Interview With Ron Pollack: Families USA
"I think health care has become the No. 1 domestic issue."
Ron Pollack is the founding executive director of Families USA, a national nonprofit, nonpartisan organization for health care consumers. Families USA's stated mission is to achieve high-quality, affordable health coverage for everyone in the U.S. In 1997, Pollack was appointed by President Clinton as the sole consumer representative on the Presidential Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry. In that capacity, Pollack helped prepare the Patients' Bill of Rights that has been enacted by many state legislatures. WebMD's Washington correspondent, Todd Zwillich, interviewed him on the state of the nation's health care and how the election might affect it.
How big an issue is health care to the nation?
I think health care has become the No. 1 domestic issue and will be treated as such during the elections. We've seen a real transformation of how this issue is being viewed by Americans. Universal health care used to be about altruism, but the debate has now changed. Now it's about self-interest for the public and for businesses. This is because costs are rising much faster than wages and companies' incomes. As a result, more and more people are at risk of becoming uninsured. And the number of people who've been affected is huge. A recent report from Families USA shows that nearly 90 million Americans do not have health coverage for a portion of the last two years. That number is enormous. It constitutes more than a third of the non-elderly population. As more and more people directly experience this problem, this issue is being transformed from one of altruism to one of self interest. People who have significant health problems are likely to bankrupt themselves. From a personal and political standpoint, this issue is becoming huge.
Is the health care system broken?
I would say that it's a disgracefully tiered system whereby those who are well insured and have significant resources are likely to get terrific care but many others are essentially excluded from getting the preventive and primary care they desperately need. For them, the system is broken. For others, they may be satisfied with the care that's available to them. If the standard is that we have an egregiously inequitable system of coverage and care, then I would say the system truly is broken. We have such enormous disparities in care, affordability, and coverage that it simply cannot be a system that we should be proud of.
What should we do to lower health care costs?
I don't think there's any single magic bullet. I do think one of the most important things we can do is make sure there is a far better understanding of the efficacy and efficiency of different kinds of health services, including prescription drugs, technological interventions, or other treatments. We then have to make sure that professionals and patients have a better understanding of what works and what doesn't work. This could help make sure providers are more prudent in what they prescribe and make consumers much more prudent in the care they seek.
How -- or should -- we try to cover the uninsured?
The U.S. Census Bureau reported in August that 47 million Americans lacked health insurance throughout 2006. But, as I mentioned before, if you look at who lacked insurance at any point over the last two years, the figure is more than 89 million. That's simply unacceptable. It's unconscionable for the richest country in the history of the planet to have so many people uninsured. I think this deserves to be the top priority in terms of health reform. But it can only be successfully addressed if we go about it differently than we have in the past. It has got to be a bipartisan effort, it has to gain consensus support of key stakeholders on all sides. To achieve that you can't rely on a method that is exclusively either in the public or private sector. There will have to be a mixture. Finding that consensus has the potential to change the political dynamic so we can once and for all successfully address this problem.
What should we do to make prescription drugs more affordable?
The 2003 Medicare legislation that launched Part D was an enormous opportunity to deal with fast-rising prescription drug costs. If that could be revisited so that Medicare truly bargains for lower prices, it could have a real impact not just for seniors, but for all patients. We need to find a way of objectively analyzing the cost-effectiveness of new drugs before they come to the market. We should continue to expand the use of lower-cost generic drugs and to do more to prevent the abuses that the drug companies use in the legal system to prevent generic drugs coming to market.
How important is prevention to any health care policy we pursue?
Prevention is very important because it improves people's health, and that's a worthy objective irrespective of its impact on cost. I don't know whether improved preventive care and improved responsibility on the part of individual will impact on costs. But insuring we have a healthier population that has the opportunity to live well and longer is something we should pursue.
