US Supreme Court Approval Of ObamaCare Will Institutionalize Universal Price Controls

If US Supreme Court does not dispose of ObamaCare in total, it will institutionalize universal price controls. Much is stated about how the individual mandate erases freedoms but conventional wisdom has ignored how decades of government price controls and regulations have erased health care provider freedom to innovate. Consequently, the nation has an inefficient and quality challenged health care delivery system masked by the suppliers of innovative technology and drugs. Who, if subjected to government mandated price controls "to control cost" may have achieved just a fraction of the innovation we take for granted today.

Price controls historically have cultivated poor quality, fraud, lost talent, shortages, surpluses, etc., and health care suffers them all. For example: a quality chasm was identified in the 1999 Institute of Medicare Report, and to this day, poor quality is still a cash cow as CMS uses savings from price ceilings to reimburse preventable medical errors (minus a few). When Intermountain Health System focused on preventing medical errors, it took a loss on every Medicare patient because CMS price ceilings underpay excellence. Price ceilings have caused a shortage crisis in primary care physicians. Plus, the limits in income contributes to the “less than stellar” medical school applicants in recent decades as the talented students choose price control-free careers. Price floors have resulted in overpayments to cardiologist (recently and painfully corrected) creating years of surpluses and waste. The same for CT scans because CMS’s pricing system is slow to respond to technological advances that lowered costs while increasing value. Just Medicare fraud approaches $150 billion annually and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services is clueless in how to lower the volume.

Yet, CMS an inefficient and quality challenged federal agency under ObamaCare will be tasked to implement universal price controls and hundreds of thousands of pages of regulation to coherce the nation's health care delivery system into something CMS can not achieve, an efficeint, quality driven system. Only a fool who would lie 39 times in his own biography would tell Americans this would work, which is why a system of universal price controls and regulations is called ObamaCare.

Decades of CMS underpaying excellence has made excellence a cultural misfit in the nation’s healthcare delivery system. And decades of CMS rewarding failure has filled the nation's quality chasm with a culture of failure that ObamaCare, if held constitutional, will put inefficiencies and poor patient outcomes on government steroids sending the nation's health care delivery system down the toilet that the US Supreme Court should be flushing ObamaCare down.

Effective Hospital Leadership Wellness Program Increases Patient and Financial Outcomes

Want to improve employee health? Make sure all levels of management exhibit robust leadership skills. A study of 3,100 men over a ten year period determined that individuals under a manager that is inconsiderate, opaque, uncommunicative, and a poor advocate were about 60% more likely to suffer a heart attack or other life-threatening cardiac conditions. Employees under a manager who was considerate, transparent, communicative, and a great advocate had 40% LESS chance of these problem. Poor leadership trumped work load and whether the employee smoked, exercised or had a weight problem which are the traditional focus of a hospital wellness program.

A second study of 4000 government bureaucrats found that cold-like symptoms where primarily caused by job-stress, dissatisfaction, and poor office relationships. These symptoms are also reflect poor leadership skills.

We know health care’s quality chasm is rooted in its leadership chasm where communication-breakdown is at epidemic levels, transparency is an orphan, being considerate is a political calculation and being a great advocate of other’s work is a selective process if it exist at all. Could dysfunctional leadership be why health care spending is 10% higher for hospital employees than it is for the general employee population?

Maybe a leadership wellness program with a top to bottom evaluation of which leaders inspire their employees to excellence and who demoralizes them to mediocrity could lead to healthier employees, patients and finances.