“In order to solve a problem, you have to understand it,” said attorney William P. Harrington, who heads the Westchester County Association”™s Blue Ribbon Task Force on Healthcare Reform.
Harrington was speaking of the “very complex” problem of health care delivery and its uncertain future in the U.S. Like many observers, Harrington, managing partner at Bleakley Platt & Schmidt L.L.P. in White Plains, is convinced our current health care model “is broken beyond repair. It”™s got to change.”
That change over the next five years will be propelled by the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the voluminous and oft-challenged federal health care reform legislation called “a work in progress” by a health economist at Deloitte L.L.P. who will address the system”™s future in Westchester this month.
Harrington said the WCA task force he chairs, a 6-year-old coalition of business leaders and health care providers, spent about a year organizing its Sept. 22 symposium, “Health Care Reform: What You”™re Not Hearing in the National Debate.” The daylong event at the Westchester Marriott in Tarrytown will bring together experts from all sectors of the health care industry to lift discussion and debate of the issues into the intellectual realm and out of the political miasma of Washington, D.C.
“This is not political,” Harrington said of the symposium, which will include speakers representing hospitals, physicians, insurers, state agencies, home care providers and businesses. “It”™s an attempt to educate every (health care) constituency, plus the public, on what this means.”
Reforming the broken system “requires adult discussion and ultimately adult decisions which we as a society, especially in recent times, have not been willing to make,” he said.
The event”™s keynote speakers include Dr. Herbert Pardes, CEO of New York Presbyterian Hospital, Dr. Kenneth L. Davis, president and CEO of Mount Sinai Medical Center and Paul H. Keckley, executive director of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, the health care research arm of Deloitte L.L.P.
Panels of industry experts will discuss new models of integrated health care delivery, how businesses can control their costs in future health care insurance exchanges and the cost drivers behind a current system the experts agree is unsustainable.
The WCA”™s blue ribbon task force was formed in 2005 to advocate in Albany for a more tightly regulated health insurance industry to correct what WCA leaders saw as a market imbalance that favored for-profit insurers at the expense of hospitals, physicians, employers and patients. Since passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the reanimated task force has widened its focus to educate WCA members and the public on the impact of federal health care reforms. Harrington said he sees the symposium as the first in a series of presentations to be hosted by the WCA.
While the WCA will continue to advocate for tighter state controls on insurers and higher reimbursements from insurers to New York hospitals and physicians, Harrington said, “I don”™t want to demonize the insurance companies. I don”™t want to demonize any sector of this health care delivery system, because they”™ve all been forced to deal with what I consider a very flawed, broken model.”
The national driver to reform that model, the Affordable Care Act, will be further shaped and altered in Washington”™s “very toxic” political environment, said Paul Keckley, an economist and leading expert on health care reform at the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. He said the legislation, being implemented in stages up to the year 2016, will be especially affected by the $1.5 trillion in federal deficit-reducing spending cuts a joint committee of Congress will recommend this fall.
Six of the congressional committee”™s 12 members are up for re-election in 2012, another political factor shaping health care reform, Keckley noted.
“The political partisanship right now means everything is in play, everything is in negotiations,” he said. “The bottom line for the providers is you know you”™re going to have cuts” in federal program reimbursements “so you”™re going to have to cut costs, period.”
Health care reform will require a difficult realignment of hospitals with physicians, Keckley said. “You”™ve got to re-engineer how you provide patient care in a team-based model instead of the specialty mentality that we have.
“The new normal is kind of uncharted territory,” said Keckley, the symposium”™s closing keynote speaker. “We”™ve really not been where we”™re going, but there”™s no going back.”
