Former GE CEO Jeff Immelt: To Combat Costs, CEOs Should Run Health Care Like a Business | Medxoom Skip to main content

Former GE CEO Jeff Immelt: To Combat Costs, CEOs Should Run Health Care Like a Business

Jun 2019
Dan

As healthcare costs continue to rise for employers, former GE CEO Jeff Immelt argues that one of the most effective ways to spark change is from CEOs themselves. If companies start to treat their own health care benefits like a business, then we should start to see some positive change in cost reductions. Medxoom helps companies lower costs, improve quality, and increase employee health benefits satisfaction with easy to use modern marketplace technologies.

From Fortune:

“One of the failures of the U.S. healthcare system is that employers haven’t been very good purchasers of healthcare,” Immelt said. Run that effort like a business, and “that will be a catalyst…for how world change gets made.”

“The former CEO said it took the 2008 global financial crisis for him to really scrutinize how much GE was spending on health care costs. It had grown 7% annually over more than two decades. ‘If a relatively big company only does that well as a purchaser, there’s something that’s fundamentally broken,’ he said. ‘You can move the needle, but you have to be willing to take the risk. And it has to start with the CEO.’

That could include changing the company’s benefits, boosting awareness, negotiating, or just looking at the incredible spread of costs between individuals in different cities. Some therapies in the U.S. health system “have been transformed in the last 25 years,’ Immelt said. Yet ‘we still spend $0.25 of the dollar on administrative costs.’

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