America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), a trade association and lobbying group for the insurance companies, launches its annual conference AHIP Institute at the San Diego Convention Center Wednesday. Healthcare reform and healthcare IT are expected to be center stage. Outside, expect protestors for the second year running.
The political blog Daily Kos is putting out the word that there are opportunities to join nurses protesting the insurance industry Thursday from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. outside the convention center.
Protesters from the California Nurses Association and allied groups are expected to rally for a single payer plan. The nurses and other protesters of the for-profit insurance industry marched at AHIP's annual meeting in San Francisco last year, calling for a single payer system.
For its part, AHIP opposes a single-payer system. However, the organization is on record as supporting healthcare reform - and for advocating the increased use of healthcare information technology to achieve better patient care and cost savings.
AHIP, joined with five other lobbying groups, including the American Hospital Association and the American Medical Association, last month to pledge aid in achieving President Obama's goal of reducing the rate of growth in healthcare spending by 1.5 percent a year to achieve the $2 trillion in savings over a decade.
Industry observers view AHIP's cooperation on healthcare reform as designed to stave off a public health plan. But the group, which opposed reform in the 1990s, says it is committed this time around.
"Our message is clear: The private sector will do its part to bend the healthcare cost curve," AHIP President Karen Ignagni said at a meeting with President Obama on May 11. "We are initiating the reforms needed to make healthcare more affordable for families and employers and to put our healthcare system on a sustainable path."
On June 1, the groups sent a letter to president Obama reaffirming their commitment and offering some details.
Each group has identified changes in its sector that will reduce costs, strengthen quality and improve access to care through the following key areas:
- Utilization of care: Providing clinicians and other providers with the tools to address utilization and to improve quality and safety will help ensure that patients receive the right care at the right time in the right setting and will lower costs.
- Cost of doing business: Innovative approaches to reducing the growing costs of providing healthcare services are essential and will benefit all stakeholders in the health care system.
- Administrative simplification: Streamlining the claims processing system will allow clinicians and other personnel to spend less time and fewer resources on paperwork, lowering costs for everyone.
- Chronic care: We are identifying significant opportunities to better manage chronic disease, which accounts for 75 percent of overall health care spending. We are also looking at more effective approaches to health promotion and disease prevention, with a special focus on obesity.
Photo by Patty Enrado.
