Framing idea for healthcare reform

by phil on Tuesday Feb 24, 2009 11:27 AM
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Maybe some advice for Obama's State of the Nation address tonight:

Start to use the language of Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life, and have a talking point like:

Instead of profit-driven hospitals, we need purpose-driven hospitals.

I know it sounds a little ridiculous, but I don't think it's too ridiculous to be repeated on CNN, FOXNews, and MSNBC.

Purpose-driven hospitals? What's that?

A doctor who's a friend-of-mine says that hospitals are run by MBAs who bring all these metrics to measure his "performance." Unfortunately, he says, they're performance only in the context of the Starbucks model: give them a shot of happiness, at the least amount of cost-to-the-hospital, in the shortest amount of time.

There's a school of thought in medicine that says if you're getting no complaints, then you're practicing bad medicine.

This is basically a re-framing of the argument that the drive for profits creates an inappropriate incentive structure for healthcare given the actual purpose of healthcare.

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