By Phillip Longman

Conservatives love to apply “cost-benefit analysis” to government programs—except in health care. In fact, working with drug companies and warning of “death panels,” they slipped language into Obamacare banning cost-effectiveness research. Here’s how that happened, and why it can’t stand.

Why are you reading this when you could be doing jumping jacks?

And how come you’ve gone on to read this sentence when you could be having a colonoscopy?

You and I could be doing all sorts of things right now that we have reason to believe would improve our health and life expectancy. We could be working out at the gym, or waiting in a doctor’s office to have our bodies scanned and probed for tumors and polyps. We could be using this time to eat a steaming plate of broccoli, or attending a support group to help us overcome some unhealthy habit.

Yet you are not doing those things right now, and the chances are very strong that I am not either. Why not?

Continue reading “The Republican Case For Waste In Health Care”

By Ashish Jha, MD

In 2006, Governor Mitt Romney signed Chapter 58 of the Acts of 2006 entitled “An Act Providing Access to Affordable, Quality, Accountable Health Care.” It has been described by many names, including Massachusetts Healthcare Reform (MHR), Romneycare, or simply, as the template for the Affordable Care Act. The goal of the act was straightforward: to ensure near-universal access to health insurance for citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The bill quickly led to insurance expansion: by 2010, 94.2% of adults under 65 had health insurance, an 8 percent increase over the 86.6% in 2006. By all accounts, the goals of insurance expansion were met.

But the bill has not been without controversy. There have been two main concerns: first, that the bill did too little to control rising healthcare costs. The cost crisis led to the 2012 bill that many refer to as “Mass Health Reform 2.0” – formally called Chapter 224 of the Acts of 2012. Its focus is to curtail healthcare spending, and while reasonable people have reasons for skepticism about the likelihood of success, that’s a topic for another day.

Continue reading “Did Massachusetts Health Care Reform Hurt Access To Care For the Previously Insured?”

By Martin S. Gaynor

There’s been a great deal of discussion about health care payment reform. Prominent in this discussion is “Pay for Performance” (P4P). The idea is simple — rather than pay providers based on volume of care (fee-for-service) or number of patients (capitation), tie their payment to a measure(s) of performance. There has been substantial concern about the quality of care delivered to patients, so pay for performance appears to make a lot of sense. Don’t we want to reward providers for good performance? Shouldn’t this encourage them to provide high quality care?

Unfortunately, this is not as straightforward as it might appear. While the idea of pay for performance is very appealing and intuitive, there are some major pitfalls in implementation.

Continue reading “The Promises and Pitfalls of Pay for Performance”

By Charles Ornstein

My father, sister and I sat in the near-empty Chinese restaurant, picking at our plates, unable to avoid the question that we’d gathered to discuss: When was it time to let Mom die?

It had been a grueling day at the hospital, watching — praying — for any sign that my mother would emerge from her coma. Three days earlier she’d been admitted for nausea; she had a nasty cough and was having trouble keeping food down. But while a nurse tried to insert a nasogastric tube, her heart stopped. She required CPR for nine minutes. Even before I flew into town, a ventilator was breathing for her, and intravenous medication was keeping her blood pressure steady. Hour after hour, my father, my sister and I tried talking to her, playing her favorite songs, encouraging her to squeeze our hands or open her eyes.

Doctors couldn’t tell us exactly what had gone wrong, but the prognosis was grim, and they suggested that we consider removing her from the breathing machine. And so, that January evening, we drove to a nearby restaurant in suburban Detroit for an inevitable family meeting.

Continue reading “How Mom’s Death Changed My Thinking About End-of-Life Care”

By Martin S. Gaynor

A recent article in Time magazine by Steven Brill, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” is a brilliantly written expose of the excesses and outrages of health care pricing. In reaction to the story, some have suggested the price controls are the appropriate (or the only) way to rectify the situation. A recent story in the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, “Steven Brill’s 26,000-word health-care story, in one sentence,” suggests that US health care costs and cost growth are so high because we do not use rate setting, i.e., price controls.

