Vanderbilt's Larry Van Horn optimistic about shifting employer health ...

Larry Van Horn, executive director of health affairs at Vanderbilt's Owen Graduate School of Management, sees the shift from traditional employer-sponsored group health plans to new models as a positive trend for health care in the United States.

'The past is the future,' Van Horn told a group of Nashville-area health care professionals at Harpeth Capital's annual health care forum Tuesday night, comparing high deductible plans and defined contribution (where employers give employees a set amount of money to purchase from a broader pool of plan options) to the major medical coverage of his youth when insurance only covered high-cost medical services.

Not only will high-deductible health plans and defined contribution models motivate consumers to make smarter choices with their money, Van Horn said, the new models can also help new business models emerge to guide the new sector of the industry.

In that way, he said, 'The future is good.'

Beyond that, however, Van Horn was less optimistic.

He spent much of his talk seeing if he could 'drive [the audience] to drink in 30 minutes,' detailing America's failing health and inability to reconcile spending increases (especially related to entitlements in Medicare and Medicaid) with an insufficient amount of incoming revenue.

'We are impoverishing future generations through consumption of health care, much of which doesn't make people healthier,' Van Horn said.

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Eleanor Kennedy covers Nashville's health care and technology industries.