Insider offers view of health innovation
Filed under: Health care reform, Health policy, Hospitals
Blogging for the Harvard Business Review, Simon Stevens (chairman of the UnitedHealth Center for Health Reform & Modernization) seeks to explain why the field of health care is so agonizingly slow to adopt innovation, whether it be 15 years and counting for e-mail communication or several generations for scurvy-preventing limes. Without spoiling Stevens well-chosen analogies and explanations, I can say he makes a case that it comes down to three factors:
- The labor intensive nature of health care
- Failure to spread organizational innovation
- Barriers to new entrants in care delivery
To Stevens’ way of thinking, there is one group positioned to overcome those barriers and push the system forward: Health plans. UnitedHealth and its competitors have the data, platforms and connections to become major change agents in the field of health care delivery, as well as the incentive to put it all to work improving outcomes and decreasing costs.
Insurance industry positioned to profit from reform
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Government, Health care reform, Hot Health Headline
In BusinessWeek, Chad Terhune and Keith Epstein write that major insurance companies have already succeeded in defining the debate over health care reform in such a way that, whatever the final outcome, they stand to profit in the end.
In addition to limiting and maybe even eliminating the proposed “public option,” insurers, led by UnitedHealth, have deftly steered legislators toward universally mandated coverage with little or no cost controls. After identifying the insurance behemoth with impressive influence in Washington as the ringleader of the effort, the reporters proceed to dig deeper into UnitedHealth’s closet, chronicling dirty laundry like rate hikes, sketchy databases and dubious plans for seniors.
Terhune and Epstein also point out that the Lewin Group – whose work (especially that showing how government-run care would harm the insurance industry) is often cited by legislators opposing a public option – is ultimately owned by none other than UnitedHealth. But Lewin isn’t the only arm of UnitedHealth making a cameo appearance in the reform debate, the number crunchers at its Ingenix wing and its chronic care OptumHealth subsidiary both stand to reap substantial windfalls from the proposed reforms.
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