Doctors Thwarted in Improving Service, Abraham Verghese says in SF Chronicle

Abraham Verghese, a doctor and the author of Cutting for Stone, argues that doctors need to spend more time with their patients, but the system prevents them from doing so. He makes this point in a timely essay in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Verghese will discuss this and related topics in a speech to The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco August 12.

Visit Our New Health Care Resources Web Page

The Commonwealth Club has launched a new web page dedicated to covering health care from many angles.

Underwritten by the California HealthCare Foundation, the new page features information on upcoming Commonwealth Club health-care programs, audio and video of previous programs, a health & medicine news feed, and other online resources.

We'll be adding new features and resources to the page, so bookmark it today if you're interested in this country's health-care dialogue.

Visit the page directly, or go to our home page and select "Club Events" and then "Special Events" to find the page.

Christina Romer: Health Care Reform Is "Good Economic Policy"

Citing a series of benefits to the nation's businesses, public coffers and individual citizens, Christina Romer -- chair of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors -- made the case for tackling health-care reform.

Romer, speaking Monday, June 8, 2009, at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco, gave some backing to people who've been seeing some recovery from the nation's economic crisis, at least if one measures that by her workload. She said that in the first few months of her tenure in the Obama administration, she dealt with a number of crisis-related topics that were all in her professional comfort zone: banking, fiscal stimulus, recession. But after his first 100 days in office, Obama announced his intention to tackle health-care reform, which led Romer to come up to speed on health-care economics.

"I've gone from being a positive but somewhat passive advocate of health-care reform, to being a passionate advocate," she said of the experience.

She worked on a report that looked at the benefits and costs to the country of reforming -- or not reforming -- its health-care system. She said that by the year 2040, health-care expenditures could be as high as one-third of the nation's economy if the system isn't reformed. A failure to reform, she said, could result in stagnating take-home pay (as insurance premiums eat up an ever-larger share of income) and the number of uninsured could rise from an already-alarming 46 million to 72 million people.

But if the country can meet the president's goals of slowing the growth of health-care costs and expanding coverage to the uninsured, Romer said that significant amounts of money could be freed up for investment in other things, savings will increase (which could also result in lower interest rates), unemployment will drop, and and the inflation rate would be lower.

"Good health-care reform is good economic policy," she summarized.

You can read a copy of the report via a link on this post on the White House blog (yes, they have one, too). A critique of the report's approach from libertarian Michael Tanner of CATO Institute is here. Politico.com reports on the political give-and-take over the report.

What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation!

GM Loses Some Swagger

When General Motors Chairman Rick Wagoner visited the Commonwealth Club in May of last year, he spoke with uncommon boastfulness despite the fact the automaker was in severe dire straits even then. In a speech that mainly covered the company's foray into green technology, he said:

Over time we have a natural advantage by our experience here and our depth of technology, and we plan to win. We welcome the competition, but when I come back to see you in 10 years there may be other guys in, but we plan to be leading the parade in this area.

Famous last words?

The good news is GM's $30.9 billion loss last year was not the company's worst ever. That was 2007. While Wagoner visits Washington asking for as much as an additional $16 billion just to keep the assembly lines rolling, the aftermath of GM's possible demise is being felt outside our borders.

Reports today say GM is preparing to ask European countries such as Germany for over $4 billion in aid to keep its Opel brand operating. This comes a day after GM announced it would cut 1,600 jobs and furlough another 900 at a plant in Brazil.

The situation in the U.S. continues to be perilous for GM. Wagoner reportedly told the auto task force created by the Obama administration that GM would cut the company's brands to four and eliminate 47,000 jobs as a part of a vast restructuring plan. In addition, an agreement with the United Auto Workers over a contractually obligated $5 billion payment to the union's health-care trust has not come to pass.


Wagoner mentioned GM's health-care predicament during his Commonwealth Club address, arguing that it inhibited the company's growth. “I have long been outspoken on the fact that the health-care costs in the U.S. is significantly damaging the manufacturing competitiveness of this country and the competitiveness of our economy, and I continue to feel that is true,” he said.

The plight of General Motors with its corporate tentacles extending far from Detroit might be a prime example of how GM's decisions and its fate not only affect the streets of Flint, Michigan, but employees in small European towns and workers in auto plants in South America.

On Health Care: With GM, so goes the Nation?

American economic monoliths tend to steer the wheels of commerce by their sheer size and influence. A state like California can enact sweeping environmental laws that leads other states to do the same, and when a company like McDonald's acquiesces to posting nutritional information, others follow. As General Motors and the United Auto Workers iron out a deal involving its vaunted health care challenges, will its decision change how others do business and the debate due to commence in Washington?
As a part of GM's vast restructuring plan, the automaker is negotiating with the UAW to change the terms of the 2007 agreement that created a $35 billion trust fund for employee health care. To justify additional government bailout dollars, GM must show Washington details for future plans. The New York Times noted [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/business/economy/17auto.html], GM "has to address how a company that lost more than $20 billion last year can afford $5 billion a year in medical bills."
Matt Miller, whose book The Tyranny of Dead Ideas indentifies the role of companies paying for employee health care benefits as one of those mortally-wounded ideas. Instead, he believes the government should carry the burden like every other nation in the industrialized world. Miller spoke about his ideas at The Commonwealth Club of California last week (see photo; Miller is on right, posing with ABC7 anchor Dan Ashley, who moderated the event).
In his book, Miller writes:

The second force — The Rush for the Exits — is corporate America's desire to stop providing health care and pensions to its employees. To be sure, these costs are soaring in ways that seem unsustainable, especially when competing firms in other nations bear fewer of them. Still, American business leaders act today as if their search for an "exit strategy" on benefits is the end of the conversation. What happens to the millions of workers who are left unprotected if companies simply walk away?

Miller told [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100338745] NPR last month that the government would need to raise taxes to foot the bill, but with Baby Boomers retiring, taxes will increase anyway. "We need to tax ourselves more smartly ... [by] cutting taxes on things like payrolls, which hurt lower-income workers and kill jobs, and raising taxes on dirty energy, which we want to cut back on because of our environmental goals," said Miller.
The Obama administration may be signaling a willingness to allow GM to tinker with health care, according to statements made by his adviser David Axelrod and the naming of Ron Bloom as a key adviser to the Treasury Department. Bloom, according to the Wall Street Journal [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123483084725295657.html], is known for forcing parties to make significant concessions.
If GM is able to restructure its health-care responsibilities under the eyes of the White House, health-care reform critics and proponents alike will be wondering whether it could be the harbinger of the wholesale transfer of health care from private industry to the public sphere in the future.