The 30th Annual Symposium on Health Care Services in New York: Research and Practice on November 19 offered a detailed look at voters’ concerns about health care issues central to the upcoming presidential election. Keynote speaker Drew Altman, PhD, president and CEO of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), presented a series of detailed graphs and charts (see the PDF on this page) drawn from KFF polling on health care costs and coverage, the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, and health care reform.
So far, Altman said, candidates for the 2020 presidential campaign have not focused on the issue that is central to the American public—affordability. He said that voters regularly list “pocketbook issues” such as surprise billing as a top concern, along with high insurance deductibles and out-of-pocket costs. Altman’s presentation was based on KFF’s rigorous and reliable polling operation.
The symposium was jointly sponsored by United Hospital Fund and Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA) and was attended by nearly 200 people from the New York area health care community.
A research poster session followed Mr. Altman’s keynote, with 17 posters presented, as well as a panel discussion on new payment models and quality that are influencing hospital discharge planning and the delivery of post-acute care. The panel discussion, Bridging Acute and Post-Acute Care in a Changing Environment, was moderated by Tim Johnson, senior vice president of GNYHA. Panelist David Grabowski, PhD, professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, discussed how pressures to reduce Medicare expenditures and bundled payment arrangements are affecting utilization of skilled nursing facilities and home health care services. Lynn Rogut, director of Quality and team leader at UHF’s Quality Institute, explained why post-acute care decision-making matters and how patients and families experience discharge planning for post-acute care, and Claudia Colgan, RN, vice president, Quality Initiatives at Mount Sinai Hospital, described Mount Sinai’s efforts to develop its own network of post-acute care providers and implement a more patient-centered approach to discharge planning.
All presentations can be downloaded from this page.
