Healthcare Reform - Impact on Pharma Industry Pt.2

Our call today is the second in a series that inThought will be hosting for us on healthcare reform. Each call is designed to examine the different angle, and to expose a different perspective, a different elements of the debate. If you’ve been reading the headlines you’d know that healthcare reform is now being managed by a few on Capitol Hill and scrutinized by many. Reducing the growth of healthcare spending is a top priority of Congress and the Administration. But identifying specific feasible steps that can achieve this goal has proven difficult. Now while the political debate has focused on several contentious issues, policy experts agree that there are steps that can be taken to slow spending growth while building the high-value healthcare system that our country needs. One such step is embracing Comparative Effectiveness Research, which can help address a critical flaw in our current system, that being the lack of accountability for cost and results. Providers, patients, insurers, employers and governments all participate in the system with little incentive or often adverse financial consequences to improve quality or reduce overall costs. So, to improve value we all agreed that we need better information and tools. We’re joined today by Dr. Mark McClellan, who is the Director of the Engelberg Center for Healthcare Reform at Brookings, which is a broad based group of healthcare organizations, and health quality experts, who has kicked off a national effort to help improve the quality of US healthcare. Now for those of you who don’t know, Dr. McClellan is a medical doctor and an economist. He received his M.D. from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences And Technology and his P.h.D. in economics of MIT. He served as Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services.