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July 14, 2006
Late Night Thoughts on Cars and Healthcare
So it's nearly midnight here in Minneapolis St. Paul but my body's still on San Francisco's 10 o'clock news time and I can't stop thinking about GM CEO Rick Wagoner's congressional testimony today on C-SPAN.
I'm not usually a C-SPAN watcher, but he's an interesting guy and his company's problems are legion. So I was fascinated to see him give detailed testimony on healthcare. I mean, he was describing the impact in real dollars of having generic drugs in your HMO's formulary, citing stats about the relative cost of care in U.S. and non-U.S. locations, talking about the value of the data in the Medicare database as a potential goldmine to mine in search of best practices....
This is a blog, so let me be blunt. This is the CEO of General Motors. Not an HMO. Not of a genetics or pharma firm. Of a firm that's as old-school as you can get.
And when the CEO of one of the world's major manufacturing firms is educating Congress about formularies, you can bet your bottom dollar that employee healthcare is going to be issue number one soon.
Posted by davidkippen at July 14, 2006 02:48 AM
Comments
The thing is, GM isn't really a car manufacturer per se. They are a financial servics company first (if profitability is the measure of what a company really is) and secondly a manufacturer. And if you look at where the money flows in the manufacturing side, an astounding proportion of the payroll goes to paying benefits to retirees. The short of it is that GM probably has as much to do with the department of Health and Human Services as with Commerce or Transportation. In this regard their problems are not simply legion but unique. A good overview:
http://www.slate.com/id/2128363/
Though, to the larger point about healthcare, no question it is going to get worse before it gets better.
Posted by: Colin Kingsbury at July 27, 2006 03:39 PM