Baucus and Grassley, What Is Wrong with This Picture?

As promised, the Senate Finance Committee will be diving head-first back into hearings and roundtables aimed at producing health care legislation by the summer.  Chairman Baucus and Ranking Member Grassley have sent out their first press release about a roundtable on improving the health care delivery system.  Before you get excited, I should warn you:  one-third of the speakers at that roundtable have ties to the insurance industry.  Awesome times.

The first roundtable is scheduled for April 21 and will focus on the delivery system.  As announced in the press release, they're hoping to get a conversation about "improving the quality and efficiency of care through establishing value-based purchasing programs and strengthening the role of primary care, better managing patients with chronic illnesses, facilitating the use of comparative effectiveness research and other tools that support evidence-based care, reducing hospital readmissions, reforming payments to private plans in Medicare, and increasing transparency and reducing fraud and abuse in federally financed health care programs.”

If you were selecting speakers in order to have a productive discussion, who would you invite?  Someone to speak for hospitals?  Yup, the CEO of the American Hospital Association.  Experts on evaluating quality, Health IT and health economics?  Sure, they have those.  A nurse?  Well, sort of – a former nurse and professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing anyway.  Doctors?  We have a surgeon for the specialist perspective and someone from the American College of Physicians for the primary care perspective.  Curiously, despite the fact that the VA has shown far more success managing patients with chronic diseases and comparative effectiveness research, as well as Health IT, no one from the VA will be present.  No one representing coordinated care – not even from the Mayo Clinic.  No one to talk about the medical home.  No patient advocates.  Only one “activist” group in the National Partnership for Women and Families (a great advocacy group, but hardly the first name you think of in the health care reform community.)

Every other speaker has a connection to private insurance.  There’s Dr. Allan M. Korn, Chief Medical Office for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.  There’s Roy Williams, CEO of Aetna.  There’s Glenn Hackbarth, who is currently chair of MedPac, the payment advisory committee tasked with analyzing cost and quality of care in Medicare.  What prepared Mr. Hackbrath for being able to advise Medicare on, say, how much we should pay the private plans that make up Medicare Advantage?  How about some time as an executive for Harvard Community Health Plan?  There’s also Dr. Glenn Steele, also with a background as a surgeon, who’s president of the Geisinger Health System in Danville, PA, a network of provider physicians and hospitals, complete with … yes, surprise, the Geisinger Health Plan, selling HMO and PPO products since the 1970s.

That’s four people out of a total of twelve speakers.  I understand the insurance industry is involved in these issues and so should be represented.  And yes, the largely non-profit Blue Cross Blue Shield might have a different perspective than the ridiculously profitable Aetna. But four?  Really?  In a roundtable focused on better managing patients, openness, transparency and with so many of the key players and ideas not represented, you found room for four men who could each give you the private insurance perspective?

What’s wrong with this picture, Senators?

*

Feel like giving them a piece of your mind?  Write both Senators right now!

(Photo credit:  essentialfabrication on Flickr.)