Heath Care – New York Times

Long, but interesting, piece in the Sunday Times about the history of how we got to the point of companies providing healthcare. No, and it’s not an article calling for a single-payer system (nor am I advocating that).

One tidbit on how far we’ve come in healthcare:

The first calls to create what we now know as universal health care date back to the early 20th century. Before then, medical care was generally cheap because it was, for the most part, ineffective. As one scientist put it, “It was around 1910 or 1912 when it became possible to say that a random patient with a random disease consulting a random doctor stood better than a 50-50 chance of benefiting from the encounter.”

That’s a pretty high process defect rate! Things have gotten much better, but we still have a long way to go with preventing healthcare delivery errors.

So how did we get the rise of industrial/company-provided healthcare?

And during World War II, when the government exempted fringe benefits from its strict controls on wages, employers started offering ever more generous health benefits in order to attract workers. Another government decision — to exempt group health insurance premiums from personal income taxes — made health insurance an even more attractive option for business to offer. This effectively made a dollar of insurance worth more than a dollar of income, giving companies an easy way to cement worker loyalty.

But as this developed in the auto industry:

former Chrysler C.E.O. Lee Iacocca was warning about health care’s impact back in the 1980s — the problem had magnified over the years. Uwe Reinhardt, a Princeton economist, has described the Big Three automakers as “a social insurance system that sells cars to finance itself.”

All of this is a huge distraction from taking care of the customer, I might suppose. Companies should be able to focus more on their direct “value added” activities. Every minute spent talking about or worrying about the rising cost of employee benefits is a minute not spent on taking care of customers or innovating/kaizening core business activities. It certainly provides a distracting excuse for the automakers, then and now. If we had a “level playing field” healthcare wise, what excuse would be used for the gap between Toyota and the Detroit Three?

About LeanBlog.org: Mark Graban is a consultant, author, and speaker in the “lean healthcare” methodology, focused on improving quality and patient safety, improving access, reducing costs, and fully engaging healthcare professionals. He is also the Chief Improvement Officer for KaiNexus.

Tagged as: Detroit Three, Healthcare, NYTimes