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lauramontini

Romney’s Second Shot at Healthcare Reform

Apr 3, 2012• 2

By Jim Stergios and Joshua Archambault

Americans believe in second chances. The oral arguments before the Supreme Court last week were a rare opportunity to dispassionately re-examine the divisive healthcare debate of two years ago. What happens if, after the smoke clears, we get a second chance at healthcare reform?

We’ve long known that healthcare will be a central theme in the 2012 presidential contest. The High Court’s deliberations and June decision only reinforce that reality for President Obama and Governor Romney.

Unlike with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), the constitutionality of Governor Romney’s Massachusetts law has never been seriously questioned. States, not the federal government, have police powers, allowing them to require purchases (car insurance, taxes and licensure) and to pass wide-ranging public health laws and public safety laws. The Bay State law enjoys broad popular support.

In contrast, the case before the Supreme Court was brought by the majority of states. Regardless of what the Court decides, the PPACA will continue to polarize the country.

President Obama may cite Romney’s Massachusetts reform as inspiring his efforts, but there are profound differences in the size, reach and financing of the two laws. Elected just six months after the law’s passage, Romney’s successor, Democratic Governor Deval Patrick, has obscured some of those differences by taking a big government approach to implementation.

Where Romney sought an open marketplace for individuals to purchase benefit plans ranging from catastrophic to generous, Patrick has drastically limited choices and mandated minimum coverage levels beyond private-market norms.

The Supreme Court on Moral Hazard

Apr 3, 2012• 49

By David Dranove

I have had to take some time off for the funeral of someone very near to me, so I have not had a chance to comment on the Supreme Court hearings. Nor do I have much time to do so now. But I would like to comment on Justice Alito’s line of questioning about burial insurance. His questioning was in response to one argument used to justify the purchase mandate, namely that sick individuals will receive medical care at someone else’s expense and therefore there is an economic justification for mandating the purchase of health insurance in order to prevent free riding. Alito noted that individuals who did not provide for their own burials will still be buried at taxpayer expense. This is another form of free riding. If the Supreme Court were to uphold mandatory purchase of health insurance, could Congress not also mandate purchase of burial insurance?

Solicitor General Donald Verrilli seemed surprised by Alito’s questions and did not provide a good answer. Yet these questions strike at the heart of the case and at deeper economic issues. There is a direct analogy between the market for burials and the market for healthcare. Just as some patients free ride off of the generosity of others, some deceased do the same thing. By extension, any time that a good is provided at a price below cost, whether by the government, a charity, or any other organization for that matter, we can expect a certain degree of moral hazard behavior. Some individuals who ought to purchase the good themselves will instead free ride on the generosity of others.

Health Care Reform: Good for Business

Apr 3, 2012• 6

By Brian England

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard six hours of oral arguments for and against the constitutionality of the new health care law. As a small business owner, I am not a constitutional scholar, but I can definitively say this: the Affordable Care Act is cutting my health care costs and helping my business.

My wife and I run an auto repair shop in Columbia, MD. We started as a small, family-business in 1978. Now, we’re a well-respected business with 19 employees, a long string of awards and a reputation for service.

One of the biggest barriers to growing a successful business has been the rising cost of health insurance. We’re committed to offering insurance coverage, but over the past 10 years it has become a real struggle to keep up with the costs.

We’ve become accustomed to rates going up 10 percent to 20 percent each year (sometimes even more), and we’ve had to look at many different ways to deal with the extra expense. We’ve got a great agent who does a lot of research and works hard to find the best options for us. But in the end, we’re the ones who have to decide what to do — and foot the bill.

Is There a Republican Alternative to ObamaCare?

Apr 2, 2012• 10

By John Goodman

“GOP to the Uninsured: (Feel Free to) Drop Dead.” So reads the title Michael Millenson post at the Health Care Blog yesterday. It gets worse:

[N]o Republican presidential candidate has ever presented a serious plan to cover all the uninsured … The difference between Democrats and this generation of Republicans — unfortunately including even the GOP Doctors Caucus — is not at its core a disagreement on what government can legitimately do to help create universal access to health care for the 50 million Americans without it, but whether the goal itself is worth pursuing.

Was Millenson completely asleep (like Rip Van Winkle) during the last election? Does he not read my Wall Street Journal editorials? Does he never visit my blog? Or was this meant to be an April fool’s column?

John McCain’s health plan was more radical and even more progressive than Obama Care. I’ve never seen any serious health policy wonk deny that. Maybe Millenson doesn’t live in a battle ground state. If he did, he would know that the Obama campaign spent more money attacking the McCain health plan during the election than has ever been spent for or against a public policy idea in the history of the republic. In fact, it is probably no exaggeration to say that Obama successfully turned the election into a referendum on the McCain health plan!

The McCain health plan is discussed at this blog here, here, here, here and here.

