect that Paul has learned his lesson about letting CNN tape his words without being clear about what their going to do with them and how they’ll represent him.
Instead, Deloitte’s gone to Kansas. Topeka, KS to be precise. Overall Topeka is a mirror of the national average in healthcare delivery data. Their analysis done using Healthgrades’ and other data is that if hospitals in Topeka could just do a little bit better than average they could save over 150 lives a year by just performing a little better–and that in a metro of just under 230,000.
