CEOs Want Health-Care Reform

Posted on May 28, 2009  Comments (5)

Decades ago Dr. Deming emphasized the deadly disease of excessive health care costs in the USA. Since then, year after year, the situation has become worse (reaching $2.2 trillion in spending in 2007 – 16.2% of GDP). During that time senior executives has put forth very little serious effort (in comparison to the huge cost) to fix this problem. Finally, in the last few years, more and more senior executives are actively moving to address the ever worsening crisis (including, Howard Schultz, CEO at Starbucks).

They seem to be realizing that hoping the problem will just fix itself is not a great strategy. Finally senior executives are realizing they need to have the government address the systemic failures. Those executives need to keep up their efforts because those seeking to retain the system that doesn’t work, because they personally benefit from it, have been doing a great job of preventing progress for decades. Until a critical mass of senior executives demand change from Washington the chance of improving the relative performance of the USA health system in comparison to other countries is very bleak (we have just been getting more expensive and less effective [relative to other countries] over time).

CEOs Secretly Want Health-Care Reform

Related: Many Experts Say Health-Care System Inefficient, Wasteful – Articles on Improving the Healthcare system – Applying Disruptive Thinking to the Healthcare Crisis – Our Failed Health-care System

Ivan Seidenberg, the Chairman and CEO of Verizon, has stated that the very nature of problems within the U.S. health care system mean that the health care market doesn’t function as a market at all.

CEOs Push for Systematic Reform of Health Care

This is so true. How an argument that says we must accept the most costly system that doesn’t produce the best result because we can’t afford to have a more effective less costly system makes no sense. How is such an argument even accepted? But it is all the time. It is the “conventional wisdom.” Which doesn’t say much for conventional wisdom.

And that doesn’t even address that our system leaves tens of millions without insurance and forces poor economic decisions by millions of people. People are tied to their current jobs due to health care. If they want to go back to school, or go into business for themselves they must come up with huge health care premiums (if they can quality), take the risk their insurance won’t be dropped… It is an obvious friction on economic mobility if health care coverage is tied to your place of employment.

Waiting for C.E.O.’s to Go ‘Nuclear’ (2005)

You would have to be a fool of a CEO to see a huge expense to your company rising every year in the USA more than inflation while you see the cost more contained in all the other countries your company operates in and not want the expensive broken system fixed. Now you might say it is someone else problem to deal with in 1982. By 1992 you have to be unable or unwilling to think of anything but the next quarterly report not to make health care reform a priority.

By 2002 you would have to not only be unable to think of the long term but unable to even see in your rear-view mirror. By this point the devastation caused by your fellow CEOs failures to get involved in fixing the health care system in the 1980′s and 1990′s was obvious. By 2009 many CEOs have understood what Dr. Deming told them decades ago. Those that still don’t, I really don’t understand. What are those CEOs thinking? They see one of their largest expense continuing to become worse every year and they don’t feel a need to actually address the issue effectively (especially when they can see their non-USA operations benefiting from much more effective health care systems). I just don’t understand that strategy.