Friday, August 21, 2009

Focusing on Cost Savings


One of the tricks you learn when running and business and in seeking financing for new projects is that you must know the details of your projects and most importantly you must know your costs and how you will make money. Furthermore you must distill all of this down to one piece of paper which you can use as a "stage prop" in your pitches and guidance. The single paper must distill facts, numbers, strategy and execution all in one piece. It takes time but it is worth the effort. You can communicate with this result.

The current President has not yet reached that level. He appears to be still campaigning. As stated in a recent Financial Times article by Mort Zuckerman who states:

"We must learn from our history, specifically the birth pains of Medicaid and Medicare under Lyndon B. Johnson. His former policy aide, Joseph Califano, wrote about that experience. “No one had discovered MRIs, PETs, CAT scans, organ transplants, and exotic and expensive cancer chemotherapy. None of us anticipated the extraordinary leap in life expectancy that would lead Medicare to spend a third of its budget during the last year of a beneficiary’s life and Medicaid to pump an even larger proportion of its dollars into nursing homes. Now we are in the early days of a revolution in neurology, genetics, molecular biology, stem cell research, mechanical hearts and lungs, and domino transplants that promise all sorts of [costly] cures that don’t exist today.” In other words, we must be aware of the potential expense of medical discoveries and be cautious about congressional clairvoyance that claims it can project healthcare costs 10 years into the future."

Zuckerman criticizes the current President yet he targets Medicare as doe the current President. Why has no one detailed the specifics and then from the specifics laid out an action plan. The truth of the matter is that there are areas well outside Medicare that costs can be saved.

I have prepared a report detailing many of these areas. The attached Table is a summary of 12 target areas for almost $700B cost reductions and almost 30% of the current expenditures. Medicare is $400 B and only 17%. The last here is a summary, it is that one page statement of what can be done now.