Episode 55-Dean Clancy, Healthcare Re-imagined
Brian Kruger:
Welcome to the podcast, the Common Bridge with Richard Helppie. Rich is a successful entrepreneur in the technology, health and finance space. He and his wife, Leslie, are also philanthropists with interest in civic and artistic endeavors, but with a primary focus on medically and educationally under-served children. My name is Brian Kruger, and from time to time I’ll be the moderator and host of this podcast.
And welcome to the Common Bridge. Rich’s guest today is Dean Clancy and he’s a senior healthcare policy fellow at Americans For Prosperity (AFP). And he’s also a nationally known healthcare freedom advocate and domestic policy expert with more than 20 years high level policy experience in Congress, and in the White House and the US healthcare industry. He’s worked in the House and the Senate, the medical device industry, and as an industry consultant. His specialties are health reform and health-related tax policy, and he’s also an expert on health savings accounts, and he played a key behind the scenes role in enacting the ’96 welfare reform. In the early 2000s he served at the Office of Management and Budget where, among other things, he helped devise the president’s national pandemic preparedness strategy in 2005. Now these days he’s helping promote AFP, his National Healthcare Re-imagined campaign. I think you’re really going to like this podcast. So we join Rich and Dean Clancy in conversation.
Rich Helppie:
Dean, welcome to the Common Bridge.
Dean Clancy:
Oh, it’s my pleasure and an honor.
Rich Helppie:
Dean, let’s have our audience get familiar with you a little bit-quite an illustrious career. What was the first job that you had that got everything rolling?
Dean Clancy:
My first job out of college, back in 1986, was as a mail reader in the Reagan White House. I read the incoming mail.
Rich Helppie:
That must have been fairly interesting. How did you figure out which ones to just post and which ones to pass on?
Dean Clancy:
Well we had a complicated system of coding. You would figure out where to send the letter-sometimes to an agency, sometimes a form letter, sometimes to the president himself. In one case I received a letter from Richard Nixon. It was addressed “Dear Nancy, I saw Ron’s speech last night on the Iran Contra scandal. I thought he did great, hang in there, signed RN”, but I didn’t pay attention to who had written the letter. So I coded it for a standard form letter response, and luckily someone smarter than I caught the mistake.
Rich Helppie:
Oh, that’s…I’m sure you’ve got lots of stories that you just can’t tell. Academically, tell us about your college experience and your degree preparation.
Dean Clancy:
Oh, sure, undergraduate-Georgetown, studied foreign policy and international relations. I’ve never used that professionally. Instead I’ve spent my career in health policy. My master’s degree was from Columbia University in New York where I studied journalism and I’ve never been a practicing journalist either.
Rich Helppie:
Well, we’re hoping to get a journalism professor or authority on, and just this morning, I thought about trying to find out who that right person would be at Columbia, who has of course, a very well-regarded journalism school.
Dean, I understand that a couple of years ago you founded a nonprofit educational organization? What’s it called? And what’s it do?
Dean Clancy:
The organization is HSAs For All. That acronym stands for health savings accounts, and that’s an option people have today. Most people don’t know about it or understand it. It’s similar to an individual retirement account except it can just be an ordinary bank account, but what makes it special is you can only use the money in your account for health care, but it’s tax free money. So in effect, with an HSA, you get a 15 to 40% discount on every healthcare purchase you make, depending on your tax bracket. And under current law, only about 10% of Americans really have access to these accounts, which by the way, can help people to be much savvier shoppers for healthcare. So I thought, we ought to reform that law so every American can have a tax-free HSA. And I think we should allow them to contribute as much money as they want to the accounts. Right now, there are very tight limits on how much money you can have in your account, put into your account. And so I created HSS For All, and I’m proud to say that just this week, a United States Senator introduced a bill doing just what I’m describing. It’s called the Health Savings Accounts For All Act.
Rich Helppie:
Tell us a little bit about your job today. What’s the organization, and how do you spend your days and weeks?
Dean Clancy:
These days I’m a policy [inaudible] at Americans For Prosperity. It’s a national grassroots organization that is focused on basically trying to bring about a society of mutual benefit, where we all help each other rise. And we believe in liberty and justice for all, we’re all in this together, and we rise or fall together. We do tend to believe in being more de-regulatory and letting markets work, and removing barriers so people can achieve their dreams. And this is similar to work I did in the past at another organization called Freedom Works. I’ve always been cause motivated. So when I’m not working in the government or in industry, I really get a lot of pleasure from just trying to promote good ideas. And I got an opportunity to join this group at the end of 2019. And I said, you know what? I want to do that. And so I spend most of my time talking with local activists, and educating folks, and helping promote our Healthcare Re-imagined campaign.
