WITH THE U.S. facing a 2006 healthcare tab of $2.1 trillion and healthcare a staggering 16 percent of the gross domestic product, it’s not hard to see why potential “solutions” are sometimes presented along with finger-pointing.
Who caused this terrible predicament?
Of course, for politicians, the opposing party is to blame. If we’d only taken care of this sooner, they argue. No surprise that presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) is proposing universal healthcare. So is her fierce rival, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who has set a date of no later than 2012. State lawmakers are also tossing around the idea in California, Kentucky, Minnesota and Washington, to name a few.
For the federal government, the culprit-of-the-day appears to be physicians. Pay-for-performance incentives are a trial now, but officials of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services say doctors will one day face mandatory pay-for-performance reporting. CMS announced March 14 that yet another community organization, the California Cooperative Health Care Reporting Initiative, will be granted access to Medicare data to help weed out the outliers on physician performance.
Doctors are making it clear they aren’t going to take the rap for an entire healthcare system run amuck. Claims data alone cannot accurately show the true picture of the care a physician gives, say the Washington State Medical Association and the American Medical Association. They are suing Regence BlueShield over alleged faulty data analysis that threatened their professional reputations.
A January report by the Commonwealth Fund says our healthcare burden is putting undue stress on families, businesses and public budgets. And no one knows this like the businesses. Small businesses have found one “solution”: They are simply dropping insurance coverage, thus increasing the number of uninsured and the costs on all taxpayers who foot the bill for emergency care. The House Committee on Small Business is holding a hearing on small business and health insurance as this article goes to print.
With the most on the line, big business is surging forward with innovative action. February 7 marked the launch of just one of the many efforts underway – the “Better Health Care Together” campaign, founded by AT&T, the Howard H. Baker, Jr. Center for Public Policy, the Center for American Progress, the Committee for Economic Development, the Communications Workers of America, Intel, Kelly Services, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and Wal-Mart. Their focus, among other things, is on empowering the consumer with preventative care, a plan that some report is already lowering costs.
Could the bottom line really come down to individuals taking better care of their health?
It doesn’t really matter who is to blame for the United States paying 6 percent to 8 percent more than any other country for healthcare. Because, as HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt pleads in almost every speech he’s given in the last year, if we don’t take care of this soon, we could lose our edge as world leaders.