WASHINGTON, April 17 (UPI) -- National health insurance for catastrophic care, but not a government-run healthcare system was one of the key reforms urged by GlaxoSmithKline CE0 J.P Garnier Monday at the 2006 World Health Congress in Washington, D.C.
Pitching a sweeping privatization of healthcare delivery in the United States, Garnier told the conference, "The role of government in healthcare is to negotiate and be a referee ... but not to micro-manage patient care."
In fact, he said, countries like Britain, Germany and Canada -- which have traditionally embraced government-administered healthcare -- "made a huge mistake" and are now abandoning the model in favor of more market-based approaches.
"You need the private sector to make it happen," Garnier argued.
He added that the United States should establish a privately-run, national system of catastrophic health insurance that would be subsidized for low-income Americans.
The nation's poor are already getting uncompensated care in U.S. hospitals, so a tax-subsided system of national health insurance would "take the mystery" out of healthcare spending for that population, Garnier said.
For its part, the federal government should educate the public on maintaining a healthy lifestyle, and the National Institutes of Health should develop national standards for best practices for patient care, he said. Such standards would help even out the imbalance in the current system, where excessive resources are poured into some diseases, while other conditions are neglected.
Clearly defining what constitutes quality care would also end the game of those who Garnier said are profiting off the current confusion. "Lawyers are getting rich by taking advantage of a broken system," he said. "They are taking advantage of defensive medicine."
However, he said the problem of drug price controls in Europe and Canada driving up costs in the United States in a more elusive one. For example, "Canada picks the price" it will pay for a particular drug, he said. Companies like GSK could simply refuse to sell to that market below a certain price, Garnier said, but that wouldn't make sense from a business standpoint, because a country like Canada would simply "copycat" the company's products.
"It's a vicious circle. We didn't create this monster, but we're stuck with it," he said. And capping drug prices in the United States isn't an option either, since that would destroy financial incentives in the last true bastion of robust pharmaceutical research and development, Garnier noted.
In fact, as more and more jobs in other sectors like manufacturing are being shipped out of the country, he said, "the last chance of the United States is innovation, but you have to reward innovation and you have to pay fair prices for drugs."
At the same time, drug makers should be discouraged from putting excessive markups on certain products "because they can."
Garnier said drug innovation will be critical in the coming years with some diseases "on the verge of exploding" and that chronic diseases like Alzheimer's will be major cost drivers.
But well-funded science might produce "one good medicine" for diseases like Alzheimer's and extend patients' quality of life, he said.
Garnier said it will take "one visionary politician" to "put innovation on the agenda" and make the other necessary reforms to the U.S. healthcare system. "It's not going to be pleasant to reform healthcare. Sometimes political courage is in short supply," he said.
