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Strategy: What If Health Care Costs Go Down?

The telegraph will generate millions of jobs.

In the early 1990s, call centers were popping up around the United States like mushrooms on a dewy morning. Companies invested millions of dollars to improve customer service via well-trained, professional operators in automated centers. Several prognosticators suggested that the segment was growing so quickly that every man, woman, and child in the United States would be working in a call center by, oh say, 2010.

Of course, it didn’t happen. The Internet arrived and millions of customers chose to serve themselves. Telecommunication costs plummeted and many companies moved their call centers offshore. Call centers are still important but not nearly as pervasive in the United States as they were projected to be.

Now we’re faced with similar projections for health care costs. If current trends continue, prognosticators say, health care will consume an ever increasing portion of the American budget until everything simply falls apart. Given our experience with other “obvious trends”, I think it behooves us to ask the opposite question, what if health care costs go down?

Why would health care costs go down?  Simply put — we may just cure a few diseases.

Why am I optimistic about potential cures? Because we’re making progress on many different fronts. For instance, what if obesity isn’t a social/cultural issue but a bacteriological issue? That’s the upshot of a recent article published in The ISME Journal. To quote: “Gram-negative opportunistic pathogens in the gut may be pivotal in obesity…” (For the original article, click here. For a summary in layman’s terms, click here). In other words, having the wrong bacteria in your gut could make you fat. Neutralizing those bacteria could slim down the whole country and reduce our health care costs dramatically.

And what about cancer? Apparently, we’re learning how to “persuade” cancer cells to kill themselves. I’ve spotted several articles on this — click here, herehere, here, and here for samples. Researchers hope that training cancer cells to commit suicide could cure many cancers in one fell swoop rather than trying to knock them off one at a time.

Of course, I’m not a medical doctor and it’s exceedingly hard to predict whether or when these findings might be transformed into real solutions. But I am old enough to know that “obvious predictions” often turn out to be dead wrong. In the late 1980s, experts predicted that our crime rate would spike to new highs in the 1990s. Instead, it did exactly the opposite. Similarly, we expected Japan to dominate the world economy. That didn’t happen either. We expected call centers to dominate the labor market. Instead, demand shifted to the Internet.

In the case of health care, it’s hard to make specific predictions. But a good strategist will always ask the “opposite” question. If the whole world is predicting that X will grow in significance, the strategist will always ask, “what if the reverse is true?” You may not be able to predict the future but you can certainly prepare for it.

 

4 Responses to Strategy: What If Health Care Costs Go Down?

  • Travis
    The other side of this contrary thinking is ” what if the Affordable Care Act ” makes health care less affordable rather than more? Based upon what I have been seeing in my own health care, Medicare, and reading, this is exactly what is happening.

    Also, as usual, the Washington Wizards, ( I think we should rename Congress after their basketball team ), failed to consider that there are not enough primary care physicians to care for all the current patients, let alone all the newly covered patients and made no provision to increase the number of primary care physicians. An excellent example of phase one thinking.

  • P.S. I believe that a clearer picture can always be found by reversing things and see how they sound then.
    Bill

  • Hi Bill —

    You’re probably right about health care costs going up — certainly that’s what all the analysts I read are saying. I just find that — when everybody seems to be pointing in the same direction — it’s useful to look in the opposite direction as well. I think that’s what you’re saying in your postscript, too.

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