In fact, I think it’s not easy to establish whether that is indeed the case. We don’t get to use randomized controlled trials for health policies or systems, so it’s difficult to figure out how effective a policy like rate setting is. Let me start with some simple examinations of patterns in data to see if something jumps out that strongly supports (or contradicts) the assertion that price controls reduce health care costs.

Continue reading “Are Price Controls the Answer?”

By Elizabeth Dzeng, MD

On Christmas Eve, I took care of a patient who had just undergone surgery for an infected artificial shoulder. He was to be discharged on intravenous antibiotics three times a day for six weeks. This is a pretty common treatment. Patients are generally able to give themselves this medication with the help of a home care nurse who visits once a week. The total cost of this is approximately $7000 for nursing visits, antibiotics and supplies ($120 per visit for eight nursing visits plus $143 per day for antibiotics)

The social worker informed him that Medicare would not pay for home care nurse visits or supplies. BUT, Medicare pays for inpatient rehabilitation, which he would be eligible for to receive these antibiotics. Given the choice of paying $7000 for home administration versus $0 for inpatient rehabilitation, naturally he chose inpatient rehabilitation.

The problem is, is that his inpatient stay costs taxpayers approximately $21,000. $350 for room and board plus additional costs for antibiotics and supplies, totaling approximately $500 a day. Furthermore, although he was well enough to be discharged home before Christmas, he needed to stay until he could be placed in rehab. Because of holiday scheduling, most rehabilitation facilities were not accepting admissions. Thus, he had to stay in the hospital an extra four days in the hospital over the weekend and holidays. Given that the average cost of a hospital stay is $2338 in Maryland that added an additional $9352 or so of unnecessary expenses.

In sum, because financial incentives encouraged my patient to spend $0 rather than $7000 out of pocket, Medicare spent an unnecessary added $30,000 on his hospitalization and care.

Continue reading “How Much are Misaligned Incentives in Health Care Costing Tax Payers?”

By Leslie Kernisan, MD

Do they need a PET scan to confirm the presence or absence of amyloid plaque?

More importantly, would doing such PET scans make meaningful impacts on patients’ health?

Those are the questions that a Medicare expert panel recently considered, and their impression, after carefully reviewing lots of high-quality research, is that we don’t yet have evidence supporting the benefit of using the PET scans. Unsurprisingly, some experts disagree, including a working group convened by the Alzheimer’s Association. This group of experts reviewed the evidence and common clinical scenarios, and concluded that in certain select situations, use of the PET scan would be appropriate. (See their guidelines here.)

As someone who evaluates many memory complaints, I’m certainly interested in Medicare’s inquiry, and in whether they’ll decide to cover the scan. (The NYT’s New Old Age Blog has a nice summary of the debate; a good read if you haven’t seen it yet, esp the comments.)

Also, I blogged last fall about how I thought the new scan could and wouldn’t help clinicians like myself evaluating cognitive complaints, especially in those who likely have early dementia. In particular, I commented on the difficult period of uncertainty that we often go through, as we wait to see if subtle problems progress or not.

Would the PET scan meaningfully help with that period of uncertainty? Hard to say, and it hasn’t yet been tested. I myself think that this period of uncertainty can be pretty hard on families, but measuring this burden is tricky. (Much easier to measure hospitalizations and utilization!)

I also suspect that it’ll be hard to prove benefit from “knowing earlier,” in large part because our healthcare system is currently so poorly equipped to meaningfully help people with a new dementia diagnosis.

Which brings me to the part of this story that has me annoyed.

Continue reading “The Four Things You Should Absolutely, Positively Do For Somebody at Risk of Developing Alzheimer’s”

By Robert Centor, MD

The RUC is an easy target. The RUC is flawed. But the RUC is not the problem. Several bloggers have written extensively about the RUC – How the RUC Escaped a Challenge to Our Deeply Flawed Reimbursement System and US Senate Subcommittee Asks What the RUC is About.

