Today's Critcal Healthcare Issues

Josh Weston, Honorary Chairman of ADP and Chairman of the NJTV Board of Trustees, talks about healthcare issues facing our country today and the important changes needed to fix the system.

1/27/18 #126

Excerpt:

"Welcome to State of Affairs. I am Steve Adubato. Coming to you from the beautiful Agnes Varis NJTV Studio here in Newark, New Jersey. We are pleased to welcome Josh Weston, Honorary Chairman of ADP, and also the Chairman of NJTV's Board of Trustees to fully disclose. Good to see you Josh. Nice to be here Steve. Every time you're with us we talk about challenging, difficult issues, and you put out what you believe are some remedies. Let's go right to the healthcare crisis in this country. A lot of talk about replacing the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. Your biggest concern about that is? Well I don't think that's the biggest concern. Let me back up. Sure. What Obamacare and other conversations are about is who pays how much of the bill for healthcare? The real issue is the bill for healthcare. This country spends four trillion dollars a year on healthcare. To put it in perspective, that's $12,000 per person. That's about twice what countries in the Western world pay for their healthcare. And they live longer, and they're healthier. So we spend twice as much in order to be less healthy than countries in the Western world. That's the real issue. Not Obamacare, or Medicare, or Medicaid, or "Who's paying the bill?" If you want to know more, you have to ask me the next question. I will. So why is it so hard to have an honest conversation about what you just laid out as the real or bigger problem? Oh, it's a tough issue because it starts with how we handle healthcare. We are on a fee-for-service basis. You go to a doctor, he charges you a fee. You go to the hospital, they charge you a fee. Actually it's not a fee. In each case, using software that's peddled all over the place, they explode the so-called fee into various components, put a price on each component, which makes the total fee a lot higher if there was just a fee. Adding to that, when you are in a fee-for-service mode, whoever is providing the service, say a doctor, has an incentive to provide more service, more fees. Even if it's not necessary for the patient? Or if it's questionable, and make it even worse than that. There are a lot of good doctors in this country. Clearly. You go to see your doctor, your doctor is listening to you, and then doing his best, or her best. You probably visited some other doctors somewhere along the line. You probably had EKGs elsewhere. You probably had blood tests elsewhere. You probably had MRIs elsewhere. Josh, I feel like you're talking about me right now, but go ahead..."