Tag: Policy

A Tribute to Austin Ross

Mar 24, 2010

By GARY S. KAPLAN, MD, Chairman and CEO Virginia Mason Medical Center

The selection of Austin Ross for the Modern Healthcare Hall of Fame is fitting. His ideas on leading and managing in health care – which he’s written about extensively in books and articles dating back to 1959 – laid the foundation for successful health care administration nationwide. His leadership has guided me and countless other health care leaders and administrators across the country.

Virginia Mason was privileged to benefit from Austin’s expertise for most of his 36 year career. He came to what was then Virginia Mason Hospital and Clinic in Seattle as an administrative resident in 1955 after completing his MPH degree from the University of California, Berkeley. By 1968 he was the hospital administrator and in 1977 he became executive administrator, a position he held until his retirement in 1991. Austin’s leadership is credited with putting Virginia Mason in the national spotlight as a foremost example of how to integrate a multi-specialty group practice with a hospital.Continue reading…

Wellpoint’s wasted opportunity

Feb 7, 2010• 47

By Matthew Holt

Sometimes with something so egregious gets written that, even if it’s in the Wall Street Journal, you have to notice it. Angela Braly, the CEO of Wellpoint—compensation a hair under $10m in 2009—ought to be happy, even though Joseph Rago in the WSJ is surprised about that. It looks like the health reform bill which put much of Wellpoint’s highly profitable individual and small group business at risk is dead, and this week Wellpoint started putting up rates between 35% and 80% in the California market (where it’s Anthem Blue Cross).

But the WSJ quotes her as calling health reform a “wasted opportunity”. Funnily enough Wellpoint and the trade association it funds, AHIP, were on both sides of the debate. Pushing Congress to give it 30 million more customers as part of the bill, and then surreptitiously funding the Chamber of Commerce to oppose health reform (and putting pressure on the Blue Dogs, and the DINOs in the Senate) when some of the terms of the House Bill started to look less favorable (85% Med loss ratios limits among them).

I’d had some semi-decent hopes for Braly and her team.

Todd Park speaks: Free the data!

Feb 4, 2010• 2

By Matthew Holt

Todd Park is definitely one of health care IT’s good guys. Todd was the brains (though not the mouth!) behind athenahealth. After he left athenahealth, he spent a year back in California doing angel investing (Ventana among others) and being a dad. But despite his desire to stay on the west coast, he was dragged into the vortex known as Washington DC, and for the last 5 months he’s been the (first) CTO of HHS. (By the way, he cashed out his investments, and politely turned down my proposal to “care for” his cash while he was being a public servant!)

Todd gave the keynote yesterday at the Health IT Summit for Government Leaders. He describes his job as unlocking HHS’ “inner mojo” in terms of data use and technology innovation. So what are the big deals he sees? These are my notes on his fast talking!

1) HITECH/ARRA is not about for paying for software. Its purpose is to incentivize “meaningful use”. He wants to make sure that people understand that the NHIN (National Health Information Network) is not a thing. It’s a set of policies and services that people can use to make health data work over the Internet. It is NOT a parallel network. And at the end of the day, what’s going to make this work is the private sector — including vendors modifying their products to match these policies.

2) Leveraging the power of HHS data for public good. The amount of data HHS has is “ridiculous”. It has a set of sets of data. Todd is a paid up member of Tim Berners-Lee “free the data” club. They’re adding all kinds of data sets to data.gov including every grant, patent et al licensed/paid for by HHS. Todd calls this “data liberation”. They’re also creating community health maps where data on community health performance can be mashed up with other types of maps (real estate, job listings, et al). In addition, they’re doing “smart targeting” — an attempt to combine findings from different/disparate data sets without waiting to do the big database integration. He’s hoping to use techniques that the intelligence community uses to link, say, emails and bank wires, to similarly track, say, disease outbreaks, drug interactions, etc.

Uwe and Heritage agree: we need a tax-funded universal pool

Feb 1, 2010• 46

By Matthew Holt

When you’re at a party and someone explains to you that they just read a great article in the NY Times explaining why Peggy Noonan doesn’t understand basic math, and you know that they’re referring to Uwe Reinhardt, then you’re over-wonked. That’s surely my condition

Here’s what Uwe said—you can’t just ban medical underwriting as Noonan suggested, because the individual insurance market will collapse. Both the history of New Jersey (and Washington state) in the 1990s, and in current Massachusetts where people can buy insurance or pay a lesser fine, show that healthy people won’t buy insurance until they need it.

The answer is to force everyone into a universal insurance pool

But of course, that means younger and healthier people will likely pay more. For the good folks from Heritage writing on the WSJ Opinion page this is an outrage. Using their complex model they came up with the amazing analysis that if you give uninsured younger people with no health condition the choice of paying a smaller fine or a higher premium—surprise surprise—most will pay the fine. And of course that’s exactly what’s happened in Massachusetts.

The problem is of course that most younger people who have no insurance are in low wage jobs, They therefore place a much higher value on receiving money now than forgoing it to later stave of a potential risk of catastrophe from having no insurance

So we deal with this in a very sensible way in the rest of society’s transactions.

