635 - Dr. Meena Seshamani is on a Quest to Make Medicare Personal
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 13 July 2023
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With 64 million people enrolled, billions of dollars in payouts, and millions of clinicians and health systems in the mix, it's hard to see how Medicare policies translate to the doctor's office or the bedside. But Medicare director Dr. Meena Seshamani, an ear, nose, and throat surgeon and a health economist, is working to change that. Dr. Seshamani talked with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about improving Medicare on a large scale while making it more accessible and helping individual patients live better, healthier lives.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, |
| 0:05.9 | where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges. |
| 0:16.3 | If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.edu. |
| 0:23.8 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:32.1 | This is Lindsay Smith Rogers. Today, the Medicare program. |
| 0:36.7 | Dr. Mina Seishamani, the director of Medicare, |
| 0:39.4 | is both an ear, nose and throat surgeon, and a health economist. She joins Dr. Josh |
| 0:44.5 | Sharfstein to talk about her agenda for Medicare, from helping individual patients to providing |
| 0:49.6 | care at a grand scale. Let's listen. Dr. Mina Seishamani, thank you so much for joining me in public |
| 0:57.1 | health on call to talk about Medicare. Thank you so much for having me. Now, you are the director |
| 1:04.6 | of the Center for Medicare at CMS, which is an enormous responsibility. How long have you been in that role? Yes, I have |
| 1:12.7 | been in this role for almost two years, July 6th, it will be two years. And before that, |
| 1:20.0 | tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. What were you up to? I am a physician, so I'm an |
| 1:26.1 | otolaryngologist or an ear, nose and throat surgeon, and I also have my PhD in health economics. |
| 1:32.4 | And so I have spent time through my career, both working in the policy sphere and also taking care of patients. |
| 1:41.1 | So I worked in the Obama administration where I led implementation of the Affordable |
| 1:46.5 | Care Act in the Office of Health Reform at the Department of Health and Human Services. |
| 1:51.5 | And most recently, I was on the leadership of MedStar Health, which is a large health system |
| 1:58.4 | in the Maryland, D.C., Virginia area, focusing on care transformation |
| 2:04.8 | and how do we provide care in a different way to keep people healthy? I also was taking care |
| 2:12.1 | of patients as an ear, nose and throat physician at Georgetown. So I think of people who are great clinicians and trained for many years and take great care of patients. |
| 2:25.8 | And I think of people who are health policy experts and you are in both groups, Dr. Shai Shai Shemani. |
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