Health-care revolution needed, group says

DEER VALLEY — A reformation of the nation's health-care system is all fine and good, but a revolution is what it will take, say a group of top-tier executives, medical school administrators and leading academics who began a two-day summit here Monday.

Invoking a similar gathering at Alta in 1984 that gave birth to the human genome project, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael O. Leavitt put the task of "building a pathway of meaningful change" in the hands of the group Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. had summoned to Stein Eriksen Lodge.

"First of all, there is no system of health care in the United States," Leavitt told the group. If automobiles were purchased the way health care operates, a customer would go to a dealership, the care would be purchased with the help of a salesman, they'd drive off and about a month later the bills would start coming from all the different companies that made the parts.

"There would be one from the companies that built the chassis, made the tires, the steering system, the body, the paint and even the dealership who would be charging you for time you spent in the showroom," Leavitt said. "All charging what they think their product and labor is worth."

Citing first-hand experience as the top executive of Medicare, Leavitt said the health insurance plan for seniors paid for 255,000 hip replacements last year. "We know the number of procedures, but we have no idea of the outcome. Until we orient the system toward positive outcome of procedures and promoting wellness, we will remain incapacitated by a system that simply no longer works."

Both in model and practice, the U.S. style of health care is stuck in the 19th century, Leavitt said. It's a system frayed at the edges and torn at the seams, and no amount of reconditioning or clinging to how it's always been done will refurbish it into working order again, he said.

Leavitt has put $352 million of HHS funding and one of the country's best minds behind the project.

Clayton Christensen doesn't call what needs to happen in health care a revolution necessarily, but an "innovative disruption" is clearly in order, or what he calls a new era of "personalized health care" is the only way to get a handle on the "impossibly high" expense and rampant waste that is behind the most expensive, least effective system of health care on earth.

The approach has become a tried and proven model for other industries, Christensen said.