Healthcare 2005

Another Year, Another Set of Healthcare Challenges

At Ingram’s, we pay a good deal of attention to the healthcare industry, and with good reason. Healthcare consumes about 15 percent of the nation’s economic output (and the percentage is growing), a comparable percent of the local output, and serves—in many cities and towns in the area—as the single largest employer.

Everyone wants the best healthcare available, not only for themselves and for their families, but also for their fellow citizens. The challenge, of course, is how to pay for it all. In this issue, we meet that challenge head-on.

Our Small Business Adviser focuses on lifestyle changes that can help make healthcare more affordable. The Financial Adviser addresses the issue of long-term care and ways to pay for that. Our list of top nursing home facilities helps bring that issue to life.

A sensitive issue, and one much in the news, is the public financing of healthcare. Our inside look at Medicaid reductions in Missouri, and the media reaction to it, will shed light on what has been a very contentious debate. In this month’s Industry Outlook, healthcare leaders from around the region—Topeka included—address the thorniest of all healthcare issues, the financing of indigent care by the area’s community hospitals. The fact that we were able to recruit major players from the insurance, hospital, long-term care, education and physician communities made the discussion all the more relevant and authoritative.

At the end of the conversation, the reader will have a good grasp on what the healthcare problems are, what the potential solutions might be and what the likelihood is for successful resolution.

This is the fifth year of the Industry Outlook series, and we never cease to be amazed by the ebb and flow of challenges the healthcare industry faces, sometimes acute, sometimes chronic and always pressing.

(front row, left to right)
Barbara Atkinson,
University of Kansas
Medical Center
Dan Rexroth,
John Knox Village
John Hunkeler,
Hunkeler Eye Institute
Barrett Hatches,
Swope Community Enterprise

(second row, left to right)
Cynthia Smith,
Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth
Irene Cumming,
University of Kansas Hospital
Jo Stueve,
Children’s Mercy Hospital

(back row, left to right)
Maureen Dudgeon,
Kansas City University of Medicine & Biosciences
Darrell Moore,
Baptist-Lutheran Medical Center
David Carpenter, North Kansas City Hospital
George Wheeler,
Coventry Health Care
Sam Turner,
Shawnee Mission Medical Center
Ben McCallister,
Mid-America Heart Institute
Jack Kennedy,
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City
Sukumar Ethirajan,
Kansas City Cancer Center
Kent Palmberg,
Stormont-Vail Healthcare