Page 198 - The Drucker Lectures

23

On Health Care

1996

ost of the talk in the country is a little alarmed because
Mit leads with an “American health-care crisis,” and actu-
ally every health-care system in every developed country today is
in severe crisis. The Japanese are much worse than we are. The
Germans are probably worse than we are. The British are in part
doing very well, but the hospitals are in turmoil. And when you
have a worldwide epidemic, you are not looking for individual,
national problems. You have a systems failure.
Let me say that I fell into health care in 1947 when I lived
in Vermont and worked at a small college [Bennington], and
they put me on the board of the Vermont–New Hampshire Blue
Cross. And we had the annual meeting, 60 miles north of where
I lived, and it was the kind of a winter with a good April blizzard,
and so I stayed home. And that’s when they elected me secretary-
treasurer. And that is how I got into health care. So I’ve been
around it for almost 50 years now, but always on the fringes.
And let me say that that only thing that could have happened to
the health-care system is crisis. You cannot have the kind of growth
we have had, in which you totally outgrow your foundations.
My colleague at that small college was an economist. He was
president, and I was chairman of the faculty, and during World
War II when we both had wartime jobs, we ran the place to-
gether. And he told me again and again that in 1929, when he

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