Luxury Boxes And Public Dollars: Why Healthcare Executives Need To Up Our Ethics Game – Forbes

The Super Bowl was a popular destination for healthcare executives on their company’s dime last … [+] February. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been.
If the walls of stadium luxury boxes could talk, they’d likely tell the tale of America’s biggest business deals inching forward between sips of single malt Scotch and occasional glances at the field or scoreboard.
Healthcare, of course, is no exception. And neither am I.
Over the years I’ve paid for a few client and partner dinners whose tabs made me uncomfortable.
I’ve been on the other side too, as when a few vendors offered me tickets to this year’s Super Bowl plus some other goodies that were collectively worth $8,000 on the open market.
My first reaction was Sure, why not?
Who wouldn’t want to see Snoop Dog, Jay-Z, Eminem, Mary J. Bilge, and Kendrick Lamar…and the game?
Then I thought about it.
Why not indeed.
On the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with using a well-chosen gift or set of event tickets to help solidify a business relationship or possibly advance a deal.
But when it comes to exchanging corporate business gifts, I’d argue that healthcare companies that are funded with public dollars should be an exception to business as usual—and a highly visible one at that.
In a system that, for all our striving to provide blanket coverage to the neediest, still leaves many millions of people unserved or under-served, and where costs have been rising unmitigated, this practice is simply wrong.
And any private entity that takes public dollars—even $1 of public Medicare or Medicaid spending either directly or through other entities—should be held to a higher standard as a condition of receiving those funds.
And that means no more excessive gifting.
No more US Open boxes, Super Bowl tickets, World Series games.
I’m well-aware that this post will make me an unpopular figure in some health industry circles. And I accept that.
Our industry’s executives—some of them well-compensated people who can easily afford their own tickets—are taking public dollars for entertainment when we should instead be modeling fiscal responsibility and wise stewardship of public funds.
We expect doctors to operate ethically and have implemented stringent transparency and reporting requirements via the Physician Sunshine Payment Act on the gifts they can accept from pharmaceutical and device companies.
Why should we hold health industry executives—leaders of health plans, health systems, pharmaceutical companies, and digital health companies—to other standards?
It’s time for healthcare leaders to take an aligned step forward and commit to not using any public funds on excessive gifts.
It’s reasonably likely that few taxpayers know their money can be used for corporate gifts, and if they did know, roughly zero percent of them would be okay with it, given the massive need for cost relief across the system.
It’s time to shine a brighter light on this practice, which has for too long operated as an open secret, and it’s time to be done with it.
Why now?
Public trust in the healthcare industry continues to decline. The source of that mistrust? As an industry whose consequences are life, death, and injury, healthcare continues to demand “exceptionalism,” but then it acts like any other industry when it suits itself. With big slugs of public dollars at play through Medicare and Medicaid, we should demand more leadership from healthcare industry leaders. And if they aren’t willing to give it voluntarily, Congress should act to legislate it.
At SCAN Health Plan, the company I lead, more than 99% of our revenues come from the federal Medicare program. We have a strict policy around corporate gifts. I’m calling on my industry peers to adopt similar policies, if they have not already done so. Its chief aim is to “avoid even the appearance of improper relationships with vendors or others who conduct or seek to conduct business with SCAN.”
Practically speaking, this means employees are flatly barred from soliciting gifts, but they’re also barred from accepting gifts or courtesies from current or prospective business partners of more than $150 in value per event, and no more than $300 in value annually. Every time an executive from a healthcare company takes in a game or hosts a corporate event with a highly-compensated celebrity, they do more than they realize to undermine faith in the healthcare system and their companies’ ability to deliver lifesaving care to the people who need it.
Rather, they feed the popular notion that private companies are sloppy and irresponsible with public dollars.
They confirm the increasingly-voiced idea that healthcare is a profit-seeking enterprise whose primary interest in sustaining and serving itself rather than serving patients and maintaining the public trust.
I thought about this while watching the Super Bowl from the comfort of my home last February, and while picturing the scene in the luxury box as the hometown team hoisted the Lombardi Trophy.
Whatever FOMO I might’ve otherwise experienced instantly disappeared.
We like to say that healthcare is different because patients are involved.
Let’s start acting like it.

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