The former University of South Florida Medical School dean who helped coin the catchphrase “America’s Healthiest Hometown,” said in a recent interview that neither Obamacare or the GOP replacement plan address fundamental flaws in the nation’s healthcare system.
Dr. Stephen Klasko, now CEO of Jefferson Health in Philadelphia, played a crucial role in founding the Villages Health Care system, but bailed out in 2014 after USF pulled the plug after spending millions of dollars on the effort.
Klasko, during a recent interview on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT, said President Donald Trump did not follow through with most of the promises he made about what his health care package would include.
“To me, this is a little bit like the end of ‘The Sopranos.’ You wait eight years and it just like, eh… It’s really Obamacare 2.0 in a way that can get through budget reconciliation. One of the things that’s surprising, if you think about what President Trump has done, most of the things he said he was going to do, he really followed through. Whether or not they were feasible or not,” Klasko said. “Think about the five things he said that would be part of the health care bill. So, pre-existing conditions and keep your insurance until [age] 26. OK, so he followed through on that. Insurance across state lines? Not included. Tackle high drug costs? Not included. Won’t cut Medicaid? Well, there is a cut, but it’s delayed. So, all that Medicaid expansion that Republicans hated, still there until 2020. Then insurance for everybody if they couldn’t afford it? I’d say that’s a fee. I think the Democrats will get a lot of hay and parade people that say I now can’t afford it based on the age-based vs income-based tax subsidies.”
Klasko, who became well known in The Villages thanks to his many speaking engagements and personal appearances here, said that neither Obamacare or this proposed alternative do anything to fix the real dilemma’s posed by our health care system.
“Here’s the problem, it’s a math problem. The Affordable Care Act or this Obamacare 2.0 did exactly what we’re asking it to do. It gave a lot more people access to an expensive, fragmented, inequitable and, occasionally unsafe health care delivery system. That’s a fact,” Klasko explained. “And it hoped that the health care delivery system would transform. So, at the end of the day, none of these things gets the cost down, gets the quality up, gets patient experience to change. Until that happens, we’re stuck with the math problem. The math problem is, you either get a deal where people weren’t insured, but everybody could get whatever they wanted or, the new way, where we’ll give you whatever money you need to exist in this broken system.”