Rich Helppie:
That’s fantastic. Common Bridge has covered healthcare ideas from a lot of perspectives. I’ve given my views based on my decades in the healthcare industry. We’ve had Nate Kaufman, clearly one of the leading brains in healthcare, Brian Peters with his perspective from a statewide and national regulatory and health system view. And then recently Chris Allen with also a decades long history in healthcare, and he focused on the social determinants of health.
So today we are going to talk about Healthcare Re-imagined and unleashing market forces and innovation on healthcare in America. And we’ve, of course, had tremendous innovation in healthcare services in this country. We’ll have to, for sure, touch on the corona virus and how our health systems and participants reacted, versus perhaps what’s going on elsewhere. Some of the innovations like tele-health, and we’ll delve into some of the policy blocks, the insurance markets, the data systems, and more. And so I’m anticipating some education and perhaps a few policy ideas.
So Dean, let me start off with an area that I’ve found many people are just frankly confused about or misinformed, and they seem to use the terms, health coverage and healthcare interchangeably, but that’s not really true.
Dean Clancy:
No, care is very different from coverage. Coverage is making sure you can access doctors and hospitals and devices and drugs when you need them, and care is those actual things. And in this country, we tend to confuse the two. We think that, well, if you have coverage, then you have care, but that’s not always true. Sometimes that insurance card in your wallet doesn’t really give you access to what you need. Our goal at AFP is to make sure that every American has access to the high quality care that they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. So we see a role for safety nets and government to make sure that the poor or the very sick are not left out, they have access to care, but we also think that we shouldn’t make too much of a focus on just giving everybody an insurance card. That’s important, but that’s not the end of the story.
Rich Helppie:
And I think some of our prior guests would support that. Nate Kaufman talked extensively about how pre-authorizations are abused to deny care. Chris Allen talked about the complexity of care for disadvantaged populations that had coverage that would let them access care, but they didn’t know how to operate the mechanisms to get that coverage converted to care.
Dean, that leads us over into insurance markets and payment systems. We’ve got in our society today the tax supported groups like Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, Tri-Care, employer sponsored, and then, of course, consumer owned and a little bit of private pay out of pocket. How are those markets and payment systems working today in your view?
Dean Clancy:
Well, America, in healthcare, it’s the best of times and the worst of times. We have a system that’s seriously flawed and fragmented, but it’s also in some ways, very good. And it’s not totally untrue to say we have the best healthcare system. There’s a lot of promise and potential, and that’s why we’re pushing the idea of re-imagining healthcare so we can tap that potential. What’s good about our system- we have the best cancer survival rates in the world. We have some of the lowest wait times in the world and we have lots of innovation and progress in technology, in new drugs and therapies. It’s really wonderful. And what’s wrong with our system? Well, it’s very fragmented and you can lose your coverage just because you change jobs. It’s often very expensive. There’s a kind of inflation in healthcare that goes on year in and year out, regardless of what the rest of the economy does. And of course there’s the problem that people, in addition to not being able to afford it, don’t even know what the price is. They’re frustrated because it’s not like the grocery store where you see all the prices up front and you get to decide what you want. Oftentimes you’re basically told you can have something, but we can’t tell you how much it’s going to cost. And so those problems have made Americans very frustrated with their healthcare system, and rightly so, and we think you can fix those things. And that’s what we’re trying to do.
Rich Helppie:
Let’s unwrap that a little bit. What types of things would replace or augment the elements that we have today? You touched on some of the safety net programs and some of the employer sponsored and some of the shortcomings of those. In Healthcare Re-imagined, what are some of the things you’re working on?
Dean Clancy:
Healthcare Re-Imagined basically means let’s unleash the potential of modern technology and of consumer empowerment so that basically things get better, faster. And examples, specific examples, of what we’re trying to do-we want to unleash a digital health revolution, a revolution of tele-medicine tele-health. And by the way, we now have tele-dentistry, tele-ophthalmology. You can carry an EKG, which is a heart monitoring device, in your pocket or even in your Apple watch. And there are government barriers that make it hard for these tele-health devices to become more widely utilized. So we want to remove those barriers. And we’ve seen a lot of that in the current pandemic where people have realized they need tele-health to reduce infection rates and avoid needless visits to the emergency room. And so, tele-health, we’ve actually had more progress on that front in the last five months than we’ve had in the previous 25 years. We’re very excited about that. Other ideas for re-imagining healthcare, let’s remove the local laws that make it hard to add new hospital beds or new MRI machines in your community. We think those so-called “certificate of need” laws are unneeded. Why not allow competition? And by the way, those laws are often administered by the current incumbent hospitals or interests who basically have been given the ability to say no to new entrants or competition in those markets. We say, let’s remove those barriers.
