Health Care For America Now

I'm heading to the Families USA Health Action 2009 conference in DC tomorrow. For us health wonks, it should be a great event.

A long line of elected officials (and their representatives) will be attending, including Senators Grassley, Stabenow, and representatives from Senator Kennedy's office, Representatives Waxman and Hoyer, and Jeanne Lambrew, Deputy Director, White House Office of Health Reform. Also of note, educators, researchers, writers, and activists like Joe Trippi, Uwe Reinhardt, Atul Gawande, and Paul Begala will be there.

Though a lot of the conference will be focused on state health care reform, as is Families USA's focus, there will be a good amount of attention paid to the national reform effort. Through the plenaries, panels, and workshops, I hope to get a good idea of where reform is headed and how to make it happen, at least in the opinion of those in attendance. And I'll be reporting back what happens here for all of you to enjoy (hopefully).

If all goes as planned, I will also get to sit down as part of a bloggers roundtable with Uwe Reinhardt, Atul Gawande, and Ron Pollack. So, for the sake of interactivity, I'd like the throw the opportunity out to you. What questions do you want me to ask of these distinguished health care experts?

First, some biographies.

Uwe Reinhardt is a internationally renowned researcher at Princeton University. Via Wikipedia:

Reinhardt's most recent research has focused on hospital pricing, systems of health care around the world, Medicare reform, and health care spending. His work has appeared in Health Affairs, The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and The British Medical Journal.

In a recent paper, Reinhardt discusses the obstacles to success of consumer-directed health care in light of the lack of transparency in hospital pricing. Reinhardt suggests several reforms that could lead to better information on hospital pricing for consumer decision-making, including a national set of Diagnosis-related group weights to which each hospital could then apply their own conversion factor. Reinhardt's previous work on hospitals examined the tax and cost of equity capital advantages of not-for-profit hospitals over for-profit hospitals.

Reinhardt's scholarship has often analyzed the U.S. health care system in relation to systems around the world. His research has argued that higher U.S. health spending is a result of higher U.S. per capita gross domestic product (GDP) as well as an intricate and disjointed payment system. Reinhardt's work on foreign systems of health care includes a recent analysis of Switzerland that appeared in JAMA. Reinhardt argues that there is little correlation between the prevalence of consumer choice and the high quality of Swiss health care.

In 2003, Reinhardt, along with 14 other prominent health policy experts and private health care industry leaders, signed an open letter arguing that Medicare should lead the U.S. health care system in paying for performance by tying financial reimbursement to quality measures.

Reinhardt's work on health care spending includes a debunking of the popular myth that the aging of the U.S. population is driving the growth in health care spending.

Atul Gawande is a surgeon and writer who works at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, MA. He's worked in Congress and under Bill Clinton. Most recently, he published a spectacular article in the New Yorker explaining how various health care systems around the world came to be and what that means for our health care reform effort. Most significantly, he argues for a system based on what we already have, a system that works, that is messier than an idealist would want, but that solves problems and can pass Congress:

It won’t necessarily be clear what the final system will look like. Maybe employers will continue to slough off benefits, and that lifeboat will grow to become the entire system. Or maybe employers will decide to strengthen their benefits programs to attract employees, and American health care will emerge as a mixture of the new and the old. We could have Medicare for retirees, the V.A. for veterans, employer-organized insurance for some workers, federally organized insurance for others. The system will undoubtedly be messier than anything an idealist would devise. But the results would almost certainly be better.

Ron Pollack worked under Bill Clinton as well, and is the Founding Executive Director of Families USA. From his bio:

Ron Pollack is the Founding Executive Director of Families USA, the national organization for health care consumers. Families USA’s mission is to achieve high-quality, affordable health coverage for everyone in the U.S.

Families USA’s numerous reports and analyses – on such matters as health coverage for the uninsured and underinsured, Medicaid, Medicare, prescription drug issues, long-term care, and others – are frequently cited at Congressional hearings, in state legislatures, by the media, and by consumer organizations that Families USA works with all across the country.

These folks have thought a great deal about health care and health care reform. They may have some answers, if you have the questions.

Leave a comment as soon as you can and let me know what you'd like me to ask any and all of them. I'll try to get in as many questions as possible.