Yesterday, I had opportunity to have dinner with Newt Gingrich. Granted, this was with about 60 other people, but I did have the opportunity to have an intimate conversation with him for about 15 minutes regarding health IT. This was after a full day at the CyncHealth Annual Meeting. Many people don’t recognize the fact that healthcare IT legislation was heavily sponsored by Gingrich and that the health exchanges that we have today are greatly due to his efforts. You can read about his bipartisan efforts on health exchanges and all about the former speaker’s life on Wikipedia.
However, this post is not about healthcare exchanges or Gingrich’s political past. The former will be discussed in a later post. This post is about what Gingrich had to say regarding healthcare legislation overall. He made the point that, for the most part, legislators want to stay away from healthcare. It’s an incredibly complex topic, with constituents that all have a different interests. Simply understanding the system is a challenge, and he made the point that one specific perturbation will frequently create a butterfly effect across the entire system.
Gingrich essentially made the case that touching any element of healthcare is basically a political lightning rod. It used to be that agitating the system would result in the AMA becoming an active force against the politician. Today, it is the fear of hospitals and pharma. He pointed to the recent lack of support for a bill to lower prescription drug costs. From his perspective, representatives would rather suffer the ire of Nancy Pelosi than that of the pharmaceutical industry.
The former speaker’s comments gave me pause and a profound understanding of why change in healthcare is so hard from a legislative perspective. He provided his opinion that for real change to happen, it needs to be spurred at the “customer” level. The questions are “who is the customer?” and “what voice do they have?” Gingrich recognized the complexity of the current payor/patient relationship, but ultimately advocated for change in healthcare directed directly by patients. His commentary was pointed and polar on a variety of topics during his time the podium, and his passion for change in healthcare is through a “grassroots” effort. It appears his perspective is that a consumer driven approach is the only way to successful change in healthcare in today’s environment as he appears to feel politicians do not have the will to intervene.