Yesterday, I wrote a post about the effort from Newt Gingrich and Nancy Desmond and the Center for Health Transformation to offer an alternative to Barack Obama’s health-care reform proposals, focusing on eliminating waste and fraud and finding a system of implementing best practices.  In my post, I criticized a couple of their arguments.  Today, Nancy Desmond responded to my concerns, and I’m happy to post her reply in full.
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Ed,

Thanks for drawing attention to the work of Newt and the Center for Health Transformation in your recent post on Hot Air. I hope you will allow me to correct a few points.

The “safe harbor” plan CHT is proposing would not rely on best practice standards set by “elites in Washington” as you put it, but instead by the standards that national medical specialty associations have already set. We strongly believe that physicians – not bureaucrats – should be setting best practices for other physicians. This litigation safe harbor would dramatically reduce the problem of defensive medicine which costs over $100 billion annually.

Second, while it is true that many doctors and hospitals have adopted electronic medical records, many more have not, including the vast majority of those who accept most Medicaid and Medicare patients. If these hospitals were electronic, the data could be much more easily analyzed for irregularities, much like the way credit card companies detect fraud. The amount of fraud in healthcare is at least 100 times that in the credit card industry, at least 10 percent annually (both industries exceed $2 trillion annually and involve millions of vendors and virtually countless items for purchase). It is $100 billion in Medicare and Medicaid alone.

Finally, on the issue of “wiser spending” on federal research, we couldn’t agree more. A major plank in our Alzheimer’s project is a change in the way science investment is scored and approached on Capitol Hill to take into account future cost savings and a clearer sense of national priorities in the way research grants are awarded.

I invite you and your readers to learn more at www.healthtransformation.net.

Sincerely,

Nancy Desmond

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I don’t think we’re really that far apart.  I’m still troubled by the “safe harbor” approach if it rests on a government-approved panel of experts, or even a government-recognized panel for official purposes.  It will still tend to force doctors to protect themselves by taking a one-size-fits-all approach to treatment, which is already a component of insurance policy.  However, I strongly encourage people to read the CHT proposal in detail and decide for themselves — and it’s certainly better than what Congress is likely to produce.