Rich Helppie:
Let me break in a little bit and explain to our audience what a certificate of need is. And I’m going to use a contrasting example of a tire store. So if somebody wants to sell tires in your community and there’s a tire store across the street doing well, they might say I’m going to open a tire store on the opposite corner because people seem to like to buy tires here. Under a certificate of need, that second competitor coming into the market who wants to deliver better service, lower price, would have to go to a state agency and say, I think there needs to be a second tire store here. And that agency could say, no, we’ve got plenty of tire stores in that area. It’ll just mean people spending more money on tires, so we’re not going to grant your certificate of need. That’s what we do in many states with hospital beds. And that’s why you see in certain areas that the inpatient beds might be all located in an urban center, although the population has spread out to suburbia and ex-urbia, is that what you’re getting at?
Dean Clancy:
Yes. And thank you for interrupting me. Because your explanation of it was far better than mine. Yes, certificate of need is basically protectionism at the local level. It’s not needed and we could lower prices and increase access by repealing those laws.
Rich Helppie:
Let’s go through employer sponsored healthcare a little bit: what’s good about it, what’s bad about it, how would you propose changing it.
Dean Clancy:
Well, obviously half the American population gets their health coverage through their workplace. And that system has been very successful and popular. It’s had some downsides, it tends to make people insensitive to the price of care. They don’t realize how much of a subsidy they’re getting through the tax code for that workplace health plan. And they don’t necessarily pay good attention to the cost of healthcare. And we could help reduce costs by, in effect, weaning people away from employer provided coverage to other forms of coverage where it’s more like a traditional insurance: automobile, insurance, homeowners, insurance. You wouldn’t have to change your policy every year as you often do with health insurance. You wouldn’t lose it if you changed jobs, it would be portable. But in doing that, you want to be gradual and gentle so that people who have chronic pre-existing medical conditions, don’t just suddenly lose their access to care. And there are ways you can do that. And by the way, you mentioned those podcasts. I happened to have the pleasure of hearing all of those podcasts. And I thought there were some very good ideas there about how to replace our current system and move to something better. I would love for you, in this podcast, if you don’t mind, just to reiterate what you said earlier in those others about how you would fix the American healthcare system.
Rich Helppie
Always happy to do that. And it’s a simple four part plan. At first is to acknowledge that there is a role of a tax supported systems today in a fragmented way-Medicare, Medicaid, VA, Tri-Care, Chip and others, eliminate all those bureaucracies to a single system. If you’re a citizen of the United States of America, you get this basic level of care, it’s funded through a sliding scale based on income. Everybody pays something. If you’ve been fortunate and/or industrious enough to be an upper earner, you’re going to pay more for it. Secondly, there would be a private market for people that wanted to purchase more choice, more access, and the like, and that would be something they would buy on an individual market. There would be consumer protections about shall issue, so it was not to discriminate against pre-existing conditions. If your employer provided that, I would tax those benefits and the employer market, I think has outlived its usefulness. And then I would let everybody get into Medicare part D today, which is doing a great job of pitting the two biggest not-for-profit parts of the health care system-the health plans and the pharmaceutical companies-against each other. That’s it in a nutshell.
Dean Clancy:
Oh, thank you. I have to say I find your plan very appealing. I might want to modify it in a couple of details with respect to, and it sounds a little bit like a four layer cake. In that first layer, the government safety net, I would have them basically provide re-insurance and guaranteed coverage pools, which would basically bring down the price of premiums for people who have chronic medical conditions or very large expenses in a given year. So government would be kind of in the back office, almost in the background, helping the private sector.
That second layer of the cake that you described, provide good, true health insurance, without anybody not being able to buy their way into it. And on the second layer of the private market, I would actually allow the pricing according to medical risk, because that first layer gives you your protection for the people who are sick. So you can go ahead and allow the companies to price according to risk. And what that means is the prices will be lower and more people will buy insurance before they get sick. They won’t wait until their house is on fire to try to buy fire insurance. That will make the pool bigger, prices cheaper, everybody better off.