In no way can I defend the payment schedules that the RUC has proposed to Medicare. I can defend their recent changes. Radiology payments decreased last year; interventional cardiology payments decreased last year; and many other procedures have decreased dramatically. The relative payments are still wrong (in my opinion), but the RUC actually has been responsive to criticism. They have increased primary care payments (admittedly not enough).

But if one studies the problem carefully enough, one must decide that the idea of paying per episode almost must lead to gaming the system. Forget the RUC, the entire idea of time independent episode based payment must lead to worse medical care and higher costs. If physicians can make more money by doing more, then some will.

Practice administrators push primary care physicians to see more patients each day. If we can decrease the time spent per patient from 20 min to 15 min then we could see up to 8 more patients in an 8 hour day. Our overhead has not changed – hence the marginal financial benefits are huge.

But any honest physician will tell you that the result is rushed medical care. Do we want our surgeon trying to do 5 surgeries today rather than 4? Do you want to be the 5th patient? Continue reading “The RUC is a Symptom. RBRVS is the Disease”

By Rob Lamberts, MD

I was furious. I went to the office on Sunday to see what work the electrician had done (and to discuss decor issues with my wife), and my office was deserted. The inspection was supposed to happen on Monday, allowing me to get furniture in the office and see patients on Tuesday.  A text message back from my contractor said that the electrician would be in on Monday and the inspection would happen on Tuesday.  Apparently he didn’t realize I was so ambitious (read: crazy) to see patients so soon after construction was completed.  Apparently my panic wasn’t obvious to him.

On Sunday I broke with my usually placid demeanor (read: codependent) and expressed my emotions on the issue quite clearly.  Many panicked calls from supervisors and electricians later (read: effusive apologies and promises to fix things), and the reality had not changed: inspectors would not be coming until Tuesday, and so my opening, already a month after I planned, would wait one more day.  What a terrible way to start my new practice: canceling appointments on my first day.

Then I realized something: I don’t need an office to do my job.  One of the things I am trying to overturn is the practice of requiring all care to be conducted in the exam room.  Why can’t people talk to their doctor on the phone?  Why can’t they email questions?  Why not videoconferencing for visits?  Why not texting me a picture of the rash (depending on the location, of course)?  Why hold my expertise hostage to the ransom of an office visit?  So then what’s the big deal of not having an office?

Continue reading “Day One: Not So Grand Opening”

By Leslie Kernisan, MD

A little over a year ago, I found myself burning out and realized that my worklife was unsustainable.

I’d been working at an FQHC clinic, and had become the site’s medical director a few months before. I was practicing as a primary care doc, trying to improve our clinical workflows, problem-solving around the new e-prescribing system, helping plan the agency’s transition from paper charts to electronic charts, and working on our housecalls and geriatrics programs.

All of this was supposed to be a 50% position — plus 5% paid time for follow-up — because I had two young children that I wanted to have some time for, and was also working one day/week for a caregiving website (Caring.com).

Needless to say, this job was taking far more than 55% of my time, and seemed to be consuming 110% of my psyche. I very much liked my boss and colleagues, was learning a lot, and felt I was improving care for older adults.

But I was also irritable, stressed out, and had developed chronic insomnia. And clinic sessions were leaving me drained and feeling miserable: try as I might, I couldn’t find a way to provide care to my (and my patients’) satisfaction with the time and resources I had available.

One evening my 3 year old daughter looked at me and asked “Why are you always getting mad and saying no?”

Good question, kiddo.

A few weeks later, I told my boss that I’d be resigning my position in 5 months. And I started trying to reimagine how I might practice geriatrics.

My current clinical practice, which I launched last October, is the result of that reimagining.

Continue reading “One Woman Brand: How one Doctor Started Over Again With a New Practice, a New Specialty and a Great New Outlook on Life”