Healthcare issues, reforms discussed by Frist, Whalen

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By Wayne Ma | Monday, July 31, 2006 | 1 comment(s)

When U.S. Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., began the Quad-City Times Bix 7 on Saturday morning, he was unsure whether he would finish it.

However, once he started running, Frist said he couldn’t stop.

Running the Bix, which is good for the cardiovascular system, was to promote the importance of individualism and those who want to take control of their own health, Frist added.

“But nobody can ask me what my time was,” he said.

Frist was in town Saturday to help Davenport Republican Mike Whalen moderate a roundtable discussion on healthcare reform held at Thunder Bay Grille, Davenport. Before leaving, Frist — the U.S. Senate majority leader and possible 2008 presidential candidate — handed Whalen a check for an undisclosed amount to help with Whalen’s campaign for Congress.

Whalen, a business owner who founded the Iowa Machine Shed restaurants and Heart of America Restaurants and Inns, is running for the seat in the 1st Congressional District that soon will be vacated by Republican Jim Nussle, who plans to run for governor.

Whalen’s opponent is Democrat Bill Braley, a Waterloo lawyer. The race is one of those being closely watched nationally this year as both parties try to gain a majority in Congress.

Ten medical professionals from the Quad-City area — ranging from ophthalmologists and chiropractors to the president of an employee benefits company and the vice president of hospital operations for Trinity Health Systems — participated in the panel, which focused on problems doctors and others in the healthcare industry face today.

For Whalen, the goal was to make a real attempt to discuss healthcare issues without the usual set of sound bites, he said. Some topics discussed included liability reform, health-information technology, and price and quality information availability.

Many of these issues prevent consumers from getting access to better health care, Whalen said.

For example, because of a fear of lawsuits, Whalen said, a study by the Journal of the American Medical Association showed 93 percent of physicians in Pennsylvania practiced defensive medicine — behavior identified as the over-ordering of tests, unnecessary referrals and the avoidance of high-risk patients to prevent future malpractice lawsuits.

Additionally, the high cost and lack of interoperability of health information technology also prevents better-quality health care, Whalen said. Although health information technology could increase efficiency and patient safety, the cost versus revenue has prevented many from adopting the technology.

Braley said in a phone interview that the stark difference between the two candidates is that he would have focused first on why 48 million U.S. citizens are without health insurance — rather than discuss liability reform.

But on issues relating to medical professionals, Braley said he would try to address Medicare and reimbursement problems.

“Iowa doctors are getting penalized by providing quality, low-cost healthcare and their reimbursement rates do not reflect that quality care,” he said.

Healthcare, Whalen said, is an important issue because there are a lot of seniors in his district and many headed toward being seniors. In addition, it also will determine whether Americans can compete globally for jobs.

When asked what he thought of Frist’s position on federal funding for an expanded number of human embryonic stem-cell lines — a bill Frist came out in support of last week — Whalen said he respected Frist’s position but sided with the president when it came to whether the research should be federally funded.

Wayne Ma can be contacted at (563) 383-2360 or wma@qctimes.com.