Over the past two decades, the locus of medical decision making – via the rise and fall of “managed care” - has shifted from physician to health plan to patient. Tiered co-payments for hospitals stays, physician visits, and drugs represent only a crude first step in the final phase of this historic shift. The slow, steady rise of high-deductible health insurance, coupled with the mushrooming of health care cash accounts and credit products, are ushering in the inevitable decline and disappearance of traditional health coverage, swelling the ranks of the “underinsured,” and renewing a critical mass movement within the federal government to reform the entire system with mandated coverage and a public insurance alternative to the failing health insurance marketplace.

What will the reform plan look like? What will be its financial, organizational, and legal impact on hospitals? How will it affect patients, especially those currently outside the insurance system? And how will broader market forces toward ever more patient cost-sharing affect patient behavior? How will patients act when they get more and better access to information about hospitals, doctors, and drugs? And how will they act when they finally get electronic access to their own medical records? Everything we think we know about how consumers behave when managing their own care with their own money is completely speculative. And that is before factoring in the wave of new medical information, data access and patient communities coming online now as part of eHealth 2.0.

Combined with lessons from the emerging field of consumer behavioral economics, and observations from the cutting edge of the patient-centric health information revolution, J.D.'s speeches provide strategies and practical steps for health care organizations, companies, no-profits, and patient groups, at this unique moment in what may prove to be a turning point in the history of the US health care system.

Most Popular Speaking Topics

• ObamaCare: Stimulus Spending, System Reform and Market Change
• eHealth 2.0: The Once and Future Health Care Information Revolution
• The Patient Is In: Health Care’s Economic Slow Boil
• The High Price of Progress: Who Pays for Medicine's Good Bad Luck?
• Chaos in the Clinic: Leadership Strategies for the Post-Modern Health Care System

Life After Reform: Your Organization in the Era of ObamaCare
What will the final Obama health reform plan look like? What will be its financial, organizational, and legal impact on providers, health plans and employers who continue to offer health coverage? How will it affect patients, especially those accustomed to getting the most (or the least) from traditional employer-sponsored coverage? And how will it affect benefit design strategies, mandates, population health and individual behavior? How will patients act when they get more and better access to information about hospitals, doctors, and drugs? And how will they act when they finally get electronic access to their own medical records?

Everything we think we know about how consumers behave when managing their own care with their own money is completely speculative. And that is before factoring in the wave of new medical information, data access and patient communities coming online now as part of eHealth 2.0. This session examines the concurrent effects of government reform, increasing patient economic empowerment, and emerging patient information technologies on today’s health care organization.

Combined with lessons from the emerging field of consumer behavioral economics, a career spent researching and writing about the impact of health benefit design on medical economics, and observations from the cutting edge of the patient-centric health information revolution, Mr. Kleinke will outline business strategies for self-insured employers at this unique moment in what may prove to be a turning point in the history of the US health care system.