America’s Health Insurance Plans offered a pep rally of sorts at the organization’s annual conference, urging insurers to be positive in the face of sweeping healthcare reforms that will almost certainly change how they do business.
Faced with skyrocketing costs and an inefficient model of care, the nation has been quick to paint the insurance industry as the villain. AHIP’s Institute 2010, held June 9-11 at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, sought to dispel that with a series of rallying cries from popular politicians.
“People are going to go after insurance companies as continuing villains” in the healthcare debate, warned noted journalist and Harvard University professor David Gergen in his keynote speech. He challenged the insurance industry, in the wake of healthcare reform, to promote transparency, embrace wellness and preventive health, and embrace “the innovation that’s going on in your midst.”
“What we don’t need is the American people turning on the insurance industry and blaming them,” added former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, during a round-table discussion with former Tennessee Sen. William Frist and Harvard University’s David Cutler.
Cutler, Harvard’s Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics, said the nation’s healthcare system has to learn how to save money – something it hasn’t done before. He said the nation has to better organize and coordinate its healthcare delivery network, making use of information technology as well as wellness initiatives.
“I think this legislation is going to live or die off of its ability to get cost savings from healthcare,” he said.
Former President William Clinton, in a folksy speech, pointed out that America is facing a period of disorientation, and that while healthcare reform measures passed by Congress are “far from perfect” and unpopular, they are necessary. He urged his audience to become less rigid and more creative.
That creativity was on display in education sessions and on the exhibit hall floor, where roughly 300 vendors displayed and tested technology designed to help insurers improve communications and business processes. One of those was Verisk Health, a Waltham, Mass.-based developer of data-mining technology.
“Everyone is anxious,” said J. Christian Kryder, Verisk’s chief executive officer. “Some payers are embracing change, some are going out and sponsoring patient-centered medical homes, and some are in denial.”
“This is a completely new marketplace for health plans,” added Dennis Schmuland, Microsoft’s U.S. director of health plan industry solutions. “They’re going to have to have a platform to continually expand and improve.”
Carolyn Wukitch, senior vice president of McKesson Health Solutions’ products division, said insurers are unsure of how health reform will affect them because much of the health reform legislation passed by Congress this year remains undefined. Some, she said, are embracing the patient-centered medical home concept, as well as the idea of accountable care organizations and bundled payments, but they need more direction from Washington.
“The anxiety isn’t going down,” added Paul Keckley, executive director of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. “Nothing has changed yet.”