Contents tagged with academy update
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The future ain’t what it used to be
The future ain’t what it used to be
By Tom BanningTAFP Chief Executive Officer/Executive Vice President
In spite of an intractable partisan divide, President Barack Obama signed into law the … more
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Sowing the seeds of a better health care system
By Tom Banning
TAFP Chief Executive Officer/Executive Vice PresidentNow that Democrats have lost their 60-vote supermajority in the Senate after suffering defeat in the Massachusetts special election to fill the vacant seat left by the death of Ted Kennedy, the fate of federal health system reform hangs by a thread. Will Democrats scale back the legislation and look for compromise, or is it back to square one? Whatever happens, one thing is certain: the problems plaguing the American health care system aren’t going away on their own, and they’ll likely get worse before they get better.
For a fresh take on the concept of health system reform as it’s been considered for the past year or so, read the most recent contribution by prominent physician and author Dr. Atul Gawande in the December issue of the New Yorker magazine. It draws historical parallels with early-20th-century federal efforts to reform America’s labor-intensive, fragmented, and unproductive agricultural economy.
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Bending the cost curve
Now comes the hard part
By Tom Banning
TAFP Chief Executive Officer/Executive Vice PresidentIf one accepts the premise that politics drives health care policy, then it would follow that flawed politics produces flawed policy. Those hoping for a vigorous and thoughtful debate on health care reform—what works and how to pay for it—are instead forced to settle for media theatrics and hyperbole that come dangerously close to the level of UFO conspiracies.
The town hall debacles and orchestrated lunacy during the August recess have dispelled any lingering hope that Congress can move away from the partisan bickering and sniping that has increasingly characterized what passes for debate in one of the world’s greatest deliberative bodies. Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle, with the blessing and encouragement of their caucus’ political consultants, talk not in terms of medical economics and policy options for improving our health care system, but rather in calculated polling and focus-group-generated strategies designed to fire up their respective political base and confuse and scare the public to meet their own political objectives.
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Health care politics 101
By Tom Banning
TAFP Chief Executive Officer/Executive Vice PresidentAt the risk of sounding overly cynical, epiphanies in politics are rare, if they exist at all. Ground-breaking legislative reforms are more likely to evolve from several years of toiling in the political trenches. Even then, legislative breakthroughs may be a result of sheer unanticipated luck, stumbling by an opponent, an inadvertent absence of a determined adversary, or the weird and largely unplanned alignment of mutual interests, as politics makes strange bedfellows.
Legislative reform is by definition a reactionary sport. Reforms typically occur after, not before, the proverbial train wreck, plane crash, biblical storm or financial meltdown. Health care reform is no different and in many respects will be much more difficult to achieve, as reformers are attempting to transform the system before it collapses.
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When it’s bad enough to be good
Health care reform and rescuing primary care
By Tom Banning
TAFP Chief Executive Officer/Executive Vice PresidentThere is an old adage that political leadership is the art of finding a parade and getting in front of it. And the corollary to that axiom is that whether it’s a parade or an angry mob, it’s best to stay in front of it.
The drumbeat for health care reform might be the sound of a marching band or it could be the din of a brute-force mob for whom might makes right and passion wins over reason. Either way, the need to transform our health care system—and in so doing reinvigorate primary care—is being heard, and more importantly, understood by policy makers, opinion leaders, the business community and the public at large.
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