And then in terms of your taxing employer benefits, that’s the third layer of the cake-total agreement. Yes, we should do that. It’s time that we moved in that direction.
And then the last layer Medicare part D, I liked the concept very much because Medicare part D, the drug benefit, is competitive. It does try to use market forces, but it’s a managed competition. I’m not sure you’d absolutely need it, if you had those other three layers of the cake in place, but maybe I’m wrong, talk me out of that. But in general, I think you’ve got a great plan there.
Rich Helppie:
I really appreciate the learned view, and that’s what the Common Bridge is about, is finding a solution. What I haven’t found, anybody able to challenge on a broad layer, is that the Republicans basically have no plan and the Democrats do not have a workable plan, including the Medicare For All, which isn’t Medicare and doesn’t cover all, but that’s for another day.
But let me respond to some of the things. So, first of all, part D it is running 40% below projected costs continually, and it is getting 95% subscriber satisfaction. And another great element is that consumers can pick the plan that works for them. If they are taking no medications, they’re probably going to choose something with a lower premium, higher deductible. If they are taking a certain type of medication, they might look for a plan that provides that, on favorable terms. So it begins to correct one of the other many issues with employer sponsored healthcare-that like any one size fits all-that employer sponsor doesn’t work. And frankly, I think that when President Obama had the opportunity to redo healthcare, had he taken the successful model of part D and applied it to the rest of the insurance market, the problem would frankly be fixed at this point.
When you talk about the risk pools, the insurance companies have to be prevented, in some way, of dropping coverage when a person becomes ill. And in my view, one of the issues is that we’re buying a product that has a longitudinal need over many years and selling it year by year. It makes no sense. I would endorse more selling of health insurance like house insurance and car insurance with the proviso, that it would become legal to sell them in five and 10 year plans, because that’s when you can really start getting to dealing with health care versus sickness care.
And then I’ll end where you started, which is on certain high intensity and chronic needs going into tax supported risk pools. We do that today with end stage renal care. Everybody that is on dialysis is ultimately covered by Medicare irrespective of their age or income. So we do have that element there. And the risk, to me, would be it would still leave the most vulnerable parts of the population, the elderly, the ill, on the government risk pools, subject to a tax supported plan, and a one size fits all, but allow those fortunate enough to be healthy, to take the benefits of the innovation and experience of the private market. And thus, I would rather see regulation to make sure that that private market is available with the proviso that the person is indeed participating in paying premiums and not just trying to enroll when they become ill. That’s probably a little longer than we wanted to go there, but that’s my 2 cents on the matter.
Dean Clancy:
No, that’s great. And I think we basically are in agreement. If there’s any disagreement, it’s minor details. It’s not fundamental. I think the important thing is we both agree that if we simply replaced everything we do now with a size fits all or top down kind of government run approach, we would probably end up with a worse system in a lot of ways, because there would be no innovation or competition with the government payer and it would be expensive. And it would probably make life tough for doctors and nurses and patients. And I’d think that a plan like what you’ve described could probably reach across the aisle and get most Americans who are not at the ideological fringes. And we haven’t talked about how politically feasible these ideas are, but I think they’re actually reasonable. You just have to bring people around to understand that they’re not losing anything, they’re actually gaining something better and it’s still respecting their freedom and choice, and still following the American way of enterprise and innovation.
Rich Helppie:
This is where the Common Bridge comes in, that both major parties have become very adept at attacking each other. We’ve seen ads showing one party, rolling an elderly grandmother off of a cliff and trying to frighten people. And I think if we come together as a populace and say, these are the policy changes we need, we might be able to affect them.
I do want to comment a little bit on the centralized plans that we see around the world. And I’ve been in many other countries and talked with people on the street, people driving cabs, and to executives, and also to government folks. And based on that experience, here’s what I know about the nationally sponsored plans. So first of all, the way they manage budget is by managing access. It’s get in line and you’re going to wait for the hip, the knee, the heart care, et cetera, because they’re only going to do so many of those during a particular budget year. And you wait. That affects the kind of care that a physician can deliver. To my knowledge, all of the national health programs have an ability for their citizens to have a private plan, a supplement to go on top of that. And frankly, the Canadians, prior to the borders being closed for COVID, they had us here and that’s how they deal with their demand for people that have means. So the United States actually is a secondary insurer. The other thing that is underneath some of these plans is that it’s a long time before you see a doctor in a lot of cases. And I can personally attest to multiple times when someone had visited the national system-and I won’t name the country-multiple times, but they weren’t able to see a doctor. They were seeing somebody, a nurse practitioner and such, and finally, in frustration, I’m going to pay the money to go see a doctor and ended up getting treated properly. So the one size fits all plan does not fit all, period.
