If health care reform doesn’t get a handle on spiraling costs, it will fail. Medicare and Medicaid are already racing toward insolvency, and if costs aren’t curbed, adding more subsidized care to the government’s tab will only hasten a fiscal catastrophe.
Now some good news: Such strides are well under way locally, and the rest of the nation is taking notice. That’s why three local health-care leaders were invited to Washington, D.C., this week to explain how they’ve achieved envious results in keeping costs down and quality up.
Dave Brooks, CEO of Providence Regional Medical Center Everett, Dr. Harold Dash, board president of The Everett Clinic, and Rich Maturi, senior vice president of Premera Blue Cross, shared what they’re doing right at a symposium called “How Do They Do That? Low-Cost, High-Quality Health Care in America.”
Health-care leaders from 10 high-performing regional health systems were chosen to appear at the symposium, jointly hosted by a distinguished group of health organizations and think tanks. The idea was to examine the factors — culture, finance, delivery structures, etc. — that enable certain communities to provide low-cost, high-quality care.
One of the event’s moderators was Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon whose recent article in The New Yorker described why the town of McAllen, Texas, had the nation’s highest Medicare costs without ranking high in quality of care. (McAllen spends more than twice the per-patient Medicare average of Everett, which ranks higher in quality measurements.) Gawande’s conclusion: Patients in McAllen got plenty of expensive treatments, but not necessarily the treatment they need. Rather than a medical culture centered on quality and cost-effectiveness, McAllen’s has grown to emphasize quantity of treatments — largely because Medicare provides the financial incentives for it.
If that’s the future of our health-care system, we’ll soon be sunk. Lessons about what’s working well must be applied with urgency throughout the country. Decisions about public-option insurance plans and how to pay for covering the uninsured will have little meaning if overall costs bankrupt us.
In Snohomish County, Providence and The Everett Clinic have been on the leading edge of innovation in the delivery of cost-effective care, and have piled up national awards for quality. They and some of the other top-performing regions are blazing trails the rest of the nation should be following.
It’s gratifying — not to mention comforting — to live in one of the regions that’s leading the way toward cost-effective, quality health care. That the Everett area is recognized for it nationally is pretty cool, too.
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