by Gregg A. Masters, MPH
First in a series of lessons NOT learned tweets to be enhanced and re-posted to @ACOwatch.
In the 80s Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Kenneth Abramowitz predicted for-profit hospital systems would dominate the market by 2000. One of the strategy ‘diversification arrows‘ in the quiver of hospital system executives was to enter the insurance market via managed care strategies of various strains. During this consideration phase, my then employer American Medical International (AMI) elected (against my counsel) to build its own insurance company dubbed ‘AMICARE’ vs. creatively ‘parter’ with the insurance sector. /1
Editors Note: See: ‘SuperMeds Hoping to Reshape System‘ by colleague Michael Millenson.
/2 Context: Abramowitz predicted the relative competitive under-performance of 501c3 hospitals & thus their parents. Too clunky and with the wrong governance structure they’d be swarmed by their more nimble for profit operators with easier access to the capital markets required to support a full range of acute care services.
/3 Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) (follow @HCAhealthcare), National Medical Enterprises (NME) & AMI (merged into @tenethealth) dominated the emerging for-profit sector. Humana was actively repositioning itself from a hospital owner/operator into a health insurance company with a robust portfolio of managed care products.
From major academic medical centers (see: ‘Corporate Takeover of Teaching Hospitals‘) to regional non-profits, c-suite strategists were aggressively courting their engagement given bond debt service coverage requirement concerns amidst an uncertain future.
/4 While all major systems where looking into ‘integration model 1.0’ (recently and cleverly rebranded as ‘pay-vidor’) the mission critical decision in board rooms was: ‘do we make, buy or lease’ the infrastructure? Some sensibly chose the ‘payor neutral’ route, while others built brands.
/5 As then ‘director health system development’ @ AMI California, and previously serving as founding member of Preferred Health Network (PHN) now portfolio company @UnitedHealthGrp post Pacificare acquisition, I counseled AMI to NOT build AMICARE, but partner with the ecosystem as a payor neutral aligned, managed delivery system.
/6 The theory was don’t compete with insurance companies but learn to partner and co-brand local market products from PPO to HMO to POS and ‘OWAs’ (other weird arrangements). Furthermore hospital operations & insurance company cultures were ‘oil and water’ and would not mix. More later (think pre @texashealth formation where Presbyterian Healthcare and Harris Methodist Health Services merged and the health plan leadership where shown the door while DFW market dominant Harris Methodist Health plan was shopped to Pacificare).
/7 Rather than ‘risk’ the payor neutral, lack of vertical integration control (the lessons forged at PHN) and what I advocated at AMI, most majors’ (including 501c3s) with some local market (operations & branding) variations chose to ‘build’ vs. partner. #wrong #move
/8 I digress. On the branding thing (another wrongly reasoned corporate brand extension decision), what’s wrong with the pictures above? At AMI I advocated that the product/service is the local market asset (a co-branded insurance product) and NOT an extension of corporate nameplate!
/9 I reasoned hospitals serve as ‘hubs’ of community trust (not too mention economic engines and potential integrators of the then dominant independent practice of medicine) & thus the assets to brand & market locally. A sensibly if not delicately calibrated blending of corporate vs. local market identity is more likely to create the goodwill & trust to build upon. Again I was over-ruled by corporate marketing gurus shopping a corporate branded nameplate. For example, all AMI hospital names were preceded by AMI, e.g., AMI Tarzana Regional Medical Center, AMI Irvine Medical Center, etc.
/10 There’s much more to the story here. This is just an install in the hospital/insurance dance we’ve witnessed in the 80s-00’s playing out today and in some respects completely oblivious to painful lessons of the past (think NorthWell Health’s strategic entry and rapid exit from provider sponsored health plan ownership due to massive losses).There’s a similar story on hospital/health system side (both branding and strategy), to be elaborated in a separate post.
/11 Concluding thread as follows. So what happened to those systems who elected the ‘build’ option? Massive losses & write-downs were reported with d/c operations posted to the balance sheets of public companies’. The gamble of assuming ‘insurance risk‘ was repelled as if the plague. Health plan or health insurance division employees were looked upon with suspicion. Welcome to FFS maximization era which reigned supreme until the recent round of re-engagement with managing the burden of the total costs of care (think triple aim) envisioned by various risk transfer provisions in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), where Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) serve as the principal – but not exclusive – workhorse.
Comments:
Hey @VinceKuraitis, please checkout thread 1 – 11 below. Would love your thoughts and commentary. c #ACOchat #phychat #hcldr #JPM19 @jpenso1 @DonCrane @Farzad_MD @bobkocher @DrShlain @sgschade @davidmuntz @RejuvalifeBH @NACOMSO @NicoleBradberry @drnic1
Gregg Masters MPH @2healthguru
Replying to @2healthguru @jpenso1 and 10 others
Nice thread. On point.
IMO the jury is back — high probability of failure/$$ loss. (Most) hospitals do not have expertise, culture, patience, scale to become successful health plans.
Newer model of hospital/health plan JV MUCH more promising, e.g., Aetna + Inova.
Replying to @VinceKuraitis @2healthguru and 11 others
It may be promising Vince but we’ve been studying this for several years and still dumbfounded by the shear amount of distrust between provider and payer.
Requires a degree of transparency that few are willing to abide
acowatch.me 