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MARQUETTE - President-elect Barack Obama has vowed to reform the American health care system, and he's called on communities across the nation to help.
Marquette County answered that call on Wednesday morning at a community health care discussion organized by the Lake Superior Community Partnership.
About 40 representatives of local hospitals, physicians, insurance companies and businesses met at Marquette General Hospital to discuss problems with the current health care system and solutions.
"It's terrific, we need more of them," Rich Cooley, chief of staff at Bell Memorial Hospital, said of the meeting.
"The health care system is too complex for everyone, from patients to doctors to hospitals," he said.
Assisted by a moderator, the health care leaders discussed various problems and issues by answering a series of questions and filling out a survey before leaving the meeting.
Some parts of the current health care problem will be easy to fix, Cooley said, because "solutions are simple and everyone's in agreement." The system needs to be changed, he said.
Topics discussed included educating the public, especially children, to improve the level of preventive care Americans can receive. Preventive care targets chronic diseases like cancer, diabetes, heart disease and stroke, which account for more than two-thirds of all deaths. Reducing obesity in children would help to decrease the number of people suffering from those diseases in the future.
"You need to go through an intense marketing strategy," Cooley said. "People in America can sell products, we just don't sell preventative health care."
Also a major problem from a local standpoint was efficiency in the health care system. The most efficient health care system is one that emphasizes prevention, which is not the main focus of the current system.
The lack of efficiency is compounded by the bureaucracy inherent in the system. If the paperwork currently required of physicians was eliminated, Cooley said he would be able to see 25 percent more patients at the same cost.
However the health care system is reformed, attendees agreed that Americans need to keep some "skin in the game," a phrase that came up frequently during the discussion.
"Every individual person needs to have a stake in their own health care," Cooley said. "The cost needs to be borne by the patient to some extent, even if it's just a dollar. Something that costs is more highly valued than something that's free."
The information gathered at Wednesday's meeting will be sent in video and paper formats to Obama's administration to help organize and plan the reform, said Lindsay Hemmila, LSCP marketing specialist. Hemmila said it is important for smaller communities to voice their health care concerns because "smaller community needs differ from large communities," and hoped that the meeting would be a "spur" for hosting other discussions on health care in the area.
"The community really came together to support this," she said.
Attendee Vince Rose of insurance firm Employee Benefits Agency Inc. agreed.
"It brought various sides and perspectives together and outlined what the real issues are," he said.
