Jeffrey Immelt0:06
You've got a lot going on in the world. I really like this business, I like the industry, I spent time in the business, I think a lot about it. I think it's a good face for the company. It's important that we do it well. I think what you see today is a little bit, from where I sit, a need to kind of rejuvenate our own business—a way to kind of, in some ways, reset, reboot if you will, what it means to be GE Healthcare in the environment where we've had to play a lot of defense over the last five years. We've had the Deficit Reduction Act, FDA invasions—I could just go down the list—stimulus, reform, all those things going on. And with our own team and with our customers, what does it mean to be GE Healthcare? What is our vision going to be in a different world, not believing that it's going to go back to where it was in 1997 or 1999, but what can it be? So that's really where we came up with the notion of Health Imagination, which really has to do with more R&D spending but a focus on R&D in different places—some of the same places but some different places. More products, more price points, more information technology, more services, more solutions, a whole series of things like that. A focus on our own employee base, so for the first time in more than 20 years we're going to change the GE Healthcare plan—it's going to be a pretty comprehensive and pretty focused change. Ability to engage with our customers and with governments in terms of where healthcare policy is going to go. We're trying to fly those under one big banner called Health Imagination, then try to change and reset what we want to do in the future in healthcare. But this is a core GE business. We probably spend close to $3 billion on employee healthcare costs, so we're embedded in this industry. It's like a marathon. When I was 25, 26 years old, I decided I wanted to run a marathon once in my life. I lost weight, trained, and I ran a marathon in about four hours in Washington, D.C., and I really almost died—I tripped across the finish line. That's what Obama's going to feel like when he finishes this healthcare bill. It's going to be like finishing a four-hour marathon being slightly overweight. And then I think the question is what happens post-reform. The way I kind of think about the company is not so much the reform—it's going to be fragmented, it's not going to be big, it's going to impact us in some places, it might help us in others. But I think about what happens after reform. And this is not meant to be self-serving—I really think it gets back to the companies. I really actually think that where healthcare reform is going to have to take place is going to be about the companies, because in the end we have the most skin in the game. In the end we're going to have to change the way our employees buy healthcare, and I don't know how many of you—in GE towns we have to change the way our providers work with us. I try to explain this to the president and other people, to say, 'Guys, look, we are a big employer in Louisville, Kentucky. Louisville has 15% unemployment. Our healthcare pass-along to us this year was up 15% by our local providers, because they say, look, our Medicare cuts go down, you have to pay more.' So that's the healthcare system—you take one thing away, it's not like the cost actually comes out of the system, it gets pushed around. We care deeply about how that all takes place. So I really do think employers are going to have to get together. I can very much envision the 25 biggest employer payers in the country getting together sometime next year and really pooling and deciding what they want their healthcare to look like—converging on certain healthcare plans across 25 big companies in the US and coming to all of you and saying, we're all self-insured, we all have these big legacy costs that we have to manage, we all have a certain number of people that have diabetes and other chronic disease, we all spend 65% of our healthcare spend on chronic disease. I can see something like that maybe happening in the next year post-reform in order to find ways to control our own healthcare costs.
