• It costs about $125,000 a year to train a medical resident. That’s the three years or so after their internship and after their med school. According to John Raymond, head of Medical College of Wisconsin at a recent St. Norbert CEO B’fast & Strategy session. When they start the med school at St. Norbert’s, it’s an effort to increase the number of available physicians. Training will be done by many of the local practitioners … and we’ll be able to get a higher share of residents. He also said that if a person attends both his/her med school and residency in Wisconsin, there’s a 70% likelihood he/she will stay here. They’re also going to put four years of med school into three, to reduce the student debt level. This year, they have 7700 applicants for the 204 slots in the beginning med school class in Milwaukee.
Much of the $125,000 is paid by the federal government, which controls where residents can be trained, and how many can be trained ... which restricts the number of physicians we graduate each year.
Thursday, May 1, 2014
Wisconsin Rises To 14th from 20th in Gallup's Wellness Ratings
Most of us read in February that Wisconsin improved to 14th from 20th in the last Gallup/Healthways annual ratings of Population Well-Being, but buried within that report are some interesting points.
The ratings are based on phone interviews with 176,000 people (3651 in Wisconsin), and look at six key areas, only one of which is Physical Well-Beiong (Wisconsin was 18th). The others: Life Satisfaction (25th), Healthy Lifestyle Habits (19th), Work Environment Satisfaction (primarily treatment by supervisors, 26th), Emotional Health (10th) and Access to Basic Needs (6th).
Iowa was singled out as having the most comprehensive official approach to improving health; they embrace a Blue Zones (www.bluezonesproject.com) process that was pioneered by Healthways, a disease management organization.
Among other points regarding how to be successful:
• You need high ratings in (1) learning new and interesting things daily, which meets an important psychological need, and (2)workers using their strengths, resulting in high physical and emotional health, and (3) safe places to exercise.
• For the most part, said the research director, well-being goes up with income (especially for the emotional well-being factor). They hit their peak at about $75,000 a year, and don’t get better after that. Also impactful, even if incomes arren’t high, are educational attainment and low unemployment.
• “Be it politicians, executives, clergy, school principals, grocery store managers or community activists, a well-informed and active leadership is crucial to a state’s success at building an institutionalized, embedded, and sustained well-being culture. …. including a shared and uniform definition of well-being, constant and public vigilance in its advocacy, and a clear message that commitment to it … will never, ever go away.”
The top states: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota and Montana. The worst: West Virginia, Kentucky and Mississippi.
Hilarious!
Earlier this week, it was reported that employees of Media Matters, a non-profit that is a proponent of labor union issues and was founded to counter-interpret conservative misinformation, want to vote to organize as a union represented by a Services Employees union local, the nation’s largest non-manufacturing union. However, Media Matters management, while publicly stating it isn’t “actively opposing” unionization, has hired a high-powered anti-union law firm to work with it. Media Matters has 51 employees, it’s reported, of which 36 have indicated an interest in unionizing. Ironically, the SEIU is a top donor to Media Matters.
AND/BUT: Hypocrisy has no boundaries. In the past two weeks, the EEOC sued Kaplan, the for-profit learning company, for using credit-checks on applicants, saying there was no need to and it resulted in a “disparate impact” on black people. The federal judge found that there was a legitimate business need … and indeed, it is the same credit check process that the EEOC uses on its own applicants.
One more thing, on Regulations …
I heard my U.S. Rep. Reid Ribble, who ran the family roofing business with 150 employees for several decades before running for Congress, say that he has a mission to help his fellow Reps understand the impact of every Regulation that they authorize and gets issued: That every Regulation that applies to that type of business requires someone to analyze whether it applies to it, and if so when, and then to set up up a record-keeping operation around it … and then to assign people to do the things that it requires. In other words, every Regulation adds costs … at the low end in discretionary time (the person can fit in the analysis), but then when “doing” is required, it becomes costs that are passed on to the customer.
How effective is he? Four of the five highest years of rule-making/publishing have occurred in the past four years … at around 80,000 pages. The fifth was in 2008. These pages publicize both the rules that are proposed, as well as when they are finalized.
Back in 1995, I was a delegate to the White House Conference on Small Business, and I watched Bill Clinton and Al Gore show us on a table a stack of 16,000 pages, which represented regulations that had been repealed. I guess it didn’t “take."
Harry Dennis passes away
My boss at TEC, Harry Dennis, 70, passed away last Sunday at his winter place in Vero Beach of complications from a decade-long lung deterioration. He was one of the first employees hired in 1974 (Bob Nourse created TEC I in 1957) and created TEC IV in Madison, which still persists, and became sole owner of TEC Wisconsin-Michigan in 1989; there are seven different TEC/Vistage organizations, but the dominant one is headquartered in San Diego.
More importantly, he embodied, lived and espoused the TEC values around non-commercialized service to our members. As TEC has grown nationally, and now internationally into 14 countries as Vistage , Harry was the Keeper of the Flame, the person who represented what TEC is all about both nationally and internationally. That’s important as these seven entities moved through different ownerships and we fight to maintain the original value proposition.
He hired me as a TEC Chair beginning in 1990.
A Chair’s relationship with Harry (we’re actually independent contractors, not employees) could be tumultuous when he very pointedly railed at us for not providing the value he felt we should to members … but if you were ever in stress either personally or professionally, he couldn’t have been more supportive as you moved through it. That creates loyalty.
We often wondered how come we didn’t “run” TEC as we espoused organizations should be run to our members. Eventually, we figured it out … that Harry truly treated us like family, with full faith and trust (usually).
He struggled for years on what should happen to TEC Wisconsin-Michigan should anything incapacitate him. He shared with us many scenarios. But finally he picked the best one of all: TEC Wisconsin-Michigan would never be sold. It would be held within a trust, and operated from within that trust. The trustees are in Milwaukee, and Priscilla Kemp is our CEO and has been for two years; she’s a 37-year employee of TEC so understands all of our values.
In 2009, he said to us, “I’m hanging around until when Bob Nourse did. (Note: Bob Nourse died at age 94.) That gives me another 25 years of helping this great event with our CEOs continue to grow and unfold …”
We wish he had.
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