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Healthcare Cost Debated In Nashville With Gov. Bredesen, Rep. Cooper and Others
September 8th, 2009
I covered this personally last weekend. Article also appears in the recent weekly addition of the Nashville Pride Newspaper.
The Rand Corporation, a national public policy and research institute hosted a healthcare cost symposium at Nashville’s Schermerhorn Symphony Center on Saturday August 29, 2009, with many prestigious guests discussing the issue.
The event, titled The Third Rail of Health Reform: Cost; was a day long event of speakers and panels discussing the cost challenges of healthcare reform. Some of the talks and panels included Framing the Cost Challenge; Controlling Health Care Spending: Making Tough Choices; A panel Discussion on Incentives for Change; and the one packed with perhaps the most notable figures, A panel Discussion on Controlling Cost, featuring panelist Phil Bredesen, Jim Cooper, Julie Gerberding, Patrick Soon-Shiong, and moderator David M. Walker.
[David M. Walker, Phil Bredesen, Jim Cooper, Julie Gerberding, and Patrick Soon-Shiong,with Dr. Soon Shiong on the big screen.]
As an example of cost inefficiency that doesn’t result in better healthcare, panelist Patrick Soon-Shiong, M.D., Chairman and Ceo of Araxis BioScience, Inc. relayed a story of being with a number of oncologists (cancer doctors) and asking them about the use of a very expensive electronic test that is place on the lymph nodes under the arms, and can even cause paralyzes. Every one of the doctors knew about that test. He then asked if they knew about a cheaper, safer blood test that could yield the same results. Few of them did. “Now these are not bad people’ he stated, but that there’s just too much information for them to keep up with.
Dr. Soon-Shiong spoke of an electronic information exchange as part of a remedy for this, for which the technology already exists, he exclaimed; developed by the defense department. Heissentiments where later echoed by Dr. Julie Gerberding, who just recently left her seven year post as Director of the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta; by saying that physicians just can’t keep up with all the information; “it’s coming too fast” she emphasized.
Part of Representative Jim Cooper’s analysis on the cost problem was the following: “Politics has gotten more polarized. We need to have our arguments, but we also need to do what’s in the national interest. There are other factors…it’s very difficult to figure this out; physicians, bureaucrats, anybody to try to figure this out. So, the patients are in the most vulnerable position…I’m very optimistic. We’re the greatest country in the history of the world; we solved all of our previous problems. We can solve this problem too; but, we need to be truthful about our real budget situation. I’ve gone to the Wall Street Journal three times now and begged them to print the real numbers for America…A lot of people don’t realize that it’s hard to project when the U.S. Treasury bond can lose it’s triple A rating as soon as 2012 if we don’t act on Medicare and Medicade reform.”
Cooper has taken national heat as one of the “Blue Dog Democrats” (a congressional coalition of fiscally conservative democrats) in recent months from those calling themselves progressives and highly favoring a public option; notably from national news-issues commentary sites such as The Huffington Post and Firedoglake; where they have linked back to local Nashville stories about Cooper not asking for earmark money to save Metro General Hospital, which may go under due to budget shortfalls. According to a March 31st News Channel 5 web-article, Metro General provides more than 30 percent of uninsured care for Nashville-Davidson County, and has a 3 million dollar shortfall due to absorbing indigent care cost.
[David M. Walker, Phil Bredesen]
At the end of the panel Bredesen and Cooper fielded a question from Twitter, as the event was broadcast live over the internet. A woman asked why as a small business owner is she treated differently, and has to pay 3 times more for coverage than what someone in a corporation pays.
Rep. Cooper responded that sometime after World War II a value was put on people based on where you work, and basically gave an answer that can be surmised as the situation being due to cost efficiency due to economies of scale. Gov. Bredesen took his answer further saying that the problem lies in not just efficiencies but that you will have cost issues unless you have something approaching universal coverage because “the people buying are expensive”. He went on to explain that if you go a period of your life without coverage, and then all of a sudden want to buy it is because there’s something wrong; and that then becomes expensive. Gov. Bredesen related it to buying storm coverage for your house when the hurricane is coming. He suggested that having not paid in over time become more costly when only paying in at the point of significant need, stating that “healthcare doesn’t work that way.”
All 4 panelist agreed and echoed sentiments to the effect that they are disappointed with the national healthcare debate only being about “transforming” the delivery system and insurance, and not about reforming health and healthcare.
The Rand Corporation bills itself as an organization that “for more than 60 years… has pursued its nonprofit mission by conducting research on important and complicated problems”…improving “policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis.”
Critics of the institution point to its military funding from its inception and high-level of corporate funding by interested parties; as incentives that skew its positions.
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Yobachi Boswell is creator and publisher of BlackPerspecitve.net. I’m a writer, activist and political watcher based in Nashville, Tennessee. I’ve also been know to do some spoken word and MCing in my day.
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