By ANISH KOKA, MD

The Senate has taken its first step to repeal Obamacare.  By a final party line vote of 51-48 the Senate approved a budget resolution setting the stage for rolling back much of the Affordable Care Act.

Consternation reigns among Democrats who have closed ranks and promise catastrophe.

Bernie Sanders, the top democrat to lead the resistance said “I think it’s important for this country to know this was not a usual thing, this is a day which lays the groundwork for 30 million people to be thrown off their health insurance… And if that happens, many of these people will die.”

And so it is that a complex problem comes to be painted in black and white.   To oppose Obamacare is to be for a medical holocaust.  Genghis Khan reincarnated would be unable to wreak a devastation as complete as repeal of Obamacare.

The insidious fact is that this simple phraseology is used as a cudgel by those who well know that the tentacles of a program as complex as Obamacare defies such a simple duality.  Understanding the effect of Obamacare is to understand how politicians flapping their wings in Washington DC creates a hurricane in California.

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By DANIEL STONE, MD

We all fear that phone call.  A medical report turns out the wrong way and life may never be the same.  When that call arrives we all have the same needs:  A doctor who cares, a place to go for treatment and the finances to afford what’s needed.  Starting on January 20^th, some of my patients will join the 20 million whose lifeline to those fundamental needs becomes jeopardized.  

One of my patients facing this threat lost his job and health insurance during the 2008 recession.   Because he’s a diabetic and has a special needs son, no insurance company would sell his family a policy.   Why would they?   Diabetics and others with serious illnesses pose high risks for future health expenses.  Insurance companies make money by avoiding such risk.   After exhausting all the options, he sweated out 18 months with no coverage.   Finally, the roll-out of the California Exchange, funded by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), allowed him to buy an Anthem Blue Cross policy for his family.  

Do we really want millions of our fellow Americans to relive those nightmares?  We all benefit from the ACA’s fundamental commitment: That everyone deserves access to healthcare regardless of their ability to pay.  The policies guided by this principle moved us toward the achievement of universal coverage without changing the existing care of the majority of working families with employer based plans nor those with self-funded coverage.   

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RAY DESROCHERS

Meet Edith Stowe.

An 83-year-old resident of the District of Columbia, Ms. Stowe has made a routine out of her two to three monthly trips to MedStar Health, a Maryland-based nonprofit health system.

After all, her life literally depends on it. Ms. Stowe has chronic kidney failure, so her 5-mile trips to the hospital aren’t a luxury. She absolutely needs them.

Stowe doesn’t own a car, and taking the bus to get life-critical care isn’t always reliable–or even desirable for an aged patient with a chronic disease.

That’s how Uber enters the frame.

Beginning earlier this year, MedStar has integrated the ride-hailing giant into its platform, allowing patients to easily schedule rides to and from critical appointments. MedStar’s patient advocates will arrange rides for Medicaid patients who don’t have access to its website or app-capable smartphones.Continue reading…

By JEFF GOLDSMITH

Every so often, voters conspire to hand unambiguous control over the federal government to a single political party.  It is rarely the unmixed blessing that party strategists dream it to be.  President  Clinton got a Democratic Congress, and promptly lost it two years later in the wake of the famously unproductive HillaryCare debate.   President George W Bush invaded Iraq.  Lyndon Johnson waged War on Poverty and sent a half-million baby boomers to Vietnam. 

More recently, President Obama had a (brief) filibuster proof Senate majority and an eighty vote House majority entering 2009.  Despite this huge advantage, the passage of ObamaCare turned into a costly, fifteen-month political cliffhanger. A lot of Obama’s problem wasn’t merely an increasingly angry Republican minority but a substantial (and imperiled) moderate wing of his own party. 

What can the resurgent Republicans learn from these cautionary tales as they enter Donald Trump’s Presidency?   What they will come to realize is that often, “friendly fire” is as perilous a risk as anything the other party throws at you.  The Republicans are actually in a much less strong position than they appear as they enter 2017.     

Today’s Republican Party is actually riven into at least four distinct factions, each of which has its own health policy agenda and hot buttons.  Arrayed from Far Right to Center Right, these factions are:

1. The Hamburger Hill Republicans.  (See Wikipedia definition.) Exemplars include the House Freedom Caucus, who won office in the Tea Party rebellion, and would be perfectly comfortable repealing ObamaCare without replacing it, and letting states, particularly of the blue variety, sort out the carnage. A lot of them are “safe seat” Red State Republicans who can afford to take some electoral risks in the name of party principle.
   
2. The Take Your Castor Oil Republicans.  Exemplars include most prominently Speaker Paul Ryan, and also HHS Sec. Designate Dr. Tom Price, who believe that entitlement reform is actually a bigger deal, fiscally and politically, than repealing ObamaCare, and who favor cutting entitlement spending, “pro-competitive solutions” (whatever that means in a highly concentrated health industry), and also compelling “wealthy” Americans to pay a bigger share of their healthcare bill.
3. The Pragmatic Republicans.  Exemplars include:  Lamar Alexander, Orrin Hatch and Kevin Brady, all burdened with the realism borne of Chairmanships of major Committees, all of whom would prefer to strap on a parachute before exiting the airplane on Repealing and Replacing ObamaCare and who are also cognizant of the cost of ownership of the healthcare issue.
   
