EP238: Who Will Be the Knights in Shining Armor Who Fix the American Health Care System? With Brian Klepper, PhD, From the Validation Institute

We have gotten ourselves into this pickle: Americans—all of us as taxpayers, as patients, as employees, as employers—spend exorbitantly for highly variable results. Great work, great health care in some areas by some great physicians and their teams, and then voluminous other areas rife with overtreatment, errors, abysmal chronic care management, predatory pricing by entities owned by private equity or with billing departments gone wild.

Who will be our knight in shining armor when it comes to fixing health care in the United States today? Will it be legislators? Will it be our current crop of large health care stakeholders? Will it be a self-proclaimed disrupter like Amazon or Haven Healthcare, that Amazon, Chase, and Berkshire Hathaway collaboration?

In this health care podcast I speak with Brian Klepper, PhD. Brian has opinions on these questions.

Spoiler alert: Some of the entities that Brian points to as intrinsic to the mission of fixing American health care are brokers who are not compensated in secret by insurance carriers. He also calls out primary care physicians and new primary care models as crucial.

If you’re looking for brokers of this kind, go to healthrosetta.org for a list of them. You could also listen to my podcast with David Contorno (EP186). On the primary care side of the equation, listen to my chat with Jed Constantz (EP209) and also the one with Alex Lickerman (EP184).

In case you haven’t heard of him, Brian is a health care analyst, commentator, and also an entrepreneur. He’s executive vice president at the Validation Institute, executive analyst and editor at the Health Value Institute, and principal of Healthcare Performance, Inc, a health care strategy and business development practice. He’s also principal of Worksite Health Advisors, a benefits consultancy. Formerly, Brian served as the CEO of the National Business Coalition on Health.

You can learn more at careandcost.com, by emailing bklepper@gmail.com, and by visiting validationinstitute.com.

Brian Klepper, PhD, is executive vice president of the Validation Institute, principal of Worksite Health Advisors, and a nationally prominent health care analyst and commentator. He speaks, writes, and advises extensively on high-performance health care, primary care clinics, and the management of clinical and financial risk.