In Season 2 we’ll be drilling down on questions about what works and how to scale. Alan Weil is a great person to kick off this conversation. He is the editor of the premiere health policy journal Health Affairs, previously directed Medicaid in Colorado and led an ambitious health study at the Urban Institute.

We discuss:

• How states use Medicaid to create entirely new delivery systems
• That we should not bank on savings from whole person care
• The keys to successful implementation: focus on customer experience, implement iteratively and have strong feedback loops
• The missed opportunities to understand and solve for the underlying roots of inequity

The conversation ended in an unexpected place - a discussion of governance and power:

“If a pot of funds being used to improve the health of a population is governed by a nonprofit health system, a state or a state authority, a county or a local authority or government or a community based organization, each of those enterprises will begin the process differently, which leads me to believe that they will almost certainly end the process differently … And we don't have a lot of examples in this country have the kind of community governance of resources that I think would be most valuable,"

Relevant Links

Alan Weil’s podcast “A Health Podyssey”

A Conversation on Health Equity with Alan Weil

Commonwealth Fund ROI Calculator for Partnerships to Address the Social Determinants of Health

Building Community Power To Dismantle Policy-Based Structural Inequity In Population Health

Medicaid Transformation: Past, Present and Future with Alan Weil of Health Affairs

The Results of the CMMI Accountable Health Communities Model 1

The Results of the CMMI Accountable Health Communities Model 2

About Our Guest

Alan Weil is the Editor-in-Chief of Health Affairs, the nation's leading journal at the intersection of health, health care, and policy. For the previous decade he was the executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP), an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research and policy organization. Before that, he directed the Urban Institute's Assessing the New Federalism project, one of the largest privately funded social policy research projects ever undertaken in the United States; held a cabinet position as executive director of the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing; and was assistant general counsel in the Massachusetts Department of Medical Security. He earned his bachelor's degree from the University of California at Berkeley, a master's degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Follow Alan Weil @alanrweil on Twitter for the latest developments in health policy and Health Affairs.