JD Kleinke

JD Kleinke is a healthcare economist, medical industry strategist, and one of the most incisive analysts of American healthcare policy and financing. As a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a pioneering health care information entrepreneur, he brings an evidence-based, nonpartisan perspective that cuts through political rhetoric to address the real economics of healthcare.

A Pragmatic Voice in Healthcare Policy

Kleinke has been instrumental in the creation of four health care information organizations and served as a healthcare business columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He has advised both sides of the political aisle on pragmatic approaches to health policy and legislation. He is the author of Oxymorons: The Myth of a U.S. Health Care System and Catching Babies, a novel set in the world of obstetrics that brings healthcare issues to life through fiction. His ability to combine rigorous economic analysis with accessible communication makes complex healthcare topics understandable for any audience.

Decoding the Economics of American Healthcare

Kleinke has been a leading advocate for data-driven, post-partisan health care reform. His expertise spans health insurance, medical economics, pharmaceutical pricing, and healthcare delivery innovation. His keynotes deliver penetrating analysis of healthcare financing and policy reform, the economic forces shaping the future of American healthcare, evidence-based strategies for healthcare organizations navigating industry change, and cutting through political spin to focus on what actually works.

Health Reform is Now: What is Health Care “Reform” and What Does It Mean for Your Health Care Organization?

Health reform is now. Or is it? What does the actual plan look like – and what does it mean for your organization? Power shifts in Congress and state governments have put health reform legislation into a state of suspended animation – and forced all organizations to re-think how they should or should not ready themselves for major systemic changes that may or may not come. This is precisely what happened in the 1990s under the promise of broad-brush change from managed care – much of which never came to pass. 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, and observations from the cutting edge of the patient-centric health information revolution, this session will outline how your organization can navigate a health care system confronting the greatest changes in its bizarre, hundred year history.

Risky Hospital Business 2: Remake of the 1990s Managed Care Classic

Buried not so deep in the health reform legislation are radical changes in provider payment methodologies. Accountable Care Organizations, Medical Homes, Electronic Medical Record-related subsidies and penalties – these are only a few of the latest attempts to correct the health system’s economic, behavioral and organizational disorders a century in the making. The cost and quality problems that gave rise to the national managed care companies in the 1990s have not gone away, inspiring both the government and large health plans to simultaneously revisit many of those same managed care strategies. Will this second round – and double dose – of harsh economic medicine prove worse than the disease? Or are certain aspects of health care’s cost and quality problems simply incurable? How can provider organizations cope with a system that, as the government and payers attempt to re-engineer it around reimbursement, seems to yield only more chaos? This session will outline how your organization can navigate the latest attempt to re-engineer much of the U.S. health care system.

Collateral Damage: What Happens to Health Care Under Federal Budget Armageddon?

In a few months, the perennial question of “how much more health care can we afford?” graduates from academic argument to brutal funding and cash flow reality – when Congress’ ?” supercommittee?” takes up the biggest budget-cutting ax ever granted 12 people with radicaly different political philosophies and priorities. Health reform may have passed into law on paper. And even as its key provisions grind their way through the federal courts, the health reform law itself – with its radical new provider payment challenges and opportunities – may be killed, slowly in implementation, one ” check run” at a time by a political process willing to risk economic catastrophe rather than compromise. This session provides a macroeconomic outlook on where the health care system stands today; how the continuing recession will play out for all of its major funders, including government, employers, and payers; and how and where the system’s major players are most vulnerable to profound political attack. This session will outline how your organization can navigate a health care system confronting the likely effects and unintended consequences of government health reform efforts – and private market turmoil – in the coming months, as US health care system faces the greatest challenges in its bizarre, hundred year history.

eHealth 2.0: The Once and Future Health Care Information Revolution

A new generation of health information technology is emerging – and this one may finally ready for primetime, thanks to $17.2 billion in stimulus funding! Beyond the government’s sudden willingness to fund the computerization of health care, there has been explosive growth in e-prescribing and other electronic medical tools, as a new generation of providers comes online – and as patient communities have also emerged online, allowing patients to share exquisite details about their medical conditions and experiences. To attract and retain the most lucrative (i.e., well-off, well-insured and web-enabled) segments of the market, providers and payers at the vanguard are promoting the use of provider/patient e-visits and remote systems to manage disease, track changes in symptoms, and share data. New reimbursement methods and models – including insurer-paid e-visits and annual &qout;connectivity” fees from patients – are emerging in parallel with these technologies, as the health IT community finally addresses the need for privacy, security, physician income preservation, and liability protection. The sum total of these trends is the long overdue computerization of health care, and the “liquification” of patient data from paper charts and institutional silos – with far-reaching strategic consequences for every organization in health care.

The Patient Is In: Health Care’s Next Economic Revolution

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 and the introduction of high-deductible health insurance, coupled with Health Savings Accounts, are ushering in the inevitable decline of first-dollar coverage by health plans and the often irrational demand-inducement behavior of consumers. How will people behave when they are confronted daily with a financial document that looks like a 401(k) plan statement – one which shrinks with every doctor visit, lab test, new prescription and refill? Everything we think we know about how consumers will behave when purchasing routine care from these new cash accounts – and about how desperately ill patients will behave when confronted with draining those same accounts when fighting a life-threatening illness – is completely speculative. This keynote session examines keys moments in health care system history and policy for clues as to what the future will hold for all of us, not just as patients, but as real health care consumers.

Chaos in the Clinic: Leadership Strategies under Health Care Reform

Buried not so deep in the health reform legislation are radical changes in provider payment methodologies. Accountable Care Organizations, Medical Homes, Electronic Medical Record-related subsidies and penalties – these are only a few of the latest attempts to correct the health system’s economic, behavioral and organizational disorders a century in the making. The cost and quality problems that gave rise to the national managed care companies in the 1990s have not gone away, inspiring the government to revisit many of those same managed care strategies with the broad, sweeping strokes of federal legislation. Will this harsh economic medicine prove worse than the disease? Or are certain aspects of health care’s cost and quality problems simply incurable? How can provider organizations cope with a system that, as the government and payers attempt to re-engineer it around reimbursement, seems to yield only more chaos? This session will outline how your organization can navigate a health care system confronting the greatest changes in its bizarre, hundred year history.

The High Price of Progress: Who Pays for Medicine’s Good Bad Luck?

The majority of medical research compels the utilization of ever newer and ever more expensive drugs and other medical technologies. At the same time, the majority of actions by private and public health plans seek to constrain their use. The result is an emerging collision course – between the march of medical science and the countermarch of medical policy – arising from often bitterly divided views about the optimal use of expensive medical resources. Pharmacy costs in particular are rising in excess of general and medical cost inflation, leading to calls for price and utilization controls by public and private payers. Such controls would be ineffective and counterproductive because they would attempt to reverse two profound, historic phenomena at work in the US health care system: the added costs associated with breakthrough medicines represent a major structural shift from the provision of traditional medical services to the consumption of medical products; they also represent the creation of economic, social, and public health utility that we value as a society. Nonetheless, the turmoil in the private health care system’s approach to managing health benefits and costs – currently undergoing replication for Medicaid and the new Medicare drug benefit – can be remedied through adoption of a value-based (rather than price-based) approach to pharmaceutical spending – and all stakeholders in the system have the opportunity to enable, rather than resist, the hard economic news associated with all of our good clinical luck.