There are a lots of reasons to attend the annual confab on healthcare organized by investment bank JPMorgan, but hearing surprising things said from the stage generally isn’t one of them. In fact, the presentations are usually predictable as the pharmaceutical and biotech elite click their way through PowerPoint slides using seemingly interchangeable talking points. So it was a little startling to hear Jamie Dimon, chairman of JPMorgan, urge a luncheon crowd at the first day of the conference to put the nation’s interest ahead of their own, embrace corporate responsibility, and call for universal healthcare.

 

“Our nation can and should provide healthcare for all and it will make us a far stronger nation over time. It’s hard for me to understand that we have tolerated for so long a healthcare system, which while it has made enormous advances in technology and medicine and done so much good, that it continues to leave close to 50 million of our fellow Americans out in the cold,” said Dimon, during the JPMorgan Annual Healthcare Conference in San Francisco January 12. “You could argue it’s unethical—and I’d probably put myself in that category—but at a minimum it’s not humane that we haven’t ensured everyone has basic healthcare.”

 

Dimon said that it will be far more effective and efficient, and cheaper if we fix the problem now rather than let it continue. He sees the election of Barack Obama and Obama’s selection of former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, both who appear to be committed finding a solution, as an opportunity to do this. 

 

Ethics aside, Dimon not surprisingly made an economic argument for comprehensive healthcare reform. He said the nation’s healthcare problems represent an a $37 trillion unfunded liability. It makes many companies uncompetitive, holds down wages, and partial solutions have only shifted costs from one set of payers to another without solving the fundamental problem of inefficiency that underlie it.

 

His own vision for reform would build on the employer-based system, but go beyond it. About 60 percent of the population has employer-based coverage and any plan that allows most people to keep their current coverage will be more politically feasible and easier to implement, he said.

 

He said the problem with the employer-based system is it turns employers into healthcare administrators rather than allowing them to do what they do best. For employees, the problem is that their healthcare is not portable and creates little incentive for real consumer choices. As a result, the system does not feel the pressure of the marketplace to become more efficient and less expensive.

 

As part of the fix, he said it will be important that consumers “have skin in the game.” Consumers will seek out cheaper ways of doing things and this will allow entrepreneurial system to devise cheaper forms of healthcare delivery such as getting flu shot at Wal-mart, letting nurses do more, or taking more advantage of the emergence of Internet-based medical systems.

But in addition to incentive for cost consciousness, there is also a need for incentives for lifestyle changes and chronic-disease management. Motivating people to make modest lifestyle changes in diet and exercise, he said, can have a big impact in alleviating the cost of chronic care. In that regard, employers are in a position to provide both a carrot and stick, rewarding healthy behavior with financial benefits and punishing unhealthy habits with higher costs to the employee.

 

“We face both a serious problem and an opportunity to address that problem,” he said. “Let’s not let the opportunity slip.”