It’s far too early to predict what will happen in the 2009 health care reform debate but as has been pointed on blogs ranging from The Health Care Blog to the Wall Street Journal (both its Health Blog and its Politics channel), there are some signs that the process and strategy will be somewhat different than what transpired 1993-4.

Just to name a few… It appears that the effort will be led by former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. The president-elect has an email distribution list of more than 10 million activists. The country is even more aware of how it suffers from a costly delivery system (not to mention other problems). And a substantially greater portion of the employed population cannot get or cannot afford health insurance through their employers.

From the perspective of advancing the practice and science of information therapy (Ix), one of the major questions is what types of standards, oversight bodies, or other infrastructure will be built into proposed health care reform that could help drive an expectation of Ix delivery into the care delivery process?

Among the possibilities now being discussed is what Daschle, in his book “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis,” called a “Health Fed.”Modeled after the Federal Reserve that manages monetary policy and (at least theoretically) provides an infrastructure for stable financial services markets, Daschle hopes that a Health Fed can take some of the critical infrastructure development out of the politically charged environment in Congress.

Given the problems that a lack of Ix leads to (discussed on this blog numerous times–including everything from higher costs to greater mortality), there may be an opportunity to build Ix delivery into the expectations for how effective care is delivered in the future. Perhaps a Health Fed is a mechanism for embedding that expectation into care delivery.

In the near future, I’ll blog more about the range of issues it makes sense for a future Health Fed to tackle.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Health Care Reform, Inside the Beltway. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.