Healthcare CEOs say stakeholders must learn to 'live with less'

Even as they batted around high-level, intricate policy concepts, the chiefs of Massachusetts’s most prominent hospital network and private health insurer agreed Tuesday that the path to controlling soaring health care costs begins with a basic mindset shift: adjusting to a climate of limited resources and learning to live with less.

“We’re going to all have to, and we all have started to extensively, give up a lot,” said Gary Gottileb, CEO of Partners HealthCare, at a health care conference in Boston’s Omni Parker House Hotel, sponsored by Brandeis University’s Massachusetts Health Policy Forum. “Clearly, we’re going to have less resources than we have access to.”

Gottlieb, part of a panel of health care officials that included Andrew Dreyfus, the CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, said Partners would have to adjust to a climate in which the most cutting-edge technology isn’t always available.