And although Millenson singles out Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn as an especially egregious example of the Republican failure on health policy, the McCain vision actually was based on a bill, sponsored by Sen. Coburn and Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), along with Reps. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Devin Nunes (R-CA), [hereinafter called the Coburn bill]. That bill, in turn, was based on an idea which Mark Pauly and I proposed in a Health Affairs article more than a decade ago. (Does Millenson not read Health Affairs?)

If the Supreme Court Rules Against the Obama Administration …

Apr 2, 2012• 38

By Maggie Mahar

If the Court throws out both the “individual mandate” (the rule requiring that virtually all Americans buy insurance, or pay a fine), and the provision that insurers must cover all applicants, and cannot charge higher premiums, even if a new customer has just been diagnosed with cancer? This might sound like the end of reform, but in fact, many of the most valuable reforms in the legislation would almost certainly still stand–including those that will change the way we pay for care, reducing costs, while lifting quality. Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), hospitals will continue to find ways to reduce preventable errors–or face financial penaltie.. Doctors who succeed in managing chronic diseases, keeping their patients out of the hospital, will receive rewards. Medical students willing to practice in underserved areas “Where No One Else Will Go” will receive scholarships, and their ranks will grow. New funding will double the capacity of Community Health Centers that can provide medical homes for many who now receive their care in an ER. Reform will go forward.

There is, of course, the possibility that the court could declare the entire Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, but this seems extraordinarily unlikely. Too many planks in the law already are being implemented, and patients are benefiting. As Henry J. Aaron pointed out in an earlier post on this blog, overturning the law would be an “Rx for Chaos.”

Still, even if the judges “only” throw out the mandate and the requirement that insurers cover everyone, the results will be, as former Obama administration adviser Ezekiel Emanuel recently put it in a New York Times opinion piece “less than optimal.” (Unlike Rahm Emanuel, Zeke is known for understatement.)

Under this scenario, premiums for those who do buy insurance would climb because, without the mandate, insurers could no longer count on millions of new, healthy customers. Instead of “the 32 million Americans predicted to gain coverage under the health insurance reform act, only around 16 million Americans would gain coverage,” observes Emanuel.

No, Overturning ACA Would not Smooth the Way to Single-Payer Care

Apr 2, 2012• 4

By Harold Pollack

This morning’s post by Matt Yglesias notes a fairly obvious but important issue that bears attention.

The comportment of conservative Supreme Court justices in oral argument leads many people to seriously consider what would happen if ACA is crippled or struck down. (Like Jonathan Cohn, Henry Aaron, David Cutler, Charles Fried, and Jonathan Chait, I was appalled by the oral argument. You can read my column at healthinsurance.org for more on that subject.)

Several commentators assert, or at least have mused, that overturning ACA might improve the prospects for a single-payer system. It’s easy to see why one might think so. Single-payer is less vulnerable to the commerce-clause challenge that bedevils the mandate. Outright failure of ACA would discredit bipartisan, market-based strategies within many core Democratic groups. The political and organizational simplicity of single-payer is appealing, too. Killing ACA heightens the contradictions of our fragmented and costly health care financing system, while taking off the political table some of the most workable strategies for incremental reform. Absent a serious and workable alternative, Medicare for all might look surprisingly attractive some years from now.

Still… I just don’t see it.

In the first place, I am confident that a smart and determined conservative judiciary would entertain new constitutional challenges to a single-payer system. Such a system would end or would damage much of the private insurance industry. It would reorder relations between the states and the federal government. It would upend self-insurance arrangements under ERISA, and more. If you believe ACA’s 2,700 pages was long and complicated, wait until you see the junk DNA that would accompany a politically and administratively viable single-payer bill. That’s fertile legal ground for opponents, even absent the current political polarization of the federal judiciary.

The Right to Be Forgotten

Apr 2, 2012

By Jeffrey Rosen

At the end of January, the European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship, Viviane Reding, announced the European Commission’s proposal to create a sweeping new privacy right—the “right to be forgotten.” The right, which has been hotly debated in Europe for the past few years, has finally been codified as part of a broad new proposed data protection regulation. Although Reding depicted the new right as a modest expansion of existing data privacy rights, in fact it represents the biggest threat to free speech on the Internet in the coming decade. The right to be forgotten could make Facebook and Google, for example, liable for up to two percent of their global income if they fail to remove photos that people post about themselves and later regret, even if the photos have been widely distributed already. Unless the right is defined more precisely when it is promulgated over the next year or so, it could precipitate a dramatic clash between European and American conceptions of the proper balance between privacy and free speech, leading to a far less open Internet.

