With health care companies scrambling to keep costs in check, data is more important than ever. And Charlotte-based Premier Inc. plays a key role in providing health systems with information that leads to better care and outcomes with lower expenses, president and CEO Susan DeVore says. The solutions company shares clinical and operational data and strategies culled from its membership, which includes 2,900 community hospitals, and nearly 100,000 providers, from nursing facilities to pharmacies. Now, Premier's reach can potentially grow broader because of the company's initial public offering last month.
Only six people were able to enroll for health insurance through the Obamacare website on the first day, according to documents released Thursday by Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The documents also show that by the end of the day Oct. 2, only 248 enrollments had been completed through healthcare.gov. According to notes from a meeting on the morning of Oct. 2, there was a laundry list of "ongoing issues" with healthcare.gov, including "high capacity on the website, direct enrollment not working, VA system not connecting, Experian creating confusion with credit check information."
In May 2010, two months after the Affordable Care Act squeaked through Congress, President Obama's top economic aides were getting worried. Larry Summers, director of the White House's National Economic Council, and Peter Orszag, head of the Office of Management and Budget, had just received a pointed four-page memo from a trusted outside health adviser. It warned that no one in the administration was "up to the task" of overseeing the construction of an insurance exchange and other intricacies of translating the 2,000-page statute into reality. Summers, Orszag and their staffs agreed. For weeks that spring, a tug of war played out inside the White House, according to five people familiar with the episode
The Obamacare blame game is in full swing, and without other news to fill pages and airtime, it's likely to continue for some time. Attention is shifting from the myriad problems with the official website Healthcare.gov, and toward the health plans that are being canceled, even though President Obama promised that they would not be. But the longer-term story isn't the rollout and its many severe glitches. No one recalls whether the first batch of Social Security checks was sent on time in the late 1930s. The story that will matter, and linger, is that the Affordable Care Act was the first major law implemented almost entirely online.
Ian Morrison is a health care futurist. Companies, trade groups, and non-profits call on him to speak about trends in health care and offer prognostications of what the future brings. I've heard him speak a few times and his knowledge and sense of humor drew me in right away. I recently tweeted a story written by Anna Gorman and Julie Appleby, friends at Kaiser Health News, about hundreds of thousands of consumers receiving cancellation notices from their insurance companies on account of the Affordable Care Act. I was surprised to learn that Morrison was one of them.
Under way is a quiet revolution in health care that aims to put the price mechanism to work on the $2.8 trillion health-care system in the United States (see this Monitor Weekly cover story for details). Important note: This is not about the controversy raging in Washington and the media about public health-care exchanges to cover the 47 million Americans currently uninsured. It is about health insurance that affects the 150 million Americans with access to an employer-provided health plan.