4. Ten Republican Governors Who Expanded Medicaid.  Exemplars include:  Governors Snyder, Kasich, Brewer, Sandoval, Martinez, Baker, etc. whose states could be on the hook for billions in additional state costs if ObamaCare’s ten million person Medicaid expansion is scaled back.  Each of these Governors has Two Senators to advocate on their states’ behalf.   Vice President to be Pence also expanded Medicaid while Governor of Indiana. 

Interestingly, the new Republican standard bearer, Donald Trump (who was until 2012 registered for thirteen years in New York’s independent but left-leaning Reform party), ran to the left of his Congressional base on healthcare issues.  While he advocated “repeal and replacement ” of ObamaCare with “something terrific” (aka “TerrifiCare”), he also advocated “covering everybody” and “not cutting Social Security or Medicare”. Continue reading…

By NIRAN AL-AGBRA, MD

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) EHR Incentive Program—also known as Meaningful Use (MU)—initially provided incentives to accelerate the adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) to meet certified program  requirements.  Many physicians were mandated to change over to electronic records at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars.  Electronic records have never been shown to improve patient care or outcomes with statistical significance, the criteria physicians routinely use when making care decisions.

Physicians who failed to participate in MU would receive penalties in the form of reduced Medicare reimbursements automatically. To avoid a penalty, physicians had to implement certified electronic health records (CEHRT) and demonstrate MU of that technology through an attestation process at the end of each reporting period.  There were 10 data specifications. Approximately 209,000 physicians were facing penalties at the start of 2016, almost one-fourth of the U.S. physician workforce.Continue reading…

By JD KLEINKE

There is no conservative replacement health reform plan for Obamacare — because Obamacare is a conservative health reform plan.

After six years of promising to repeal ‘n’ replace the President’s signature domestic achievement, Republican lawmakers have no coherent alternative to the Affordable Care Act for one good reason: because the Affordable Care Act was once the market-based alternative to a real, not imagined, “government takeover” of health care.

What has always made the ACA a political pariah to Republicans, typified by the bizarre claim by House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Wednesday that “Obamacare” has “ruined” and “dismantled” our health care system, is the plan’s namesake — far more than its necessarily complex architecture or any of its actual details, unless you count the details they made up.

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By ROSE, HUSSEY, MARTINEAU and FRIEDBERG

Many providers view the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2016 (MACRA) with skepticism. MACRA represents the largest implementation of physician pay-for-performance ever attempted in the United States. Starting in 2019, MACRA will integrate and potentially simplify performance measurement by combining a number of measures and programs. It will also increase the magnitude of financial rewards and penalties, which could help motivate practice change for the better.

One of the more controversial aspects of MACRA is its Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) for physicians and practices not participating in alternative payment models. One physician captured the prevalent skepticism when he wrote in the public comments on MACRA: “This rule will wreak havoc with my practice while offering absolutely no evidence that it will do anything to improve patient care.” Partly due to the many public comments, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has made substantial changes to the final rule. However, there is room for further changes during the rollout – and potentially strong interest in doing so from Tom Price, the physician nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

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By JEFF GOLDSMITH

Donald Trump’s stunning upset victory has occasioned a lot of searching among political analysts for an underlying explanation for the unexpected turn in voter sentiment. Many point to Trump’s galvanizing support among white working class and middle income Americans in economically depressed regions of the US- particularly Appalachia and the upper middle west “Rust Belt” – as the main factor that put him in office.

While the Democrats concentrated on the so-called “coalition of the ascendant”- voter groups like Hispanics and Millennials that are growing, Trump rode to victory on a “coalition of the forgotten”- working class Americans in economically depressed regions of the U.S. who had been left behind by the economic expansion of the past seven years.

When the Economist searched for a more powerful predictor of the Trump victory than white non-college status, they found a surprise winner: a composite measure of poor health (comprised of diabetes prevalence, heavy alcohol consumption, lack of physical activity, obesity and life expectancy). Believe it or not. this measure of health status predicted a remarkable 43% of the improvement of Trump’s vote percentage compared with the 2012 Republican candidate Mitt Romney, compared to 41% for white/non-college.

A month after the election, the Centers for Disease Control released its 2015 morbidity and mortality trends in the US.  The CDC Report showed that  Americans’ life expectancy actually declined for the first time in 22 years. Except for cancer where we saw continued progress, death rates rose for eight out of the ten leading causes of death, most sharply for Alzheimer’s Disease.  The decline in life expectancy was confined entirely to the under 65 population!Continue reading…

By MATT SEAGER

Star Wars may be a light-hearted adventure film series at its core, but that hasn’t stopped professionals and academics from extracting some real-world lessons from the series. A couple of prominent examples include a thesis on the economic impact of building the Death Star and NPR’s political science analysis of the inner workings of the galactic senate.

With the latest Star Wars film, Rogue One, it’s the healthcare IT industry’s turn to take a crack at the known universe’s most popular space saga.  Be forewarned: the following analysis includes spoilers from the new film.

A key component the plot is that the Empire suffers a series of data breaches that have a catastrophic impact on the organization. The connection to the healthcare industry should already be clear. Even with improving safeguards, over 11 million individuals were affected by healthcare data breaches perpetrated by cyber-attacks in 2016. We can learn from the Empire’s mistakes by looking at the film’s three most prominently featured security measures, and how a real-world organization can do better than Darth Vader when it comes to protecting sensitive information.Continue reading…