In theory, the right to be forgotten addresses an urgent problem in the digital age: it is very hard to escape your past on the Internet now that every photo, status update, and tweet lives forever in the cloud. But Europeans and Americans have diametrically opposed approaches to the problem. In Europe, the intellectual roots of the right to be forgotten can be found in French law, which recognizes le droit à l’oubli—or the “right of oblivion”—a right that allows a convicted criminal who has served his time and been rehabilitated to object to the publication of the facts of his conviction and incarceration. In America, by contrast, publication of someone’s criminal history is protected by the First Amendment, leading Wikipedia to resist the efforts by two Germans convicted of murdering a famous actor to remove their criminal history from the actor’s Wikipedia page.^[1]

Continue reading…

More PopHealth Lessons Learned

Apr 2, 2012

By John Halamka, MD

In the March HIT Standards Committee we highlighted 3 gaps in the standards needed to calculate quality metrics automatically from EHRs

1. A longitudinal (not encounter level) patient summary format to transmit appropriate data elements from an EHR to a quality measurement entity

2. A batch reporting format to transmit data elements for multiple patients to a quality measurement entity

3. Although PQRI XML and QRDA have been suggested for reporting data between quality measurement entities and organizations that use this data for payment/compliance, there is not a widely adopted standard for quality reporting in production today.

As I wrote in a wrote in a previous post, ONC/MITRE/BIDMC/Massachusetts eHealth collaborative worked together to evaluate the PopHealth tool with 2 million Continuity of Care Documents.

The full results of that analysis are now available and here’s the document for public circulation.

Key lessons learned include:

1. The CCD is a “post-encounter message” not a lifetime clinical summary optimized for quality measurement

The CCD/C32 was designed as an encounter level summary from a single organization. Each patient will have multiple CCD/C32s but there are no well defined process for merging CCDs from multiple institutions and applications. popHealth was expecting each C32 to contain the complete clinical history for one patient since quality measures are often focused on longitudinal treatment of patient, not a single encounter.

Will the Quantified Self Movement Take Off in Health Care?

Apr 2, 2012• 79

“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” Lord Kelvin

“Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Of course the quantified self movement with its self-tracking, body hacking, and data-driven life started in San Francisco when Gary Wolf started the “Quantified Self” blog in 2007. By 2012, there were regular meetings in 50 cities and a European and American conference. Most of us do not keep track of our moods, our blood pressure, how many drinks we have, or our sleep patterns every day. Most of us probably prefer the Taleb to the Lord Kelvin quotation when it comes to living our daily lives. And yet there are an increasing number of early adopters who are dedicated members of the quantified self movement.

“They are an eclectic mix of early adopters, fitness freaks, technology evangelists, personal-development junkies, hackers, and patients suffering from a wide variety of health problems. What they share is a belief that gathering and analysing data about their everyday activities can help them improve their lives.”

(http://www.economist.com/node/21548493/print)

According to Wolf four technologic advances made the quantified self movement possible:

“First, electronic sensors got smaller and better. Second, people started carrying powerful computing devices, typically disguised as mobile phones. Third, social media made it seem normal to share everything. And fourth, we began to get an inkling of the rise of a global superintelligence known as the cloud.”

Curing cancer: Too Important — and too Difficult — for University Researchers to Do Alone

Apr 1, 2012• 2

By David Shaywitz, MD

The central dogma of drug discovery is that academic basic research -> industry applied research -> new medical product. The disappointing number of impactful new medical products have been a source of endless soul searching, and could in theory be attributable to any (and all) of the steps in this model – and might also, as some have suggested, reflect the need for an entirely new conceptual framework.

The latest issue of Nature features a spot-on commentary (subscription only) by Glenn Begley and Lee Ellis (nicely summarized in this terrific Reuters article) that focuses in on the first arrow, the translation of academic oncology basic research into application by industry, and highlights the uncomfortable and inconvenient truth that by now isn’t a very well-kept secret: basic science is unbelievably fragile, and a lot of it doesn’t stand up to serious scrutiny.

This observation is absolutely consistent with my own experience and observations (see here, here, here, and here), as well as with those of Bruce Booth (this is a terrific discussion), and of course the pioneering research of Stanford Professor John Ioannidis, whose work I discussed six years ago (here), and who has been profiled extensively since (e.g. this piece from The Atlantic).

We could spend a lot of time discussing why science is fragile; Begley and Ellis, for example, emphasize the need for a cultural change in the way preclinical research is conducted, particularly in the field of cancer.

At the end of the day, I suspect that the problem involves some combination of the law of small numbers, the appeal of narrative, the structural advantages of reinforcing dogma, and the difficulties of publishing negative results that might challenge it, especially if the dogma was advanced by senior leaders in the field who tend to play critical roles in reviewing papers for high-profile journals and in selecting which new research gets funded. While the process may ultimately be self-correcting (and I certainly believe that science “works”), the cycle time for this can be a lifetime (literally – in some cases I’ve heard it said you need to wait for someone to pass away before contrary ideas can truly gain traction).