The Senate Finance Committee held its day-long Health Reform Summit yesterday. The overall theme of the meeting was reassuring in that no one doubts that changes need to be made, and soon:
“We will move quickly in 2009,” said Senator Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who is chairman of the committee. Mr. Baucus suggested that “some kind of federal health board” could help Congress make technical policy decisions. “How in the world am I supposed to know what the proper reimbursement rate should be for a certain procedure?” he asked. (From the New York Times)
"We have a broad consensus that we aren't getting nearly as much as we should for the money," said Mark B. McClellan, President Bush's former director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services who now heads the new Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at Brookings. "There's an unprecedented level of agreement that something can be done and that something must be done." (From the Washington Post)
The keynote address was given by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who didn't offer a prescription for change so much as he put our spending on health care into context. "From the economist's perspective," he said, "the question of whether we are spending too much on health care cannot ultimately be answered by looking at total expenditures relative to GDP or the federal budget. Rather, the question, whatever we spend, is whether we are getting our money's worth."
Cost effectiveness is a common theme we're exploring here, and is the subject of one of the advertisements that launched this blog. We can deliver care more efficiently, which will bring our costs down, but also give us higher quality care. What we must keep in mind, though, is that compassion must also be at the forefront of this debate. Saving money is a laudable goal, but doing so at the expense of human compassion isn't worth it. We're advocating for a system that places the patient experience at the nucleus of the system and builds a high-quality, affordable health care delivery platform around the individual's physical, mental, and spiritual needs.
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