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By Alan Bleyer,
Bill Considine
and Tom Strauss
Published on Sunday, Oct 12, 2008
Most families who have used our Akron health-care system in the past few years probably have noted two important things:
• We have access to excellent health care, provided by highly competent and well-trained doctors and nurses.
• It is increasingly difficult to afford on a typical family budget.
This situation is likely to continue. As we learn how to treat more illnesses and injuries more effectively, costs continue to increase. Every one of us wants these life-saving technologies when our loved ones are in need.
Yet these rising costs are a significant economic burden on most families, especially those with little or no insurance coverage. More families, even middle-class families, are as threatened by this potential economic calamity as by personal health crises.
The burden of rising costs does not affect just individuals and families. Local employers, including the hospitals, are faced with tremendous challenges in trying to maintain and afford health-care coverage for employees. And many are no longer able to include coverage for dependents.
Local businesses and industry are faced with stiff world competition on price and quality. In most countries, health-care coverage is not built into the overall cost of production. Instead, it is publicly financed. In the United States, the rising cost of health care is added onto the costs of producing goods and services, which makes us less competitive in the emerging world market.
One consequence of this continuous increase in the costs of health care is a sharp rise in the proportion of health-care bills that are not paid. This creates problems for the patient and family, who may have incurred significant debt without any obvious ability to pay. For the physicians and hospitals, this leads to a rapid increase in uncompensated care, which now totals more than $100 million per year just for the Akron hospitals.
Although no one directly pays these bills for care that actually is provided to patients, the costs don't simply disappear. These unpaid balances ultimately increase the cost of care for everyone who does pay. Such costs are currently estimated to add about $1,000 per year to the average insurance premium.
Hospitals are facing extreme demand for capital to renew, enlarge, update and equip facilities, and to invest in the kind of information technology systems that will help provide safer, more efficient and more effective care.
As our population ages, many more of us will need health care, and much more of it. Training the next generation of health-care workers is also a great expense, but of huge importance.
Initiatives of this magnitude can be extremely expensive. And while none of the hospitals has a source of capital funding to pay for these expenses, each works diligently to raise significant amounts of money to help offset expenditures and keep costs as low as possible.
Without these initiatives, we simply are maintaining the status quo, which is a most risky strategy. It is likely to produce a variety of unwanted results, including reductions in services, increasing premium costs and further uninsurance. It is time for the community to address these issues as a community. This will require new thinking, new rules and new initiatives.
One example of new thinking is encouraging patients to become active participants in their own health and medical care, rather than passive recipients of care. We no longer can afford to avoid routine maintenance and health-promoting behaviors, treating health care as the after-the-fact corrective to smoking, obesity, lack of exercise and similar health-harming behaviors.
As a corollary, we need new rules in this area. We need to recognize that patient empowerment requires significant changes in our workplaces, schools and homes, so that these healthful behaviors are supported by the environments where we work, learn and live. This will in turn require that we, as a community, make new investments of public and private dollars.
Finally, we need new initiatives. The development of a world-class research innovation center in and for the Greater Akron area is an ongoing collaborative effort of Akron Children's Hospital, Akron General Health System, Summa Health System, the University of Akron and the Northeastern Ohio Universities Colleges of Medicine and Pharmacy. The city of Akron and Summit County also are active participants and supporters of this initiative, which will leverage our existing resources and investments to create a new economic and educational center for our community.
There are many problems in our current health-care system — but also many opportunities to improve both our health care and our economic futures. It is time to address these issues directly, and to make sure that we get the health care we need at a price we can afford. We will all benefit from such a transformation of problems into opportunities.
Alan Bleyer is president and CEO of Akron General Medical Center.
Bill Considine is president and CEO of Akron Children's Hospital.
Tom Strauss is president and CEO of Summa Health System.
Most families who have used our Akron health-care system in the past few years probably have noted two important things:
Get the full article here.
Comments
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Posted 03:11 PM, 10/12/2008
Is this all they have to say in the whole essay or article?
"One example of new thinking is encouraging patients to become active participants in their own health and medical care, rather than passive recipients of care."
It's just bearuspeak, fluff, garbage, pick one.
One day the the bright light of discovery and reform will shine on the bearuomeds and beaurosurances and they will scurry like the roaches that they are.
