What Does Aetna’s CEO Think About Healthcare?

Here is basically the whole article in Becker’s Hospital Review:

During a keynote discussion at a Financial Executives International conference in New York City Monday, Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini described healthcare as a “rat’s maze,” according to CFO.

Mr. Bertolini joined Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky in a conversation about healthcare’s shifting reimbursement landscape. Aetna’s executive spoke about his frustrations with the complexity of healthcare.

“They [physicians] refer you here; then you get a test, and you don’t know how much it costs; and then you get a bill 30 days later and it’s got all this gobbledygook,” Mr. Bertolini told attendees.

He added, “Every time I sign up for my healthcare, I have someone else do it for me, because I just can’t take it. It’s too hard. It’s too confusing. It’s got to be easier,” CFO reports.

Now, why is he saying this?  Foor one, he is a smug idiot but obviously, he has another motive.  Digging into that CFO link above I found this:

In separate keynote discussions at a Financial Executives International conference in New York City on Monday, Mark Bertolini, the CEO of Aetna, and Alex Gorsky, his counterpart at Johnson & Johnson, argued that a key to fixing the U.S. health-care system would be to move away from health-care providers being paid for each procedure, office visit, or test they perform. Instead, the providers would receive a single fee for an entire “episode” of medical care, with the fee varied according to the quality of service provided.

It gets better:

Gorsky said that to make the Affordable Care Act more sustainable, it might help to “move from a health-care system right now that’s predicated on reimbursement for a particular procedure to one that’s focused more on an outcome or an episode of care.”

I wonder if we should pay for J&J products depending on their outcome? Or how paying Aetna’s premium depending on the quality of service you get from them?   Service and outcomes are important for doctors, too, but only when it’s a true free market.  Not the crap we have now.  And all the quality metric attempts have FAILED!!

Once again we let the idiots in the government or insurance industry, who created this mess, try to fix it.  They created the gobblygook!  They created the rat’s maze!  Bertolini whines about lack of transparency but his company negotiates different deals with hospitals and drug companies causing that lack of transparency.  He is an unbelievable hypocrite and a quick scan shows this is not the first time for him.

There is a better way and that is the free market plus DPC.  We just need to keep the insurers away and let them be used only for catastrophic issues.

(Click here to sign up for your free bonus weekly newsletter.  No spam. Ever.)