With atypically little fanfare, the Disease Management Care Blog gazes into the crystal ball and offers ten health care predictions for 2012:1. After Mitt Romney secures the Republican nomination for President, he and Mr. Obama will mutually try to find ways to avoid debating the issue of health care reform. Both will calculate that there’s little advantage to reminding voters of the messes they’ve made.
2. As a result of 1 above, the election will not hinge on health care reform, which, thanks to an improving economy, will otherwise be very close and not be a referendum on Obamacare.
3. Yet, the U.S. Supreme Court will stir things up with a ruling that the Affordable Care Act mandate is unconstitutional because, among other reasons, Congress should have used its power to tax, not impose a penalty.
4. There will be no generalizable and published peer reviewed studies on the Patient Centered Medical Home or the electronic health record that conclusively demonstrate that either reduces health care costs.
5. Even though CMS will have trouble providing timely claims data feeds to its newly established ACOs, we’ll hear little about it in the public domain. ACOs have every incentive to not cross CMS.
6. Speaking of ACOs, the least recognized Achilles heel as they start up will be a pervasive physician culture that trumps patient preference over shared savings.
7. We will learn that, thanks to their complexity, the deadlines for implementation of health information exchanges will need to be pushed back.
8. Congress will "kick the can" of the Sustainable Growth Rate conundrum down the road and past the 2012 election with another temporary patch.
9. More academic medical center faculty will find that it’s far more professionally rewarding to post on line than to publish in paper-based journals. Department Chairs will reluctantly find ways to use web statistics in promotion and tenure.
10. Piqued by Mr. Obama's recent recess appointments, the Republicans will respond by holding the up the appointment of Ms. Tavenner as CMS Administrator.
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2 comments:
what do you get if you're correct on all of them?
the only one i quibble with (in 2012, at least) is that academic chairs will recognize and promote based on web traffic, impact, etc.
talk about hidebound, diehard, traditionalist, conservative, static environments--you've hit it. but let's hope you're right about that one at some point!
-GH
p.s. you neglected perhaps the most obvious prediction: Obama or Romney?
and what of Biden vs. Clinton?
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