Adventures in Entrepreneurship with Jeremy Hanks

Health Care Cluster *#&@

I’ve talked about Health Care a few other times here on the old blog. Started after running businesses for 8 yrs as an entrepreneur and then attending a breakout roundtable back in 2007 at the Inc 500 conference in Chicago when I said:

The health care system in America (and our culture that is driving massive increases in cost) is screwed six ways from Sunday. It’s going to break. When I look at Doba and the rate increases we’ve seen in the past 5 years, I predict it’s going to break within 5-7 years. We can’t keep absorbing these costs.

Then there was a MWCN roundtable here in UT on Health Care where my eyes were opened to some of the major problems at a foundational level.

Then in August last year, we were forced at Doba to make some changes to our health care plan. Here’s my rant from then:

The Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation, created a 100-point scorecard using 37 indicators such as health outcomes, quality, access and efficiency. We scored dead last out of 19 industrialized nations. Dead last. If this were the olympics it’d be like we won no medals. There’d be a national outrage. But it’s only heathcare, something that affects every man/woman/child in this country. So most of us will only hear politicians talking about garbage and doing nothing.

We spend more on health care than any of these countries. 7.5% of our total costs in the health care system are administrative costs. Places like Finland spend 1.9% on administration. Yet they beat us badly on over 37 indicators. Think having a baby in the U.S. is a good idea? We have 7 infant deaths out of 1000 compared to 2.8 in Japan and 3.1 in Sweden. Yet again, we spend more on health care proportionate to our population than all these countries.

Hum, we spend more and are dead last in the rankings. Sounds like to me we ought to put some people in the room with a whiteboard and write down all the ways these countries provide/manage health care (all 18 of them that beat us) and ‘borrow’ some ideas from them. Shoot, just plain lift their systems and make the switch.

This is government and buracrecy AND private enterprise all gone wrong and awry and failing the American public.

(here’s the link to the report U.S. still flunks healthcare test, group says

Forget all my previous rants. This article by David Goldhill in The Atlantic is the best summary of our current health cluster-you-know-what of any I’ve ever seen.

As an entrepreneur/business owner, I can tell you health care is jacked. As a consumer (especially during the last 10 weeks since my run-in with a giant boulder as a heavy user), I can tell you health care is jacked. I can’t speak to the medical profession/insurance company side of it, but I’m guessing they might NOT say it’s jacked, since the momentum of their world drives the giant health care cluster snowball forward.

Anyway, read this article!! The entire thing. (Get past the title, I don’t like it for what the article covers) I agree with nearly every word Mr. Goldhill writes. As I’ve started saying when I see things like this, he hits it so hard he split the nail right down the middle. Without addressing some of the underlying issues that this article so perfectly outlines, our country is on the fast track to a health care induced bankruptcy. Oh wait, medical bills already drive more than 60% of personal bankruptcies, why should the macro not just be a summation of the micro? It will. Mark my (and lots of others) words.

(Thanks to Fred Wilson for pointing this out on his blog post: Consumer Centric Health Care)

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