Respected Economist Calls Health Care "Locomotive of the Economy"
Yesterday, our friends at the Health Enterprises Network (H.E.N.) hosted Uwe Reinhardt, Ph.D. to speak on the state of health care reform in the United States. Dr. Reinhardt is a professor of political economy at Princeton. Reinhardt is a prominent scholar in health care economics and a frequent speaker and author on subjects ranging from the war in Iraq to the future of Medicare (wikipedia). He even has his own blog for the New York Times: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/uwe-e-reinhardt
H.E.N.'s event was, as always, stellar. Around 300 health care executives and physicians attended, including the co-founder of Humana, David Jones, and his son, David Jones, Jr., the current chairman of Humana. Rishabh Mehrotra the CEO of SHPS / Carewise Health also attended, and I learned that he is the raising chair of H.E.N. Definitely a power breakfast. Dr. Reinhardt was introduced at the event via video by Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell. What I took away from Dr. Reinhardt's remarks was that the U.S. has an interesting balancing act when it comes to health care reform. According to his remarks and PowerPoint, "health care is the locomotive of the economy" in the 21st Century. Health care has created real job growth in this decade, while many industries have shrunk the size of their workforce. I think our new hospital construction, the opening of the new College of Pharmacy building, and bringing Good Samaritan Hospital into the UK family are all examples of this. Dr. Reinhardt's words rang true when he said, "there is a great job and employment story in healthcare" in last four decades. He asked us all, why would we want reform which would slow down the locomotive?
At the end of the day, Dr. Reinhardt is a serious economist. He maintains that reform should be about making sure consumers are "getting their money's worth" when it comes to health care. He encouraged all of us in health care to work on minimizing administrative costs, and at the same time using data to create a positive dialogue between physicians on the most effective and efficient ways to deliver care. It was rewarding to hear this message as I hear it from Dr. Karpf and Dr. Lofgren almost every day!
http://www.healthenterprisesnetwork.com/
Dr. Reinhardt used this magazine cover in his presentation -- I thought it was excellent!