Health Care Not Just A Cost -- It's Creating Detroit Jobs
By Matt Roush
Health care isn't just a high cost of doing business or a contentious national political issue.
It's also a key part of the economic development future of metro Detroit, according to Friday morning's final installment of the Pancakes and Politics breakfast series for the program year.
In fact, the Detroit Medical Center is hiring 200 people a month, president and CEO Mike Duggan told a capacity crowd of 350 people at the Detroit Athletic Club.
"With all the gloom and doom in the media, we're just going about our business hiring more people," Duggan said of himself and other panelists, Patricia Maryland, president and CEO of St. John Providence Health System, Ora Hirsch Pescovitz, CEO of the University of Michigan Health System and Nancy Schlichting, president and CEO of Henry Ford Health System.
Schlichting said Michigan has not recognized the life sciences as the economic development engine it can be as much as other states she's worked in. And Maryland said Michigan needs to use life science-based economic development to keep the medical talent Michigan's universities are generating, and needs to do more ot train displaced automotive workers in health care careers.
However, Kevin Klobucar, president and CEO of Blue Care Network of Michigan, offered an inconvenient truth: "The great thing is, we're creating jobs. The bad thing is, the percentage of our GDP going to health care is growing at an unsustainable rate."
Klobucar said he thought there were "a lot of bad things" in the recently passed national health care bill but nonetheless thought of it mostly as "a good thing" -- as the first domino, the initial movement to overcome the inertia of a broken system, moving it in a better direction.
And Duggan said the only thing that wouldn't work was leaving the system alone. "I think in five years this is going to be viewed as one of the greatest things we ever did," he said of health reform. "The system as it is now is crazy. If we admit you with pneumonia, we get a flat payment no matter how long it takes to make you better. But your doctor is paid more the longer you stay in." Health care reform changes that, moving the system toward paying the system for keeping patients well.
"Does it look really scary right now? Yeah it does," Duggan said. "But the way things were before was nuts."
In fact, Duggan said that Lansing should have the visionary leadership to take advantage of federal incentives to move universal health care access up sooner than its currently scheduled date of Jan. 1, 2014. There are billions in incentives to move that date up to Jan. 1, 2011, Duggan said -- and in a state where a lot of people are hurting, out of work and without insurance, those federal incentives could make a huge difference.
Panelists agreed that access to health care was a major problem in the system, along with the inappropriate use of emergency rooms as primary care centers.
Maryland also said that "when you think about how much money we're spending on chronic disease, the costs associated with complications from chronic disease are 80 percent of our health care spending. We need to get a better handle on the front end and really stress to people the importance of healthy lifestyles." She said the American Heart Association offers recipes to make traditional African-American fare healthier (to which Duggan quipped, "I know some Irish who like those same foods.").
Racial disparities in health status and care access also came up as a major problem for the region.
Panelists also praised the buyout of the DMC by Vanguard Health Systems, a privately held for-profit hospital chain based in Nashville, Tenn. Duggan said it was the only way the DMC could raise money for needed renovations. Schlichting noted that "it would be a disaster for the community if the DMC ceased to exist, and frankly it would also be a disaster for us."
In terms of health care as an economic development tool, Pescovitz said UM's purchase of Pfizer's huge research campus in Ann Arbor is a natural spot for more public-private partnerships to create more health care companies, and Duggan and Schlichting said work is under way on an economic development plan to bring 15,000 new residents to the Midtown area of Detroit.
Schlichting also said an example of using health care for both economic development and social good was Henry Ford's "early college" program for at-risk students, in which students take a five-year high school program instead of four -- and at the end get a high school diploma, an associate's degree in a health care specialty, and a job at Henry Ford Health Systems.
"These are meaningful jobs with good benefits and hopefully a chance to live in the city of Detroit," Schlichting said.
As for electronic health records, both Duggan and Schlichting said the system still has a long way to go.
"Ultimately this has to be a national health information exchange, because so many of our patients are in other states part of the year," Schlichting said. "This needs to be established in national health care reform."
Added Duggan: "Most hospitals today aren't even electronic within the hospital. We are, 100 percent, but before you can exchange data, you need data to exchange between everyone."
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