Apologies for the lack of posting. When you read the first paragraph you’ll figure out why. I’ve been touring around the East Coast talking to various people in the health care business and then on Thursday went to the UK. Or more accurately got on a plane, which sat on the runway at JFK overnight before deciding that it didn’t want to go and dumping all its grumpy passengers on the next plane. I have a few observations about the state of play with physicians, and Medicare.
I spoke with a group of physicians and a separate group of managers and clinical managers in a rural health system in Pennsylvania, and with various industry watchers and participants on New York and Philadelphia. The doctors are (not surprisingly) concerned about malpractice….given the current deal in Pennsylvania where the governor has decided to pay their malpractice insurance for the current year by raising the cigarette tax. If this goes through it’s a temporary win for the Pennsylvania Medical Society, which has billboards up across the state reading “when the last doctor leaves the state the malpractice crisis will be over”. While this may solve some of their problems immediately, it doesn’t resolve the longer-term issues. In my Q&A with the doctors three major points emerged.
1) There was broad if grudging acceptance that though malpractice reform was needed (from the doctors point of view) simply saying that we need a cap on awards for pain and suffering of $250,000 is not good enough, and that some more valid solution needs to be proposed. On physician told me that 20 years ago both sides of the malpractice equation were taken care of– Anyone hurt badly by the system was looked after institutionally (e.g. a child with brain damage from a “bad birth”) Now the parents only option is to see a lawyer and go after the poor OBGYN who just happened to be there at the time. On the other side, the physician I spoke with is so scared of lawyers that he will not give any kind of a reference about a doctor or nurse, especially a bad one, for fear of being sued by that clinician. That’s one reason why it took so long for the New Jersey “Angel of Death” to be discovered). So lawyers are the problem but also for many patients the only solution. I believe that this view romanticizes the “good old days” especially as way back then doctors’ incomes were lower in real terms and the communal support for victims of poor care wasn’t that great. However, we did agree that lawyering may remain the only solution unless physicians do something constructive about it.
So what might that something be? Well, physicians, nurses and pharmacists have a huge amount of public trust. Amazingly enough, politicians, lawyers and HMO managers do not. As a profession, doctors need to spend some of that “trust capital” by developing education for the public about what evidence based medicine is, and also amongst themselves by showing that they are working to implement it. I appreciate that following evidence-based medicine is very tricky, but the profession needs to level with the public about the fact that not every doctor is practicing state of the art medicine, and that although agreeing on what constitutes EBM is complicated, physicians as a whole are dedicated to working towards that end–rather than simply telling the public that “we have the best health care in the world” and ignoring Don Berwick, the IOM and Michael Millenson.
The real issue is how to do that and to some extent whether they already are doing that. I was accused, perhaps accurately, of identifying organized medicine as only being the AMA. But of course the IOM and the IHI is composed of doctors too, and their work is beginning to have an effect. Many dedicated physicians are working hard to promote the understanding and application of evidence based medicine both among the public and among physicians. The question is how will the public understand this issue and how will that interact with the malpractice issue. If doctors are perceived as simply covering their own rears, and not seen as promoting the best science in the interest of their patients, that “trust capital” may not be there to be spent in ten years time.
2) There were several comments about how much is “too much”. The specter of the Oregon Medicaid insurance experiment (organized rationing for the poor) was invoked. I’d introduced the QALY notion in my talk and one comment I heard was that “we have to get away from the concept that any procedure, test or pill that shows a statistically significant improvement should automatically become standard practice now matter what the cost.” Cost efficiency as a rationale for new Rx introduction has been introduced in the UK, which recently said no to various new drugs for MS and osteoporosis. The concept of introducing that type of assessment to the US is still light years away–we love technology too much for that. But a couple of factors suggest that a compromise might be developing here. First is the slow growth of shared-decision making. Frequently that ends up with a less aggressive course of treatment, because the patient tends to be less interested in a heroic procedure than the physician. The other is the long range state of Medicare, which is eventually going to have too may people at too high a cost to be able to say yes to absolutely everything.