02/21/2008
Regence partners with Aspen Institute to promote health care stewardship
We have reached a critical point in the evolution of health care in this country. The system is obviously failing us. Today, all players in the industry—from providers to payers to patients—are engaging in an ever-louder public debate about how to heal health care.
That debate is growing even more heated as we get deeper into the 2008 presidential campaign. Many people have theories, proposals and promises. But what, among all the rhetoric, can we point to as the cause of the problem? If we pinpoint where the problem started, then, perhaps we can identify the cure.
That was the mission of the Aspen Institute when, in the fall of 2007, it launched the Aspen Health Stewardship Project. The project's goal: to reframe and broaden the national dialogue on health care reform leading up to the election and beyond. Consisting of a bipartisan group of leaders, the project is designed to shift the debate away from the symptoms of the broken system and onto root causes.
A major premise of the project is that it's not just the health care system, but our culture, that needs to change. We as consumers need to change how we think about health care and our role in it in order to change a system that grew from a now-outdated culture of control and entitlement.
Earlier this month, members of the project reconvened to unveil a set of principles they will use to gauge the many reform proposals being debated today. These principles are yet another crucial stage of the public discussion that, the Aspen Institute believes, can lead us to meaningful change.
Regence is honored to be a partner in the Aspen Health Stewardship Project. Regence President and CEO Mark Ganz co-chairs the project with Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey and founder of the Whitman Strategy Group; and Joe Hogan, president and CEO of GE Healthcare.
In addition to the co-chairs, the project features an advisory board of 10 people, including doctors, scholars, health policy experts and information technology leaders.
Read more about Mark Ganz's role on the Regence Web site. To learn more about the project, visit the Aspen Institute's Web site.
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