The Rhode Island Business Group on Health recently sponsored a “summit” conference on a variety of health-related topics expected to be of interest to businesses in the state.
Much of the agenda focused on benefit design, working with brokers, value-driven health care, and the role employers play in the health care decisions of their workers. These are all worthy topics, and important to HR professionals and business owners coping with this ever more complex problem.
While the program was well thought out, and the speakers were knowledgeable and well prepared, as a CEO active in the health reform debate, I couldn’t shake the feeling it was all so much rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic.
Then one of the speakers actually said it. Ed Belt, a well-known benefits consultant speaking generally (and I paraphrase here), said that the health care system is like a train speeding downhill toward a brick wall with no one driving. What we are doing here, he said, is helping people to the back of the train. He was right on.
Fortunately the leadership of RIBGH had the foresight and flexibility to recognize there was important change in the air and invited to the program the CEOs of Lifespan, George Vecchione, and Care New England, John Hynes. Already the two largest health care provider organizations in Rhode Island, they recently announced their intention to merge to create a health care entity unlike anything currently in the state.
Such an event, if approved, holds the promise of true reform. It is a disruptive innovation designed to shed the parochial shackles of the status quo that have held us back for so long.
The two seasoned leaders used their opportunity well. With Brown University poised to invest $100 million to build a medical teaching facility, presumably on the Rhode Island Hospital campus, the vision of a world-class academic medical center able to compete with the renowned facilities to our north and south took on a vivid reality.
This is health care reform not in the context of slashing jobs and services to sustain economic viability, but rather as an engine of economic development. This point is not lost on a business audience.
The Lifespan / Care New England merger faces several federal and state regulatory hurdles, as well as the jury of community opinion thought to have defeated the idea in its last attempt eight years ago.
Everyone in Rhode Island, even the already troubled community hospitals not yet envisioned as part of the new entity, should benefit from the presence of such a world-class provider.
Leading doctors will be attracted here. Business from out of state will stimulate other businesses and services in the surrounding community. Research and grant money, along with patients seeking high-end medical services, will start to flow into rather than out of our state. A business entity already the state’s largest private employer will be empowered to grow even more, attracting high-paying jobs, stimulating the educational system to train workers, and ushering in an economic explosion not seen in Rhode Island perhaps since the Industrial Revolution.
Of all stakeholders, the business community, for so long powerless to control a business cost central to its profitability, should welcome such a change.
Because, despite occasionally concerted but seldom-sustained efforts, business has been an ineffective catalyst of health reform, easily neutralized by payers whose interests are clearly in the status quo.
The public sector lacks the vision, leadership and political will to impose meaningful change. The myriad advocacy groups lack consensus or a uniform message.
That leaves the providers, almost by default, to take their turn in this game of lead, follow or get out of the way. Lifespan and Care New England seem to have the financial resources to go with the vision, leadership and strength of management necessary to carry the day. We should give them their chance. •
Ted Almon is president and CEO of The Claflin Co., a medical equipment supplier, and is an active participant in the health-care reform debate in Rhode Island.
