What can International Falls do to manage health care costs?
Brian Long, CEO of Rainy Lake Medical Center, sought to answer that question as he described his vision for the future as including wellness as an important factor in health care.
Long spoke about the future of the local health care center as well as national trends during last week’s Brown Bag Luncheon, sponsored by the International Falls Area Chamber of Commerce.
He said the nation cannot financially afford to continue on the same health care path, as costs for individuals, businesses and health care providers are increasing.
“Health care is still focused on illness and injury,” Long said. “It is much more cost effective to manage chronic diseases before, rather than after, it starts.”
He recommended involving wellness programs, including exercise and nutrition, to help eliminate some conditions before they begin. He said 26 percent of Americans reported not participating in physical activity.
The Brown Bag Luncheon spotlighted the local Snap Fitness, which Long said happened to coincide with the medical center’s wellness strategy.
“The lack of activity and focus on the ‘magic pill’ is the real problem,” he added.
The “magic pills” to which he is referring are those medications that many people see advertised, promising relief from medical conditions.
Long also discussed the integration of the Falls Memorial Hospital and Duluth Clinic, International Falls, into the Rainy Lake Medical Center this summer.
Long said the integration plan focused on several factors: increasing efficiency through shared services, increased capabilities and more comprehensive health care services, an increased accessibility to services, and improved reimbursement to RLMC for services performed.
Many of these goals, Long said, would be furthered once the two campuses — hospital and clinic — are physically merged. Locating the two medical facilities on the same campus would allow them to share services such as laboratory, pharmacy and radiology, he said. This will eliminate unnecessary redundancies in technology, he said, but would not necessarily eliminate job positions.
As an example, instead of buying two MRI machines —one for each campus — RLMC would just buy one and share its use, he said.
Completing a new hospital campus will also replace the current, aging building, according to Long.
When asked about recruiting more specialists into town, Long said that, indeed, the medical center was doing just that.
“Our primary focus is to attract more specialists and keeping individuals in town,” he said. “(But) we’re not going to be doing those things that we shouldn’t do.”
He noted that some medical specialties are not cost effective to consider bringing to International Falls, while others would be better fits.
Long gave several answers to his own question on how International Falls can manage health care costs in addition to wellness programs.
He suggested completing the integration with the clinic and hospital, redesigning the relationship with physicians, reducing costs through efficiencies, promoting transparency in the price of services and the quality anticipated for the cost, promoting consumerism in health care, and increasing the quality of leadership.
On the national front, Long said that the $66 trillion in current unfunded Medicare liability is “unmanageable under the current budget system or any budget system being proposed.”
“We simply can’t afford $66 trillion,” Long told the audience.
He also said that on a national average, the rise in health insurance premiums is out-pacing earnings. He showed a chart that illustrated an ever-growing gap in the difference since 2001, and also said that health insurance rate increases were even out-pacing other products.
After reducing the number of uninsured to include only those making less than $50,000 per year and not having insurance for more than several months, Long said that about 3.75 percent of the U.S. population did not have health insurance of some kind or reasonable access to obtain insurance.
However, he said the number of under-insured people in America is more concerning.
“The greatest challenge we face in the future is those that are under-insured,” Long said, citing an “awful lot of out of pocket costs” for folks who have to pay beyond what insurance covers.
Even for Rainy Lake Medical Center, he said, one of the largest increases in costs his company sees is in employee benefits, namely medical insurance. Long asked members of the audience to enumerate their largest business expense, to which several agreed that employee benefits were among their largest costs.
Like many other businesses, he said even health care institutions themselves are concerned with costs of insurance for their staff.
