Health Care Reform We Can Believe in!!!

Focusing on expanding health care access is a very noble social goal. But in a fiscally conservative leaning country plagued by debt and recession, access driven models are not winning strategic arguments for passing legislation, winning elections, or garnering public opinion.

What seems to be a missing element from today’s dialogue on health care reform, is how enabling health technologies can have an important impact on opportunities to embolden existing stakeholders, create new jobs, and stimulate the grow of small businesses to reduce costs and improve quality of care.

Integrating responsible "demand side" consumer driven empowerment models,
implementing sensible comparative effectiveness components within the USFDA
regulatory approval processes, and reducing the cost of medical education for newly minted MD’s will help to usher in a "new new" beginning of impactful health reform, quality improvement, and cost containment strategies.

There are no easy answers or shotgun solutions.

A key will be the "Chutzpah" or courage to continually adopt incentives and test new payment
models that help drive innovation at the state or local levels. These new models can help break the chain of established "practices and habits" that create inefficiencies, drive up costs, and provide disincentive for quality improvement.

These seeds of innovation can be planted in a range of activities that include prevention programs, chronic disease management, and long-term care. Having the frameworks in place at the state, community, or organizational levels to reward new ideas, reject broken parts, and adopt the most innovative practices is a critical component of sustaining and driving a bold vision for health care we can believe in during 2010 and beyond.

As our friend Machiavelli has said the hardest thing to do is create a new order of things!

........or thinking more optimistically and emphatically, Dr. Seuss would say, "Oh, the places we will go....!!!

Reaching for the ‘moon’, our time is now.

On May 25^th, 1961 John F. Kennedy laid out a vision for the USA to land an American on the moon and safely return him/her back to earth. JFK realized that landing on the moon was not as important as setting a bold vision that would capture all America’s attention to strive for greatness and not settle for mediocrity.

In his now famous “Man on the Moon Address”, JFK stated, “Now it is time to take longer strides--time for a great new American enterprise--time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth.”

It has been almost 50 years since JFK provided a vision for which all Americans and the world’s citizens could look towards as an example to better themselves, albeit in school, at work, or the global community.

Is there not a better time than in 2010 to set such a bold and focused vision once again for America? After almost a decade of zero economic growth and job creation, with unscrupulous business practices on Wall Street that brought our economy to the brink, it is time to raise up and strive for a better future for our children and children’s children.

Today, one in eight Americans now receives food stamps, including one in four children who live in poverty. Furthermore WHO estimates that almost 50% (1 billion) of all children on this planet (2.2 billion) live in poverty. Of these children over 1.4 million die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation.

While not as potentially captivating as putting an American on the moon, I suggest we strive to find a way to set bold goals to eliminate childhood poverty, and ensure that all infants under five years of age receive adequate nutrition by 2030.

JFK believed that innovation in science, business, medicine, and education is not the byproduct of a few privileged members of our global society, but rather an outcome of all the world's citizens efforts to reach their potential through equal opportunity and by breaking down the barriers that cause poverty, tyranny, and illiteracy. Let us once again rise up and take on these challenges through bold new goals and vision in 2010 and beyond.