Brian Klepper and David Kibbe have written a terrific piece on how and why health care is in a handbasket and wondering where it’s going. But as we ex-futurists know, there’s lots of luck required to make a good forecast.
When I met Brian five years ago he told me that the sky would fall within five years, and at the time he was trying to persuade players in the health care system to self-reform. He suggested to them that the alternative would be soon be much worse.
I said, “no no, it'll take longer (10-15 years) and the system players will never self reform”. Instead I thought “reform” would be be done to them by the government when the system hit crisis. My guess was a combination of Medicare with 5 years of baby boomers on board and a middle class with 80 million uninsured would arrive around 2012–15. And then the brown stuff would be hitting the whirly object soon after that when the Chinese wanted their money back.
As it turns out we were both wrong and both right.
