The Health Care Sector’s Long Recession

I think Jennifer Palcher-Silliman was slightly embarrassed a couple of months ago when she told me that the board of directors of the Healthcare Convention & Exhibitors Assn. had decided that nobody speaking in a public session during HCEA’s Annual Meeting & Exhibition June 13-16 in Tampa, Fla., could be directly quoted by any journalist covering the meeting without his or her specific permission (and, since I was one of only two members of the media on the registration list, that meant me).

Palcher-Silliman has been the organization’s director of communications for several years, has a master’s degree in journalism and – I think – knows what a peculiar policy it was to implement. I’ve seen a lot of unusual situations during the past couple of decades that I’ve been a reporter and an editor, but having the remarks of people speaking to audiences of – in some cases – several hundred people be entirely off the record likely was to be a silly first of its kind.

Still, I didn’t think it was going to be much of an issue. Palcher-Silliman volunteered to poll speakers in advance of the meeting to confirm they were happy to have their remarks be on the record. Even when she didn’t get responses from the majority of people, I had little doubt they would agree when I personally asked them at the meeting.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Most of the experts on their topics – be it exhibit booth design or negotiating hotel contracts or, yes, the PhRMA Code – took on the look of a deer caught in the headlights when I asked if they minded being quoted.

Don’t worry though. You’re not missing much. Most of the people I spoke with at the HCEA meeting seemed to be so anxious about how much they didn’t really know of issues facing their little niche of the industry that repeating what they said wouldn’t help you anyway.

The HCEA event was the second of three industry meetings I attended last week. It was bookended by the Exhibition & Convention Executives Forum in Washington, D.C., and the Exhibition Services & Contractors Assn. Summer Educational Conference in Puerto Rico. When asked for an assessment of how their businesses were doing, the average attendee at both of those meetings gave me some version of “Not great, but we’re going to survive.”

At HCEA, it was some version of “I think I’m going to lose my job.”

The problem wasn’t just low attendance at their meetings (because it’s not that low) or a drastic need to change their way of doing things because of new restrictions on how they could market their products to doctors.

By coincidence, HCEA exhibitors were meeting just as President Obama was unveiling his proposals to overhaul the nation’s health care system. In the years-long-run-up to his proposals, most of the talk has been of what an expensive item health care has become.

Many of the changes to the way in which pharmaceutical and medical device makers are able to market their products to doctors are motivated by that. Misguided or not, the public believes taking a doctor out to dinner or giving him or her lots of free pens and tote bags is not a wise use of money.

The fact that most of the abuses of the old system of romancing doctors into prescribing a particular medicine occurred far away from a tradeshow booth has been overlooked, and HCEA meeting attendees – exhibitors and the show managers who love them – feel they are being victimized as an unintended consequence.

The truth – after they get past the hyperventilating – is that there still is plenty to talk about in a tradeshow booth that doctors want to listen to, and there always is going to be a need for health care professionals to go to their specialties’ annual meetings to learn about new developments in how to help their patients.

Unfortunately, for the time being, they’ve decided an I-know-nothing-and-you-can’t-repeat-that attitude is their best defense.

Here’s hoping the health care sector joins the mature professionals in other parts of the tradeshow industry in accepting current realities with a sense of optimism about the future. Otherwise, it could be a long recession for them.