By Todd Feathers, News Correspondent
Graduate students in the Bouve College of Health Sciences and the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy were recently selected by the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) to help conduct research on the nation’s health care workforce and provide recommendations to help reduce health care costs.
Carole Kenner, dean of the School of Nursing, and Barry Bluestone, dean of the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, are among the health care professionals and economic policy experts chosen to spearhead the study by the BPC, a Washington, D.C. based non-profit organization.
The study will focus on finding ways to improve the quality of the nation’s health care system without increasing the cost for states, many of whom are facing large budget deficits and trying to reduce spending.
“Health care cost, more than any other cost, is blowing up local budgets, state budgets, the federal budgets and private health insurance premiums,” Bluestone said. “Cost containment will be critical or we will soon be spending a quarter of our entire national income just on health care.”
Bluestone and a team of graduate students are developing an economic model designed to determine the cost and viability of implementing the changes Kenner and the other health care professionals will suggest.
“What this [model] will do is to be able to estimate where, essentially, we can get the biggest bang for the buck, where will we get the greatest savings,” Bluestone said.
Finding ways to reduce health care costs is only half of the study’s mission, however. Kenner and her colleagues will also research a variety of strategies to improve the quality of the nation’s health care workforce.
They will take a close look at ways to improve the education and training of health care professionals, such as making it easier for students at community colleges to continue their medical studies at four-year institutions.
Kenner said colleges should try to bring students from different health care tracts together into the same classrooms to increase communication and understanding between the various areas of study.
“Eventually you have to work as a health care team, so why not educate yourselves that way?” she said.
The researchers will also seek ways to create more health care jobs in rural areas, where the selection of services are more limited and the quality of care is often not as good as in cities.
“What we’ll recommend is aimed at providing a better distribution of care providers based on where the needs are, and hopefully, again, with an eye towards quality,” Kenner said.
As well as education and job creation, the task force will look at ways to cooperate with the health insurance industry in order to lower costs and improve care.
Kenner said one of the most important changes necessary is for health care professionals, lawmakers and insurance companies to focus more on promoting wellness. She said it will be far cheaper to educate people about healthy lifestyles than to treat them after they become obese or develop diabetes, and it would increase the quality of their lives.
The task force will also look at reforming malpractice laws, one of the largest contributors to the nation’s high health care costs. Kenner said they will consider capping how much money can be paid out in malpractice cases and reducing restrictions set by insurance companies on which tests doctors are allowed to run on patients.
“The doctors, in my view, are not in control of this any longer, it’s insurance companies and your Medicaid and Medicare rulings that dictate which tests can and can’t be done,” Kenner said.
She said in some cases patients are forced to pay out of their own pockets for tests their doctors believe should be done because their health insurance won’t cover them.
The researchers do not have a specific timeline yet, but said they will probably not present their findings and suggestions to the BPC until fall of 2012.