Let’s move on Dean, a little bit to social determinants of health. We know that that’s one thing, driving the demand. Chris Allen talked about things like water and housing density and exposure to pollutants and such. You and I have been talking today about the actual health delivery and health insurance plans versus the root cause. So when you think about Healthcare Re-imagined, how far upstream do you reach in order to get to those root causes?
Dean Clancy:
Well the answer, I think, is that we have to follow the principles of economics and of human nature and try to remove barriers and end forms of discrimination that lead to unfair and unhappy medical outcomes. We start with the Declaration of Independence-all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights. And from that principle, we can then deduce that it’s wrong to intentionally discriminate against people on any basis like race or creed or even their financial wherewithal, consistent with the market. And from that you realize we’ve got to make sure that people have access to a good education, access to good information about what they should eat and put in their body.
And of course, you should enable people to help each other. So for example, help doctors and nurses actually help patients and in a kind of relatively free environment. And that’s…I started to mention scope of practice earlier. That’s where you let the nurses do everything they’re trained to do, even if it makes the doctors feel like there’s a little bit of competition there-that’s actually healthy. And I’m sure I’m talking at maybe too abstract a level for your question, but that’s where we would start the analysis, is how do we remove barriers so people can help each other.
Rich Helppie:
Well, I think you’ve made a good case for that, and that if we can provide quality around opportunity and housing and such. That kind of is a natural segue over to behavioral health and particularly addiction. We have had on this program discussions around policing, and discussions around jails, and discussions around healthcare. And so much of it comes back around to behavioral health. Under Healthcare Re-Imagined what are you thinking about in terms of behavioral health and particularly addiction?
Dean Clancy:
Well, certainly just to take a first obvious example-tele-mental health. In other words, being able to access mental health and behavioral health services, substance abuse services, using digital technology, helping to remove barriers there. And this can be very important because sometimes for a person who is say deeply depressed and is in conversation with a caregiver, they just want to talk on the phone at 2:00 AM and you need to be able to make that affordable for the caregiver. So that’s just one very small example. We do have a problem in this country of a lot of addiction. Some of that has been fueled by inadvertent government policies. I’ve read, I’m not an expert, but I understand that the Medicaid program, in some ways, has inadvertently helped to fuel the opioid crisis. And if that’s true, then obviously reforms are needed to make sure that we’re not creating those perverse incentives.
And I would just add that there is a role for government to invest in these kinds of things, to help people who are in need, help prevent people from getting into trouble. There’s a lot of stress in our society and that translates into these problems and we have to address those things. If we can have stronger, healthier communities and stronger, healthier families, we’re going to have stronger, healthier children and grownups and things get better. It’s obviously not a simple silver bullet kind of problem. It’s takes a lot of work and thought and investment.
Rich Helppie:
Well said. Dean, I’d like to go into a bit of a lightning round if I can. Just a couple of questions, sir, and just to follow on. How do we approach the realignment of healthcare? And I know there’s been some suggestion to attack it the way we did back in 1988 with the military bases, with the base realignment and closure commission, which is often called BRAC. But Congress looked at a list of military bases that experts had drawn up and said they’re no longer needed. They were able to be removed from certain congressional districts. It was an up or down vote on the entire package. Is that a good way to go after healthcare and what we need to do?
Dean Clancy:
I think so. We learned at the beginning of the pandemic that there were rules in place that didn’t make any sense for an emergency like this. For example, the FDA was requiring, excuse me-the CDC, that’s the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention-was requiring that certain information related to diagnostic tests had to be transmitted to CDC on a compact disc. You couldn’t email it. That was a rule that needed to be updated, obviously.
The FDA, the Federal Food and Drug Administration, which is in charge of approving diagnostic tests for viruses and so on, they basically were very slow at the beginning of the crisis because their system wasn’t set up to move quickly, to just let people go out there and start testing, and then retroactively check to make sure the tests are actually accurate. And so FDA, to its credit actually, stepped aside and said we’re going to take ourselves out of the equation, we’ll let the states monitor this, and we’ll let developers just go out there and do it, they can inform us and we’ll approve retroactively. And if there’s a problem, then we’ll step in. Those were sensible reforms that needed to be made, but nobody thought of it before the crisis. And that was sad because we basically lost six weeks of trying to get eyes on the virus.
