Secretary of Health and Human Services


The

Michael Leavitt

United States doesn't have a health care system, but it needs one, Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt told members of the Public Sector HealthCare Roundtable on Nov. 28.

The country's network of insurers and providers is so disparate that it cannot accurately be called a system, Leavitt explained during the keynote address at the Roundtable's second annual conference.

"What we have is a large, robust, rapidly growing health care sector," Leavitt said. "This disconnected sector needs to be molded into a connected system."

Leavitt drew an analogy to cell phones, banks and airlines, industries in which different companies compete for customers, but use the same systems. If this is to happen with health care - and it must, he said, if quality is to be improved and costs reined in - national consistency must be established in four areas: 1) electronic records; 2) standards of quality; 3) pricing information; and 4) incentives that reward good performance. President Bush issued an executive order in August directing federal agencies to make progress in these areas.

"The federal government does not just want to play here, it wants to be a leader," Leavitt said, noting that Washington accounts for about 40 percent of the nation's health care spending and could set an example for both the private and public sector.

Leavitt stressed that health care reform is only likely to occur if "the market itself begins to organize," and suggested that the improved efficiency that would result from digitizing records, establishing quality standards, making prices more transparent and tying payments to performance would reduce the number of uninsured Americans.

"There ought to be a national obsession with ensuring that every person in the country has access to affordable, quality health insurance," he said. "The money is in the system. We just don't have the system distributing it in the right way."

To this end, Leavitt asked members of the Roundtable to pursue the four goals, particularly when issuing contracts.

"There is no national health care market," Leavitt said. "There is a network of local markets. This has to happen one market at a time. ... I believe we'll soon see more than 60 percent of the marketplace saying to potential vendors, suppliers and service providers, 'These four big things are important to us.'"