HealthCare Summit

To revive the stalled Healthcare Reform bill, President last week announced a white house summit where he invited leaders from both the parties to join him in a televised session so that they can look at all the best ideas out there and move the process forward.

I suggest anyone looking to participate in the summit should first read A Wasted Opportunity, an interview with Angela Braly, CEO and President of WellPoint, nations largest commercial health insurer.

There are couple of points in the article summit participants might want to focus on. First is that Government mandates have costs and have unintended consequences. For example if you want to mandate "guaranteed issue" so that health insurance can not be denied for a preexisting condition, there has to be meaningful requirements for everybody to buy health insurance. Otherwise people will not buy insurance until they are sick. As she says in the interview, if you can call on your way to the hospital and get coverage, it is not insurance anymore. This increases insurance cost and reduces coverage. For a 20 something old, it is almost four times more expensive to buy health insurance in New York State than in Indiana and the main reason is mandated regulations.

Second point she makes is that to stem the tide of rising cost, we have to "reintroduce the consumer to the healthcare equation". Patients will make more cost-conscious decisions if they have the incentives and the tools—namely, the information about cost and quality that is the basis of any ordinary market. I firmly believe in this and this is really the mission of my company hCentive. Our goal is to ensure that health care dollars go as far as possible by helping consumers make right financial decision with respect to their health. It will be one place consumers will come to when they are looking for the best health insurance plan, quality and cost information about the test or procedure they are about to undergo, help reconciling their medical bills and much more.

Cost of healthcare will come down by innovations like this coming out of the private sectors and not thru mandates coming out of Washington.