On the front page of its June 2012 edition, the Chinese journal Health News published a poem by Chen Zhu, the minister of health. It read, in part, “The wind and thunder moving health reform across the country herald glad tidings/.../The deep pool is nothing to be afraid of…Heroes dare to cross.” Unorthodox though it was for a strategy memo, it turns out that this call to action may contain good advice for companies.
Those respondents who benchmark their company’s financial performance as much better than peer companies are more likely than average to see health care reform as presenting high levels of opportunity (61% versus 47%). Accordingly, they are more likely to have taken a variety of proactive steps in response to health care reforms.
Executives at these companies also believe that their efforts are paying off: 56% of those with much better financial performance say that steps taken by their firms in response to health care reform have positively affected profits; the equivalent number for the rest of the survey is just 35%. Reform is inevitable. For the “heroes” willing to leap the abyss, health care reform may indeed bring glad tidings.
