Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar called President Trump a “man of courage and vision” who won’t be afraid to disrupt the healthcare system.
“Today, we have a president who is unafraid to drive the disruption we need,” Azar said at the World Health Care Congress in Washington, D.C. “President Trump is a man of courage and vision. He has seen and heard how the high cost of healthcare is burdening so many Americans; he understands that our system too often fails to deliver value; and he has given us a mandate to do something about it.”
Azar focused his talk on ways to increase healthcare quality and bring about better value, including through electronic health records, through allowing patients to understand what their medical care will cost, reducing government regulations and developing Medicare and Medicaid programs.
“The time has simply come,” Azar said. “The status quo cannot hold. The way we do business in American healthcare, from insurance and IT to drug pricing and patient billing, must change.”
Azar has said since taking the helm of HHS in January that the agency would face several priorities, including a shift to “value-based care,” which is an approach to providing healthcare services that focuses on reimbursing medical providers based on how healthy patients become as a result of care, rather than how much medical care is delivered. It was also a focus for the Obama administration and the George W. Bush administration.
During his speech Wednesday, Azar said that delivering care this way would result in “better, cheaper healthcare for the people we serve, and it will support the next generation of cures to diseases once considered terminal.”
Azar shared a story about his own medical care, in which he had a high-deductible plan and faced a price of more than $3,500 for receiving a heart stress test in a hospital. He researched how much it would cost at a doctor’s office, and learned that it would have cost $550.
“The problem is not just that patients shouldn’t have to put up with being so powerless,” he said. “It’s also that, if we do empower them with useful information, they’ll probably get the test where it’s available for $550. Even if I hadn’t been on the hook for that test, imagine the savings that would have accrued to the entire system if I could have easily found out where to get it cheapest.”
