Magic Doesn’t Make Things Happen
I had breakfast yesterday with Sam Valenti, the founder and creative mastermind behind Ghostly, a Grammy Award-winning record label and art curatorial powerhouse. Sam, described his role to me like this:
My job is to pay attention and find art and music that’s cutting edge and important. Then, I can’t just will things to be created. I view my job as the coin pusher. I’ve got to push coins in on a daily basis, and occasionally a bunch of coins fall.
Without Sam putting coins in and pushing, nothing gets created. In other words, magic doesn’t make things happen.
It made me think about my role at Sherpaa, but more importantly, who is putting coins into the healthcare game and pushing things forward? And I’m not talking about who is pushing healthcare forward and making more money out of the healthcare game. I’m talking about:
Who is pushing healthcare forward so patients get a better experience, better quality, and better value for the care they receive?
Here’s who’s pushing the coins forward right now:
Notice there’s no American Patient Association in that mix. All of those players above are in this game to maximize value to their shareholders. And shareholders are only concerned about larger and larger returns, which equates to more and more expensive premiums coming out of your pocket. The government is supposed to be the American Patient Association, but do you really think they have the long-term bipartisan competency to make healthcare great again™?
So who is going to fix healthcare? Who is going to start delivering care to you that increases the value of your healthcare dollar? We’ve really only got four options here:
- Government
- Insurers
- Employers
- Individuals
Think long and hard about your own personal healthcare and answer the question:
“What has been created in the last 10 years that directly impacted my experience as a patient and offered me better value for my money?”
Do you believe the government will create a better experience for you? How about your insurance company? Is your insurance company offering a more personalized, transparent experience for you at increasingly affordable prices? What about your employer? What have they done for you that made your healthcare experience markedly better? Or what about you? Have you been able to purchase better care at more affordable prices? Think hard about who’s going to do this for you.
I personally think it can only be you. You’re the coin pusher. If you don’t take some effort to make better things happen for your own life and your own experience, coins aren’t going to fall for you and they’re not going to fall for the rest of Americans. You can’t depend on the government (as we’ve seen, big changes like this take longer than a 4 or 8 year administration). Insurance companies aren’t innovators no matter how much they pay for cute cartoony subway ads or how much they think an app with the same cute UI/UX will fix healthcare. Employers have been sold a litany of do-nothing solutions for long enough they’re convinced no matter what they do, their premiums will still keep going up. And individuals are just starting to get hip to the fact that healthcare is getting more and more out of everyone’s reach now that we all have to spend the first few thousand dollars on care out of our own pocket.
Remember, magic doesn’t make it happen. It’s all about implementation. No matter how many warm fuzzies you get thinking about some political agenda, it doesn’t change what the agenda actually means. We can want something until we are blue in the face, but nothing will actually happen unless we do it. Likewise, you cannot vote to make things magically happen in society. You can only vote to give power to the government to do things and hope for the best. Next time you hit the polling station for a proposition, ask yourselves whether whatever you are voting for is worth the cost of implementation. Ask yourself whether whatever you are voting for has any practical chance of happening at all. We could all vote by consensus that everyone gets a Mazzerati and a trip to Mars. Magic doesn’t make it happen.
I’m betting on us. I’m betting on patients. And I’m betting on this new ecosystem of services like Sherpaa (and Sherpaa’s new soon-to-launch Market of curated goods and services) that are springing up to meet our demands of a better experience and more value. Until we stop paying our premiums (because we can no longer afford them), the status quo beholden to shareholders, will continue to slowly milk us dry. It’s got to stop. And we’re the only ones who can make that happen.
