Gov. Philip Bredesen in conversation with David Lazarus

Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 7:45 AM (PT)

Pasadena, CA

Philip Bredesen
Former Democratic Governor of Tennessee

David Lazarus
Business and Consumer Columnist for the Los Angeles Times

Thursday, February 24, 2011

FRESH MEDICINE:
HOW TO FIX, REFORM AND BUILD A SUSTAINABLE HEALTHCARE SYSTEM

Philip Bredesen in conversation with David Lazarus

Philip Bredesen is the former Democratic governor of Tennessee. Before being elected governor in 2002, and reelected in 2006, he was mayor of Nashville, and prior to that the founder and CEO of HealthAmerica Corporation, a public managed care company. Bredesen graduated from Harvard in 1967 with a bachelor’s degree in physics.

After decades of failed attempts and a year of bitter partisan debate, President Obama and Congress signed legislation to overhaul the nation’s health care system in March 2010. One of the most important pieces of legislation to pass in recent history, and also one of the most divisive, The Affordable Care Act intends to expand access to medical insurance to more than thirty million additional Americans. Republicans voted unanimously against the bill in both the House and Senate, and it was a key issue in the 2010 midterm elections., and there are efforts underway to repeal the legislation.

In Fresh Medicine, Bredesen opens with a critical and disarming examination of the new reform. He cites the addition of more than 30 million more people into an obsolete broken system as critical to its failure, and suggests little has been done to address underlying problems. Rather than providing real solutions, he argues that Congress and the Obama Administration are simply adding layers of bureaucracy and complexity to an already failing system. He maintains that a basic level of health care should be a universal right for all citizens and that without dealing with the tough problems—cost, sustainability, and quality—true reform will continue to elude us.

He lays out an entirely new vision for how a modern, uniquely American health care system could work and the path to take us there. Building on the successful model of the Social Security system, Bredesen suggests a “Group Health Plan for America,” a universal, federally financed, privately-delivered and fiscally sound health care system paid for in part by a payroll tax. Through the initiation of a simple framework in which citizens are armed with health care vouchers and a system of audited care is in place to receive them, the tension between money spent and the quality of care received will balance itself out. He maintains that Americans simply pay too much for health care and that economic tensions between buyers and sellers must be reintroduced to create a viable marketplace.

Bredesen suggests that building on the simplicity of the Social Security model will render the enormous bureaucracy regulating levels of assistance obsolete: Those with lower income would automatically pay less; those with higher paychecks would in turn pay more. “The entire Medicaid program and its vast apparatus simply disappears… The employment process and the monitoring apparatus is already in place. There are no more uninsured Americans so the whole system of supplemental payments to providers to compensate them for unpaid care—diminished but far from eliminated by the Affordable Care Act—is no longer needed.” In addition to the economic initiatives, Bredesen suggests taking a formal approach to ensure the quality of health care—defining practice standards and auditing compliance.

David Lazarus is business and consumer columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He joined the paper in August 2007. He is also a frequent substitute host on both AirTalk with Larry Mantle and also the Patt Morrison Show on KPCC. Before joining the LA Times staff in 2007, Lazarus worked as a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and a nightly talk radio host for San Francisco’s KGO Radio. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley. He interviewed Jane Bryant Quinn at the Drucker Business Forum last season. Here’s the video from that event.

Breakfast: 7:45-8:30am
Forum: 8:30-9:30am followed by book signing

KPCC Crawford Family Forum
474 South Raymond Avenue
Pasadena, CA

Tickets: $20, $35 includes book
Purchase Tickets
Drucker Alumni and Students register here.

The Drucker Business Forum is produced by The Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. The series is co-presented by KPCC.

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