So the BRAC idea that you mentioned, basically says why don’t we have some really smart people sit down and look at all the regulations and red tape in healthcare. Now let’s identify ones that don’t make sense anymore, or that may actually be making things worse now. And let’s ask Congress to just vote up or down on getting rid of those. And why the up or down vote? Because if you try to do it rule by rule, there’s always somebody who says, well, actually I think that’s a good idea, let’s keep it. But if you make it a big package, then there are trade off choices that have to be thought through. And basically you say we’re going to trust that these experts-that we trust-have come up with a good solution, and we’re all going to kind of jump at the same time and wave these rules. And it worked with the BRAC process. They were able to finally close the military bases, which they had never been able to close because individual congressmen would form coalitions to protect their own districts. But with the healthcare rules, we think something similar is needed.
Rich Helppie:
Well, I would concur about the up or down vote. And of course, we all remember the Simpson Bowles plan to deal with the federal deficit that never became law, but it’s that kind of compromise that we need to forge. And again, that is what we’re trying to do with the Common Bridge. I can tell you when it comes to the data handling, it’s abysmal. One of the businesses that I was instrumental in, that did not make it as a business, but I consider quite an artistic success, made all of the various health information systems talk to each other, so that a person going from one caregiver to another had their data transmitted so it would appear in the same form when that next caregiver looked into their native system. Had we been able to affect that beyond the 18 million people that we did get on it, when the pandemic hit, we would have a much better picture of how many people are testing positive versus how many tests are positive. But because of the serial nature of the testing, that’s done by the big commercial labs, frankly, I don’t trust the numbers very much, and I’ve been working through what they actually say, but that’s probably a broader topic for another day.
So Dean, before we wrap up, just quickly, if we had implemented some of the Healthcare Re-imagined policies and the COVID-19 pandemic hit, would we be better off, worse off or the same, and how so?
Dean Clancy:
We would be better off because there wouldn’t have been those barriers to rapid deployment of diagnostic testing that I mentioned. There wouldn’t have been any barriers to people using digital tools and tele-health to access their providers. There would have been an ability for doctors and nurses to practice across state lines so that the local licensure laws wouldn’t be an impediment to their providing care in an emergency situation. And we think-and by the way, a lot of these policies I just mentioned were adopted pretty soon after we realized we were in a big emergency-why not make those permanent so that we don’t have to go through the same exercise next time. We’ll be prepared.
Rich Helppie:
Well, indeed. Brian Peters, who is a healthcare policy person throughout his entire career, and now has the Michigan Health And Hospital Association and is also involved with the American Hospital Association, when I posed the question to him, is the health care system designed for the pandemic, his answer was no. And he, actually coming from a slightly different perspective, landed on some of the same policy. Let’s hope that our government can come up with those answers without being forced into it. So, Dean, as we wrap up here today, what did we not cover today that perhaps we should have?
Dean Clancy:
I think we covered a heck of a lot of really interesting ground and I really enjoyed it. I hope your listeners have as well. I would love to encourage folks if they want to learn more about Healthcare Re-imagined to visit our educational website, letsreimaginehealthcare.com, where they can find explanatory videos on some of the issues that we’ve been talking about.
Rich Helppie:
Great. We’ll be sure to post that link as well. Any closing thoughts about best or worst things that we could do from a policy perspective or recommended actions that a person might take in these times?
Dean Clancy:
Well, I can think of two things. One, urge your members of Congress to make the good policy choices of the last few months permanent, and two, listen to the Common Bridge podcast so we can make progress together without extreme ideological differences.
Rich Helppie:
Well, thank you for that, and I would endorse that. This is Rich Helppie with our guest today, Dean Clancy, talking about healthcare and specifically Healthcare Re-imagined. We need to make sure that each of us as citizens are demanding nonpartisan, policy oriented solutions to the issues of the day, and to seize the opportunities of the moment, and to ask those that are in the reporting and media industries to do a better job in relaying that information. This is Rich Helppie with Dean Clancy signing off on the Common Bridge.
Brian Kruger:
You have been listening to Richard Helppie’s Common Bridge podcast. Recording and post-production provided by Stunt Three Multimedia. All rights are reserved by Richard Helppie. For more information, visit RichardHelppie.com.
