Health Care Reform

http://www.cspan.org/Watch/Media/2010/03/15/HP/R/30674/Health%20Care%20Reconciliation%20Action%20Begins%20In%20Congress.aspx

I finished Who Killed Health Care by Regina Herzlinger, a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business school (where Bryce is going! congratulations!) and this video, and that I'm sick (just a cold) inspired me to write a few quotes from the book:

~"Our $2 trillion health care system is as large as the economy of China. And yet, despite all this spending, millions of people cannot get the care they need because it costs too much or because our fragmented health care system cannot efficiently supply integrated, multifaceted treatment for their chronic diseases or disabilities. If they are uninsured, our primarily nonprofit hospitals all too often then use criminal-like collection tactics to ensure payment"

~"Dr. William W. McGuire, the former CEO of the United Healthcare, one of the country's largest health consumers, not only received $1.7 billion worth of stock options during his tenure, but also had a jet at his disposal and a red carpet reportedly rolled out to meet his limo so his tootsies did not have to meet the same ground on which we ordinary mortals step."

~"The key to an artificial kidney lay in the most mundane of materials- plastics: a membrane so porous that it allowed the impurities in the blood to leach out bud sufficiently strong to withstand the pressure created by the flow of blood. During World War II, in Nazi-occupied Holland, Willem Kolff found this membrane in sausage casing made of cellulose acetate. He wound yards an yards of it around a drum, seated it in a vat of liquid, used an engine scavenged from a lawn mower as a power source, and thus created the first artificial kidney"

~"When cultured organizations become uncultured- by distancing themselves from their internalized values, attitudes and approaches- they fail"

~"There ought to be a law that makes public the prices that hospitals are paid by their customres so that the uninsured customer does not get screwed"

~"GM spent $5.2 billion in 2004 on health care for employees, retirees, and thief families. They claim that adds up to $1,600 for every care they made last year, more than the spent for steel....Toyota their rival, only spent $110 per car."

~"Nixon's 1973 HMO act not only required firms that offered health insurance to include a managed care product, in which the enrollee must obtain a gatekeeper's authorization for the use of medical care, among their choices, but it also subsidized their price with hundreds of millions of dollars of tax money. The act enabled physicians to be paid for not providing health care."

~"After earning $23 million in 2004, the CEO of DaVita, a firm that owns a fourth of all dialysis centers, earned over $25 million in 2005."


~"Ideology does not transform how markets operate. Entrepreneurs and consumers do."

~"Providers must be paid MORE for treating those who are sick than for treating those who are well or relatively healthy."

~"The characteristics of control, choice, and information to guide provider selection are sadly lacking in most current health insurance plans"

~"Current health insurance does not protect people against financial catastrophe"

~"Doctors are so defeated by the present insurance system that a majority of them have lied to insurers so that their patients could obtain the medical care they need"

~"But businesses cannot do everything- they cannot fund the poor. That is appropriately the role of government."

~When it comes to health care the government should: 1- Prosecute fraudulent providers, enrollees, and insurers and assure the financial solvency of insurers.2- Use our tax money to subsidize those who cannot afford health insurance. 3- Require the dissemination of audited data about the performance of providers.

~"Physicians and hospitals should not be held responsible for things they do not control."

~"It was the bipartisan 2006 Massachusetts universal health care legislation: Kennedy got what he wanted, required universal health insurance coverage, while Romeny achieved what he wanted, consumer-driven health care solutions"