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About This Issue
Triage on Health Care System
By Kathleen O'Toole, Editor
In the winter of 2006, one of our sister publications, Stanford Medicine, asked on its cover if the U.S. health care system was a “ticking time bomb.” The magazine quoted experts, some of them from the Business School, who answered yes. But they also left me with the impression that we would likely cure diabetes or end the obesity epidemic before the bomb was defused.
Along came the 2008 presidential race and for a while, a national discussion about health care inequities, quality, and pricing problems gave me hope that reform would move to the front burner in 2009. It still may do so, but as I write this, the signs are not encouraging. That is why I am delighted to read on page 17 that faculty members Andy Grove and Robert Burgelman, along with some unusual suspects from the private sector, are prodding our MBA students to look at ways that an outsider industry might disrupt the status quo and give us reform alternatives not yet on the table. It probably won’t happen tomorrow, but if Steve Jobs at Apple can disrupt and remake the music industry, perhaps some of our graduates will someday build a better health care delivery system. If you are spurred to activism on this issue, our story on page 14 outlines the tough issues that must be faced.
You might also start this magazine by sampling our story on the coffee industry in Guatemala. Author and first-year MBA student Blythe Yee and her companions who took the photographs provide a glimpse of the deeper learning that study trips give when students get their hands dirty at the first link in a supply chain. For another view of study trips, read on page 6 about alums who returned to Thailand to develop a basic business curricula suited to local conditions. They may be updating the Peace Corps, a model that another alum critiques, also on page 6. With all the adventure in our revised curriculum, you might wish you were back here pulling an all-nighter with a pot of Guatemala’s Arabica. Cheers!