Making the Best Better
Close to 99% of the hospitals in the for-profit HCA system lie to the south or west of Kansas City. That geography reflects HCA’s interest in growing markets, particularly in the sunbelt.
One of the things that attracted HCA executives to Kansas City—and kept that interest even through our spectacularly unsunny October—were, in their words, “our extremely good physicians.”
In this issue, the reader will get to meet not only the top executives from HCA, specifically Chairman and CEO Jack Bovender, Jr. and President and COO Richard Bracken, but they will also make the acquaintance of fifteen of Kansas City’s “extremely good physicians,” the ones chosen by their peers in Ingram’s highly competitive annual poll of Top Doctors.
As the other articles in this section make clear, it will take a great act of will by administrators and physicians alike to steer the ship of American health care past the Syclla of contemporary mixed-market health care, through the Charybidis of single payer health care, and on to smoother seas beyond. In Say So, Bill. Bruning, President of the Mid-America Coalition on Health Care, argues, that our managed care system is so improvised and intimidating that it is driving health care leadership towards the seductive whirlpool of national health.
Not helping matters any, as Dan Stalp reminds us in the Small Business Adviser, is the enormous pressure that litigation puts on the system. Insurance costs may be driving doctors out of the area and out of health care altogether.
And yet for all the problems, as HCA recognized, the Kansas City area remains remarkably blessed with excellent facilities and superior physicians. The bottom line is health care in Kansas City is as good as any people anywhere have ever consistently received. The challenge now, for HCA and for all interested parties, is to make it better.