Aneesh Chopra, talks Health 2.0

Jan 23, 2010• 1

By Matthew Holt

Aneesh Chopra is the Obama Administration’s Chief Technology Officer. He’ll be giving keynote speech at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Oct 6-7.

A vote for single payer, austerity-style

Jan 20, 2010• 13

By Matthew Holt

I spent summer 1984 in Boston and generally found it an oppressively hot place. I’ve spent a few winter days there and found it an oppressively cold place. I’ve always thought that, given the absence of passport controls, if you lived there and could move to California and didn’t, you were probably crazy. And yesterday the residents of that fair state proved me right.

As I said earlier this week, it now appears that health care reform is dead. I just can’t see a scenario in which there are 60 votes to pass anything. I also don’t see the Dems having the cojones to go to reconciliation or to cram the current Senate bill through the House quickly. Instead (as Bob Laszewski says below) the moderate Dems will run for their lives away from health insurance reform—although I just don’t understand what Bob thinks “reform” would have meant if it had really required 6–10 Republican Senators.

So my prediction is that we end up with nothing.

Thinking the unthinkable–no Health Care bill?

Jan 18, 2010• 76

By Matthew Holt

Matthew Holt

After a resounding Democratic Presidential election win, a terrible recession, and a bruising year of politics, it would be just like America that a crazy election result torpedoes the health care reform bill. It would be the first Republican Senator win in 43 years in Massachusetts, a state that’s bluer than blue, and the actual seat being elected on Tuesday hasn’t been won by a Republican since 1947!

But it’s becoming more and more possible, and the latest polls are all over the map.

Let’s play out what happens if we go back to a 59–41 Senate. The current Senate rules basically allow the minority to shut down proceedings. Harry Reid has in fact performed miracles to keep Lieberman, Nelson and some of the rest on board. Obama, Reid & Pelosi are now working the deal out with the unions and all the rest to make sure that what’s a pretty slim majority in the House will essentially accept the Senate bill—with some sop to the unions on the “Excise tax”. There are some other technicalities about the Exchange et al, but in the end we have a fair idea of what’s going to be the result.

Why health insurance reform really matters

Jan 17, 2010• 26

By CF Mother

Just occasionally we get a really heartfelt comment on THCB that is passionate and rational, and reminds us why for all the bile spewed about the topic the essential part of the health care bill—making insurance available to everyone—is really important. This comment from CF Mother was left on my post “Thinking the unthinkable” on Friday. And of course, this could happen to anyone—including you. And frankly the Democrats need to do a better job explaining this—Matthew Holt

Questions for those who do not support health care reform:

Twenty years ago our cheery toddler was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. Afraid, we dug into the medical research to understand the disease that threatened his future. We healed through optimism, roused by the news eight days after his diagnosis that the gene that causes CF had been found, opening the door toward a cure. We knew that our heroes, the researchers and his doctors, would continue to find ways to protect his future. We were no longer afraid of CF.

The fear that woke me in the night was of losing our health insurance because our son was on every insurer’s no-fly list. While my husband’s profession was periodically roiled by layoffs, he decided against the security of opening his own firm because the cost of carrying coverage for our eldest son was too high, the thread on which his health care dangled too slight.

State vs. National Exchanges – Why it Matters

Jan 12, 2010• 19

By BILL KRAMER

Does it matter whether health insurance exchanges are state-level or national? I used to think that it wasn’t a major issue, but my opinion has changed.

During the health reform debate early in 2009, I thought that other exchange design issues were more important than whether they are organized at the state or national level. In my view, who is eligible to join (all small business employees or just those who receive subsidies?), whether the exchange is the exclusive market for individuals and small groups, and how the exchange will be protected from an adverse selection “death spiral” are critical design features and will determine whether the exchanges are successful.

It seemed to me that the arguments put forward by advocates of a national exchange were not compelling. The most common argument was that a national exchange was needed in order to gain sufficient size, which would supposedly give the exchange more bargaining power with health insurers. But I always thought that size was more important at the local level. Health insurers negotiate provider contracts locally, not nationally, and they gain leverage based on their size locally regardless of how big they are nationwide. In addition, the “bargaining power” argument is relevant only if the exchange is negotiating rates with insurers. In an “all comers” model, the exchange isn’t negotiating rates; it relies on healthy competition among insurers to drive down premiums.

States Should Have Flexibility to Develop Own Health Reform Plans

Dec 26, 2009• 14

By MAX BARTLETT and JOSE AGUILAR

One issue has generated little discussion during the heated health care reform debate: whether states should have the right to develop their own approaches to universal coverage.

The Health Security for New Mexicans Campaign wants to see language included in the national proposal that gives states flexibility to develop their own approaches to solving rising health care costs and growing numbers of uninsured.

The focus of current health care reform proposals is to create “insurance market exchanges.” These one-stop-shopping insurance exchanges must offer consumers — primarily the uninsured — choices of different insurance products, including some type of public option. A less than robust public option is in the proposal passed by the House of Representatives. The Senate is in the process of negotiating an alternative to the House version.