All Entries Tagged With: "health reform"
Can Obama Pull Healthcare Reform Out of the Mud?
Somewhere down in the list of every President’s bag of political levers is knowing when to use public attention to get the Congressional back office talks unstuck. Whenever you hear a President say it is “make-or-break” time for a piece of policy–as Obama did earlier this week on healthcare reform–you know things are not going well on Capitol Hill.
In particular Obama saw fit to print a public letter to remind his Democratic colleagues that: A. They need to come up with a comprehensive healthcare reform package before the August recess. B. Find a way to pay for it that does not grow the deficit and reduces overall costs.
A good analysis piece on Politico points out that Obama’s primary concern is that Democrats will fashion an “all-pain, no-gain” plan that inflates and already daunting $1.8 trillion deficit. On top of bailouts of the financial industry, two bankrupt automakers, adding another deficit-heavy program could not come at a worse time. [more]
Hospitals Need Innovators, Too
My colleague Phil Betbeze makes a compelling argument that what healthcare needs right now are a cadre of highly-skilled operational masters to run efficient hospitals, and not necessarily innovators or change agents to flip the paradigm. It is true that often those leaders we think of as innovators are more like “dreamers,” whose creativity often masks an unwillingness to tackle the minutiae of running a top shop. And there is no question that much of the waste inherent in healthcare is not “the sytem’s” fault, but due to local inefficiency and outright waste.
The problem I have with the central premise is that if you set the bar only at smooth operations, we reduce the momentum to repair some of the big pieces of the reform puzzle, including a shift toward evidence-based care, improving the overall patient experience or pushing into promoting wellness instead of treating sickness. Those goals take a leader whose larger view of their mission extends beyond operations.
Maybe it is not too much to expect that the skills are not mutually exclusive, that someone who has a proven record at running a top hospital or health system could then make the step into being an innovator.