Relentless Health Value

In this healthcare podcast, I’m talking with Brian Klepper. If you haven’t heard of him, Brian’s a longtime healthcare analyst and former CEO of the National Business Coalition on Health. This interview takes off like a shot, as most of my conversations with Brian Klepper do. We’re talking about primary care and its various iterations. We start out with Exhibit A—the HMO version of primary care from the ’90s. This is a great comparator to really get a handle on what’s going on today. During the heyday of HMOs (back in the ’90s), primary care was basically a glorified gatekeeper kind of doing two things. On one hand, they were restricting access. It wasn’t an accident that it was really hard to get an appointment with a PCP.  On the other hand, it also wasn’t an accident that, once you got there, the PCP only had 7 minutes to spend with you, which basically meant that you left with an appointment to see a specialist at, of course, the health system that probably had just bought that PCP practice. Everybody’s h