This year has been a busy one for the issue of cost-containment in health care. When I am not caring for women with incontinence and prolapse, I am often engaged with friends, family and other health care stakeholders trying to describe and illuminate the hugely frustrating, inefficient, and misaligned relationship between delivering health care and how we pay for it. The voices of consumers and physicians have been somewhat muted in the conversations that surround the development of government policy designed to reform a system that almost everyone agrees is very broken – even if we don’t agree on how to fix it. The causes and effects are complex and the solutions nuanced. As in many areas of public policy, it is easy to scare your target audience with sound bites (e.g. “Death Panel”) and much harder to capture the salient issues for those who need to gain a balanced view of the fundamental forces that affect how health care is delivered and paid for in this country – which is all of us.
To try and bridge this gap and with the help of funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, two respected organizations in Boston - The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO), and Tufts Health Care Institute (THCI) - are jointly organizing and presenting a series of educational webinars for consumers on health care cost containment.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I volunteer for GBIO in the role of physician advisor to the Health Care Team.
This series of webinars (7 are planned) will address health care cost containment, provider payment reform, and related issues. The overall goal is to educate consumers about the health care system and strategies for improvement so that consumers can develop an informed voice and participate confidently in discussions of health care cost control with public and private stakeholders.
Each webinar is presented as a live online event, which is recorded and archived. The webinars feature an audio presentation by the faculty, accompanied by slides. Reference materials related to each webinar are also available for download.
Both can be found on the THCI/GBIO web pages at:
http://thci.org/GBIO/welcome.aspx
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