Summary

  • "The health care delivery system is really a community-based activity, and local health care markets have become the arena, rather than the national markets."—William Link, The Prudential Insurance Company of America
  • "We're concerned that if we overregulate what's already been created in various markets, we will essentially recreate just a different form of what we've always had, which is health care providers complying with a set of rules put in place by people who don't understand the delivery of care."—Dan Leach, Lutheran Medical Center
  • "Physicians basically want to do well. If we're given good clinically credible data, the physicians will modify their behavior in a heartbeat, but the incentives have to be there."—William Mohlenbrock, M.D., Iameter, Inc.
  • "We always understand that every year our subscribers can choose some other plan. That is the important dynamic that keeps us working hard at trying to provide cost-effective care without irritating our subscribers."—Harry Cain, Ph.D., Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association/li>
  • "Medical education should change in order to train physicians how to be gatekeepers. Not fiscal agents, but gatekeepers who are guides into a very complicated and intimidating health care delivery system."—Cynthia Hosay, Ph.D., The Segal Company
  • "It is critical that an independent watchdog maintain comparative cost and quality performance evaluations to keep alliances and health plans on their toes to best serve their memberships."—Clark Kerr, Bank of America
  • "While removing employers from the `loop' is vastly preferable to requiring them to be in it, the ideal solution is to allow employers to participate or not as circumstances demand."—William Dennis, National Federation of Independent Business
  • "If anything comes out of health reform, the most important thing has to be the disclosure of information. Information about quality should be passed along to the people who use the programs that they provide."—Charles Inlander, People's Medical Society
  • "If we are really concerned about improving health status and public health, then we need to think about integrated systems that look at chronic care, that take into account the role of prevention in public health as much as, or even more than, the need to integrate the acute care parts of the delivery system."—John Rother, American Association of Retired Persons