http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20100226/BIZ01/2270331/GE+chief+seeks+to+cut+health+costs

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LOVELAND - Cincinnati's major businesses should band together to create a health care cooperative of sorts that could lower costs, improve service and possibly be a national model for health reform, General Electric's top executive told area business leaders Friday.

Saying "government can't fix the problem, business has to," GE's Jeffrey Immelt outlined a possible plan that could include combined insurance coverage shared among area companies. The plan would include a wellness treatment and education campaign and a regional health care information exchange between hospitals, doctors and insurance companies. Finally there would be an effort to apply business practices to local hospitals to help improve efficiency and lower costs.

"If this goes on another 10 years, the only employees in Cincinnati will either be working for the hospitals, or lawyers suing the hospitals, or lawyers defending the hospitals," said Immelt, the GE chairman and chief executive officer who unveiled his idea during a speech to the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber's CEO Roundtable group. "What we need to do is take the five biggest (diseases) in this city and we ought to converge all of our benefit plans to have the same standard of care.

"And we need to buy together ... we ought to converge plans to provide the greatest coverage that we can."

The idea hearkens back to a previous local initiative involving GE as well as three other major employers during the early 1990s, when the four companies joined forces to study hospitals in a bid to lower costs.

It also comes just a day after members of Congress met publicly with President Barack Obama to discuss the possibility of salvaging a health care reform plan.

Immelt said he wants a local program to become a prototype to be exported to other GE cities nationally. His proposal is in stark contrast with the current national plan being debated in Congress, even though Immelt serves on President Obama's economic advisory council and recently spent the night at the White House.

"My health care costs are growing between 9-12 percent every year ... and I don't want to one day have to say I can't hire in the U.S. because of high health care costs and not have done anything about it," Immelt said.

Currently, Cincinnati area residents pay an average of $2,211 a year in health care premiums, according to a survey by Hewitt Associates. Local health costs are up $411 from last year and $600 more than the national average.
Making the test case

A native of Finneytown, Immelt said in an interview that he wanted the trial to be made in Cincinnati because the city has the highest concentration of GE employees and retirees of any in the U.S. - more 15,000 people, including 7,100 active workers at Evendale-based GE Aviation, the industrial conglomerate's jet engine maker.

He also said that he hopes other major local companies such as Procter & Gamble and Kroger join in as they did during the 1992 initiative, as well as smaller businesses.

"In many ways, (Cincinnati) is typical ... things we think we can do here are translatable," Immelt said. "But even with our size, (GE is) only 3 percent of the local health care market so we need to join in with all the other local companies. Even with a good health care system like we have here, we need to change the shape of the (cost) curve."

Given its large health care infrastructure business, GE could also benefit by the creation of such health information exchanges as well as improved technology.

Immelt said Blue Ash-based Health Bridge, Inc. could be a good conduit for all the ideas, since it already has connections with area health care providers as well as customers.

The non-profit company works to improve all health care, especially through sharing of information but also to improve treatments, said president and CEO Robert Steffel. He added that GE Aviation is on the Health Bridge board, and that Immelt's idea is an extension of an existing grant application for a stimulus grant for health care information sharing systems.

What Immelt is proposing "is very doable," Steffel said. "He said very explicitly that government can't fix it, that it's up to the community. And this would entail everyone sitting around the table working together."