Hope for Health Care?; HHS's Leavitt Sees an Opportunity in New Orleans
On Tuesday afternoon Mike Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, made another of his frequent trips to New Orleans on a mission that speaks volumes about his approach to what is arguably the most important domestic policy job in the federal government.</br></br>In an interview hours before his departure, the former Utah governor told me that his purpose was to exchange ideas with local officials about how to make the hurricane-stricken city "a model of a new design for delivering health care in this country."</br></br>The urgency of the task -- not just for New Orleans but for the nation -- was underlined by a report that the journal Health Affairs issued as he left Washington. Its key finding: Health care, which now consumes 16 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product each year, will eat up 20 percent by 2015 -- a level that Leavitt said is "unsustainable without serious damage to our economy."</br></br>Steps such as the health savings accounts that President Bush has recommended, and others being discussed in Congress, can nibble at the problem, Leavitt says, but far more fundamental changes must be made if costs are to be brought under control without sacrificing quality care.</br></br>Leavitt is attacking the problem at two levels. At the top, he has assigned his department the task of developing, by the end of this year, national standards for four "breakthrough projects" applying 21st-century information technology to medical offices and hospitals. One would standardize systems for registering patients and listing their prescriptions and other basic medical data so they would not have to be entered on separate clipboards with each visit. A second would set standards for equipment allowing remote monitoring of chronic illnesses, such as the blood sugar tests required by diabetes patients.