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Big Think Live Interview With George Halvorson

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A conversation with the CEO of Kaiser Permanente.

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George C. Halvorson:

George C. Halvorson is chairman and chief executive officer of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, headquartered in Oakland, California. Kaiser Permanente is the nation’s largest nonprofit health plan and hospital system, serving more than 8.6 million members and generating $40 billion in annual revenue.

George Halvorson serves on the Institute of Medicine Task Force on Evidence Based Care and the Commonwealth Commission for a High Performing Health System. He serves on the American Hospital Association’s Advisory Committee on Health Care Reform. He chairs the World Economic Conference Health Governors for 2009 and chairs the International Federation of Health Plans. He has received the Modern Healthcare/Health Information and Management Systems Society CEO IT Achievement Award. The Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange also awarded him the 2009 Louis Sullivan Award for leadership and achievements in advancing health care quality.

Halvorson has written several health care reform books, including the newly released Health Care Will Not Reform Itself: A User’s Guide to Refocusing and Reforming American Health Care. He also wrote Health Care Reform Now!, Health Care Co-ops in Uganda, Strong Medicine, and Epidemic of Care as guidebooks for health care reform.

Halvorson served as an advisor to the governments of Uganda, Great Britain, Jamaica, and Russia on issues of health policy and financing. His strong commitment to diversity and inter-ethnic healing has led him to his current writing project, a new book about racial prejudice around the world.

Prior to joining Kaiser Permanente, Halvorson was president and chief executive officer of HealthPartners, headquartered in Minneapolis. With more than 30 years of health care management experience, he has also held several senior management positions with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How did you arrive at Kaiser?

George Halvorson: I’ve been involved in healthcare for more than three decades. I started with the financing side actually, I worked for a Blue Cross plan and I was trained as an underwriter. Slightly more than three decades ago. I evolved from the Blue Cross operation into running a small health plan, one of the first capitated health plans in America. That was HMO Minnesota. We started the health plan with a network of participating clinics. And so, I evolved from the insurance side of the operation into the care delivery side of the operation.

And a little further down the road, I became the CEO of a company known as Health Partners. Health Partners is a particularly interesting organization because it’s a Co-op. It’s owned by the members and Health Partners owns its hospitals and clinics. And so it is a very Kaiser-like organization in that it’s based on focusing on care delivery on the patient and delivering care through our own care network. So, I’ve actually been doing vertically integrated care now for decades and that relatively rare in America because most often, insurance in America is based on wherever Blue Cross model where you just basically pay claims. And I’ve been now for two and a-half decades involved in actually delivering care.

Topic: The Kaiser model

George Halvorson: Kaiser is different than just about everybody else in healthcare because we play all the position in the game. We’re a payer, we are a medical group, we are a hospital system, and we own pharmacies, labs, imaging equipment, the entire spectrum. So, when we think about care delivery we think of it in the total context of everything, and we are pre-paid. We get a budget from our members. They give us a premium and we use the premium to provide care. So we function much like a country. We’re about the size of or bigger than, 140 countries, and 42 states relative to our care population in our infrastructure. We have about 160,000 employees who deliver care with 40,000 nurses who work for Kaiser Permanente and take care of patients.

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