Listening to my colleague Dale Rogers present at today's meeting of the Rutgers Center for Supply Chain Management Advisory Board on Megatrends in Supply Chain--he had good supply chain finance data on accounts payable, accounts receivable, and inventory in a variety of key sectors, as well as points to make on overall economic trends and their implications-- got me interested in the idea of evaluating public policy in major areas like health care reform, education reform, and financial regulation through a supply chain lens. It strikes me that the discipline may have the right blend of terms, efficiency/optimization concepts, and human factor/relationship concepts to be a salient part of the public policy discussion in a way that it's not now.
Currently, SCM might come up in the public policy arena in the non-normative, background context of an ISM study of purchasing--but the discipline is not, it seems to me, in the forefront of public policy discussion the way that finance/economics, law, and, to some degree, management are. How would it work to analyze public policy through a supply chain lens? Well...I don't claim to have a clear line, not least because I'm a business law/business ethics person rather than a true SCM person. My guess is that the right way to think about it is to consider a particular policy area, so let me take a very preliminary stab at that, using health care as the policy area.
A few potential ways to relate SCM concepts to health care policy:
1. The mega-debate the US will be having over the next several years or possibly decades on the merits of Medicare as it now is versus the Ryan plan or some other proposal for vouchers strikes me as having interesting analogies to a make or buy decision, with the government having to decide how much to "make" the good of health for an individual internally though something like the U.K.'s NHS versus sourcing or "buying" that good through individual voucherization or through private insurers.
2. The question of how much to uphold the "pay for everything, with deductibles" employer health insurance system that now prevails in the US health care system compared to "catastropic only" insurance provided by the government or by private firms strikes me as having analogies to inventory size and turn time issues in SCM. Just as Just In Time, etc. changed inventory practices, reforms might change "inventory" in the health care supply system for the better.
3. The question of how sustainable the health care system (or a specific health care public policy such as that in Massachusetts or at a particular company) is/isn't over time strikes me as possibly analyzable through an approach parallel to what my colleague Prof. Rogers was doing today with accounts receivables, accounts payables, and inventories. How bad (or relatively not so bad) are the comparative situations of different countries, or state programs, or individual health insurance plans?--the supply chain finance tools I was hearing about today seem potentially applicable to these policy issues.