I finally got around to reading Atul Gawande’s New Yorker piece on why the current reform bill mirrors early 20th century agriculture. I learned lots about the role of the Department of Agriculture in teaching farmers what to do. In post-war Britain the radio soap opera The Archers did much the same thing.
I was actually encouraged to remember that in almost every industrialization process, intelligence, leadership, and usually money, from the government was a key factor.
But I felt very uncomfortable with the analogy. First, the incentive for the farmers was to be more productive—even if in the long run productivity meant a relative fall in the price of food and eventually the rise of agri-business decades later. If they did things right there was an immediate market reward. Whereas we know that (from the Virginia Mason and Intermountain examples) increasing quality and productivity in health care leads to negative financial consequences.
Secondly, Gawande seems to be fine with saying that “we don’t know how to be more efficient, productive and effective, so let’s do pilots for years and figure it out.” This is just crap. We’ve both done pilots for decades, and have examples of organizational forms (you know who I mean!) that get it right. It’s just made no sense for most of the health care system to adopt those techniques and organizational forms because they make more money by doing what they’re doing—and government and employers keep paying them.
I was going to write a long piece detailing my complaints blow by blow, but luckily Alain Enthoven has done it for me!
This doesn’t mean I’m against the current bill as I suspect Enthoven is. There is some hope that ACOs and other modern terminology for the types of organization he’s espoused over the years, will arise more quickly from the “pilots” in the bill than Enthoven suspects. But more importantly, I support the bill because the saving money part is the second of my “two rules to judge a bill.” The first and most important rule is
Rule 1 A health care reform bill needs to guarantee that no one should find themselves unable to get care simply because they cannot afford it. Neither should anyone find themselves financially compromised (or worse) because they have received care.
And the current bill just about does that….although Maggie Mahar is pretty doubtful, especially for near-seniors in the first few years.
We’ll also chat with Thomas Goetz of Wired Magazine about his upcoming book,
