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Even Cleveland Clinic’s CEO feels uncertainty around the impact of healthcare reform

The Supreme Court may have given us an answer on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, but even the big players are still trying to wrap their heads around how it’s going to play out. That was one takeaway today as Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove addressed the National Press Club about healthcare policy […]

The Supreme Court may have given us an answer on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, but even the big players are still trying to wrap their heads around how it’s going to play out.

That was one takeaway today as Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove addressed the National Press Club about healthcare policy in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act.

He started the talk, which was streamed live over on the club’s website, with a laundry list of improvements the clinic has made to improve care, and some re-enforcement of his stance that the healthcare industry must find ways to cut costs, but that some of the pressure on the delivery system should be placed on society to make better lifestyle choices (basically elaborating on his post on the Hill’s Congress Blog earlier this week).

During a question and answer session, the moderator asked Cosgrove how the Affordable Care Act would affect employees and hiring at the Clinic. He took a long pause before answering, “I don’t think we know yet how the Affordable Care Act is going to affect us.”

It’s certainly not the most provocative thing that Cosgrove, who’s criticized certain components of the act like comparative effectiveness research and proposed federal rules for ACOs, has said.  But if nothing else, he re-enforced to the rest of us that although hospitals are supposed to be moving forward with measures spelled out in the ACA, even those leading the pack aren’t entirely sure where they’re going.

And, he at least gave us a little more to work with than another prominent hospital CEO did last month.

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Here are a few tweets from the talk.