Ron Pollack is the founding executive director of Families USA, a national nonprofit, nonpartisan organization for health care consumers. Families USA's stated mission is to achieve high-quality, affordable health coverage for everyone in the U.S. In 1997, Pollack was appointed by President Clinton as the sole consumer representative on the Presidential Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry. In that capacity, Pollack helped prepare the Patients' Bill of Rights that has been enacted by many state legislatures. WebMD's Washington correspondent, Todd Zwillich, interviewed him on the state of the nation's health care and how the election might affect it.How big an issue is health care to the nation?
I think health care has become the No. 1 domestic issue and will be treated as such during the elections. We've seen a real transformation of how this issue is being viewed by Americans. Universal health care used to be about altruism, but the debate has now changed. Now it's about self-interest for the public and for businesses. This is because costs are rising much faster than wages and companies' incomes. As a result, more and more people are at risk of becoming uninsured. And the number of people who've been affected is huge. A recent report from Families USA shows that nearly 90 million Americans do not have health coverage for a portion of the last two years. That number is enormous. It constitutes more than a third of the non-elderly population. As more and more people directly experience this problem, this issue is being transformed from one of altruism to one of self interest. People who have significant health problems are likely to bankrupt themselves. From a personal and political standpoint, this issue is becoming huge.
Is the health care system broken?
I would say that it's a disgracefully tiered system whereby those who are well insured and have significant resources are likely to get terrific care but many others are essentially excluded from getting the preventive and primary care they desperately need. For them, the system is broken. For others, they may be satisfied with the care that's available to them. If the standard is that we have an egregiously inequitable system of coverage and care, then I would say the system truly is broken. We have such enormous disparities in care, affordability, and coverage that it simply cannot be a system that we should be proud of.
What should we do to lower health care costs?
I don't think there's any single magic bullet. I do think one of the most important things we can do is make sure there is a far better understanding of the efficacy and efficiency of different kinds of health services, including prescription drugs, technological interventions, or other treatments. We then have to make sure that professionals and patients have a better understanding of what works and what doesn't work. This could help make sure providers are more prudent in what they prescribe and make consumers much more prudent in the care they seek.
How -- or should -- we try to cover the uninsured?
The U.S. Census Bureau reported in August that 47 million Americans lacked health insurance throughout 2006. But, as I mentioned before, if you look at who lacked insurance at any point over the last two years, the figure is more than 89 million. That's simply unacceptable. It's unconscionable for the richest country in the history of the planet to have so many people uninsured. I think this deserves to be the top priority in terms of health reform. But it can only be successfully addressed if we go about it differently than we have in the past. It has got to be a bipartisan effort, it has to gain consensus support of key stakeholders on all sides. To achieve that you can't rely on a method that is exclusively either in the public or private sector. There will have to be a mixture. Finding that consensus has the potential to change the political dynamic so we can once and for all successfully address this problem.
What should we do to make prescription drugs more affordable?
The 2003 Medicare legislation that launched Part D was an enormous opportunity to deal with fast-rising prescription drug costs. If that could be revisited so that Medicare truly bargains for lower prices, it could have a real impact not just for seniors, but for all patients. We need to find a way of objectively analyzing the cost-effectiveness of new drugs before they come to the market. We should continue to expand the use of lower-cost generic drugs and to do more to prevent the abuses that the drug companies use in the legal system to prevent generic drugs coming to market.
How important is prevention to any health care policy we pursue?
Prevention is very important because it improves people's health, and that's a worthy objective irrespective of its impact on cost. I don't know whether improved preventive care and improved responsibility on the part of individual will impact on costs. But insuring we have a healthier population that has the opportunity to live well and longer is something we should pursue.
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1 Comments:
It was discussed today in the press that those applying for insurance, found for the most part, initially, to have a diagnosis of cancer and then getting a denial of private insurance coverage. Likewise, those on Gov't funded Medicaid, among others, also have a higher diagnosis of initial cancer. This higher rate of initial cancer diagnosis in the unpreferred insurance programs, shows the lack of healthy-family preventative disease programs.
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