Denis Cortese, M.D., Mayo Clinic’s president and CEO, was featured in an extended interview last Sunday in the Commentary section of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune. Here’s an excerpt:
Q: THE HEALTH-CARE SYSTEM: CRISIS OR NOT?
A: To the extent that people say the system is broken, I would reject that as a too-simple thought. There is no system.
So let’s design one. The fatal problem that all of our people in Washington have — and many people have in the country: They’ve come to believe that the system is “broken.” That’s like saying, ‘I’ve got a broken car.’ And you’re going to go out and you’re going to fix it. And you go in the garage and you find out, ‘Oh, I forgot. I don’t have a car.’ You can’t fix something that doesn’t exist. Nobody ever designed this to be a system. Nobody’s ever sat down to say here’s where we want to be in the future. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to get across the message that we’ve got things that aren’t working. Yes, we have a catastrophe coming at us. It’s not a crisis yet. But it will be. It’s a crisis because we know it will be when Medicare hits. We’re going to go bankrupt. Medicare is orders of magnitude more of a significant financial problem for this country than Social Security is, and it’s coming in the next four, five years. Big-time, with all the people retiring. Seeing that and looking at it should be actually a releasing truth because we’re gonna have a major crisis, number one, and number two, we don’t have a system. We should say, OK, let’s go design a system. Let’s start from scratch and create one with a patient at the center.
Go here to read the interview in its entirety. And see the Star Tribune’s wrap-up of the 2008 National Symposium on Health Care Reform here.
