What Are The Objectives of The Healthcare Bill Anyway?
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010One of the first things I teach executives in decision making is to clearly define your objectives before you start formulating alternatives and solutions. The healthcare bill that Congress is struggling with provides us with a good case study of how not to go about making a decision. They never agreed on their objectives, and as a result the pending legislation is a mess, trying to achieve many different objectives. The bill is so complex because there are provisions for everyone’s different objectives. If only they had taken the time to agree on the objectives up front instead of jumping immediately into the solutions, we would probably have at least something in place now.
In my book Business Decisions I discuss the how to define the objectives when making group decisions. You need to have clear and specific objectives for a decision. If you try to achieve too many objectives (as Congress is doing), you inevitably get tied up into a decisions mess without consensus (as is the case now) because you lost sight of what it was you were trying to do in the first place. Let’s say that Congress agreed that reducing the cost of healthcare was the objective. The benefits of this would be obvious: lowering the premiums for everyone, reducing the cost of Medicare and Medicaid, and then making it more affordable to expand healthcare coverage as the next objective. After agreeing to the objective, they then could put the alternatives for achieving this objective on the table and discuss how these best achieve the objective of lowering healthcare costs. I believe that they then would have extensive bi-partisan agreement because the bill would be fact-based, instead of being based on everyone’s individual and differing objectives.
The failure of healthcare reform is not based on political differences. It’s a failure of the competency of our leaders to know how to make important decisions.
What are the objectives of the healthcare bill anyway?