“The game is afoot, eh, Watson?” This could have been a line spoken by future U.S. House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, who ran an ad blitz for Democrats during the first NFL game this week. The point of the ad blitz was to counter President Trump’s promise during the Republican convention to give every American $5,000 if the Republicans win the midterms. Notwithstanding these political games, the “game is afoot” line is spoken by Daniel Craig in the movie Knives Out, a classic whodunit murder mystery movie where Craig plays the fictional “world’s greatest detective” Benoit Blanc. It is a different kind of mysterious game in health tech policy that I will focus on in the One Thoughtful Paragraph below.
We are not playing games on this day, after what happened 25 years ago on September 11:
- There is a lot of health policy news to report, and Maverick Health Policy is collating and translating all of it for our clients and MyMaverick subscribers. But I always struggle to do work on this day every year. My now 25-year-old daughter was 7 months old on September 11, 2001, when I was working at a law firm next to the White House and her father was working at a House office building next to the U.S. Capitol. She is living in New York City now. I have no interest in re-living the terror of that day and equally no interest in ignoring what happened as if it doesn’t matter. So, I will skip the regular news section and simply refer you to this: https://www.911memorial.org/marking-25th-anniversary
“You’d think it’d be like a game show, but think of it as a community theatre production of a tax return.” This is how the droll, world-famous detective, Benoit Blanc, explains an anticipated will reading to another movie character in Knives Out. Normally, the reading of a last will and testament is quite boring, just like health policy activity is traditionally quite ho-hum. But right now, health tech policy is anything but boring. I moderated a fascinating panel with a health AI expert and leaders from the AMA, the National Academy of Medicine, and Aidoc, who talked about the current reality of AI being used in clinical settings and what the near-term future holds. And in case anyone confuses this for just talk – there is money making these ideas real. At our investor-focused event yesterday, Maverick and Goldsand Friedberg featured speakers who explained how payers are paying and investors are investing in AI to modernize our health care system. It all reminds me of what Chris Klomp – who is going to be in confirmation hearings next week for the position of HHS Deputy Secretary – said early and often for the past year: CMS wants to incentivize activity that focuses on prevention instead of only paying for (expensive) time-based or volume-based activity when people are already really sick. It sounds a lot like what Democratic leaders have said, but they used different words: pay for value rather than fee-for-service. The difference is not political philosophy, but timing; today, a whopping one in three Americans use AI chatbots or online searches for health information, like researching health symptoms and figuring out what their lab results mean. The truth is that technology, deployed wisely, can help our health care system that has posed such a complex mystery of problems for so many years for both political parties. It is like what Benoit Blanc wisely explains in the Knives Out movie: “The complexity and the gray lie not in the truth but what you do with the truth once you have it.”
