2nd opinion: Malik Hasan's HMO model drove down medical costs once, and the former Pueblo doctor believes he has a remedy for what ails health care now.

• Author: Peterson, Eric

Malik Hasan, the Pueblo doctor who built QualMed Health Inc. into one of the largest health-maintenance organizations (HMOs) in the nation, and who along the way became one of America's most lauded--and loathed--health-care executives, has never believed the United States has faced a "health-care crisis."

"Since 1973," Hasan says of his first years in the United States after immigrating from Pakistan, "I've heard nothing but that the health-care industry and the delivery of health care are in crisis. It is not true.

"Do we have problems? "Yes, we have serious problems," he said. "Do we have solutions? "Yes, we have effective solutions." But "crisis means time is limited," says the now-chairman and CEO of HealthTrio, another Colorado-based company he expects to become a health-care industry giant. "I'm thinking there have been strengths and structural problems all along.

"It's not a limited-time event. There are effective measures that can overcome it."

Hasan is obviously an optimist.

Colorado, along with the rest of the United States, faces a health-care crisis in terms of its businesses, particularly its small businesses, because those businesses can no longer afford ever-rising health-insurance premiums for their employees. And Colorado's business crisis is time limited because rising health-insurance premiums threaten to drive the state's small business out of business--and their employees into the growing ranks of the uninsured.

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New Gov. Bill Ritter, a Democrat, made health-care coverage of the state's uninsured, and especially uninsured children, a platform campaign promise, and yet he regards devising a business solution to the problem as a long-term goal of his administration, rather than an immediate demand. He has said the state needs to conduct a broad-based dialog with all interested parties before crafting a statewide response.

Hasan's voice offers an important contribution to the overall debate. He was once one of Colorado's most powerful people. His voice and opinions were heard nationally, and his record for building a business--he was at times accused of building it ruthlessly--earned him mention in several national magazines and a place in at least one book that profiled him as a "frontrunner" of the industry in terms of a "raw hunger for wealth that shocked competitors."

Yet Hasan also was a pioneer in modern health care.

From Pueblo, he forged the structure of the HMO into a doctor-driven business that chose the cheapest health-care alternative as the best kind of care, and that helped drive down--albeit ever so briefly--the inexorable climb of health-care costs that has plagued the nation for nearly three decades. Hasan retired from QualMed in 1998, one year before the end of a six-year decline in health spending nationally. After 1999, health spending in the U.S. rose to absorb 25 percent of all the nation's economic growth from 2001 to 2005--an estimated total $621 billion. And it hasn't stopped.

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During the time since his retirement, Hasan, now 68, has for the most part stayed out of the health-care limelight, spending most of his time in Denver, Beaver Creek and Las Vegas, where he can also run his new Colorado-based company. He sees HealthTrio, his Englewood-based provider of health-care software, as one of the key remedies for the...