CMS Administrator Donald Berwick made an appeal to the insurance industry to work in good faith with the agency to implement health reform during a Medicare conference hosted by America's Health Insurance Plans in Washington.
“We need your help, our nation needs your help,” Berwick said to AHIP conferees. Companies, CEOs, care professionals and managers all play a part in this goal, yet the insurance industry, AHIP in particular, “can be among the keys of our success, the central part in navigating the success of the health reform,” Berwick said.
“We have a job to do, we need to make care better for America,” Berwick said, adding that he would be working with his colleagues at the CMS to build relationships and partnerships with the healthcare industry to make this happen. “If we steadily work together to make care what it can become, trust will resurface and the rest will follow,” Berwick said.
How the current system is redesigned is the most important question to ask in implementing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Berwick continued. In his view, the problems faced by healthcare in the past have not been about the failures of doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers. “With rare exceptions, these people do their very best. The problem lies in design, systems never built to levels of reliability, patient-centeredness, safety or equity that we owe to ourselves,” he said.
