Author Archives

maithri

How Can Patients on Medicaid Possibly Be Worse Off than Those Who Don’t Have Insurance?

Dec 31, 2013• 94

By Saurabh Jha, MD

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” said Carl Sagan.

The claim that health insurance improves health outcomes is hardly ground breaking. Studying whether insurance affects health status is like wondering whether three meals a day lead to a higher muscle mass than total starvation.

Well that’s what I thought. Until I read the study on Oregon’s Medicaid program by Baicker and colleagues in the NEJM earlier this year and, more recently, Avik Roy’s short treatise “How Medicaid Fails the Poor”.

Baicker et al found that Medicaid enrollees fared no better in terms of health outcomes than those without insurance. That is, no insurance no difference.

The study is an exemplar of policy research laced with regression equations, control of known confounders and clear separation of variables. There is only so much rigor social science can achieve compared to the physical sciences. Yet this is about as good a study as is possible.

The one thing the study did not lack was sample size. It’s useful to bear in mind sample size. Large effects do not need a large sample size to show statistical significance. Conversely, if study with a large sample size does not show even a modest effect, it means that the effect probably does not exist.

There are several interpretations of the Medicaid study, interpretations inevitably shaped by one’s political inclination. The ever consistent Paul Krugman, consistent in his Samsonian defense of government programs against philistines and pagans, extolled critics of Medicaid as “nuts” and asked, presumably rhetorically, “Medicaid is cheaper than private insurance. So where is the downside?”

Unlike Krugman I am not a Nobel laureate and am about as likely to win a Nobel Prize as I am of playing the next James Bond, so it’s possible that I am missing something blatantly obvious. Could the downside of a government program paying physicians, on average 52 cents, and as low as 29 cents, for every dollar paid by private insurance in a multiple payer system be access?

Indeed, it’s darn impossible for patients on Medicaid to see a new physician. As Avik Roy explains “…massive fallacy at the heart of Medicaid….It’s the idea that health insurance equals healthcare”.

But wait. It gets better.

I am accustomed to US healthcare throwing more plot twisters than Hercule Poirot’s sleuth work. But one I least expected was that patients on Medicaid do worse than patients with no insurance (risk-adjusted, almost). I am not going to be that remorseless logician, which John Maynard Keynes warned us about, who starting with one mistake can end up in Bedlam, and argue that if you are for Medicaid that is morally equivalent to sanctioning mass murder. Rather, I ask how it is possible that possessing Medicaid makes you worse off than no insurance whatsoever.

To some extent this may artifactually appear so because poverty correlates with ill health, and studies that show Medicaid patients faring worse than uninsured, cannot totally control for social determinants of health.

The Hospice Will See You Now

Dec 31, 2013

By John Schumann, MD

Doctors are asked to sign things all the time: Prescriptions, home nursing care plans, death certificates, diabetic shoe forms.

Less frequently, hospice verifications.

Why was I asked to sign hospice orders for Mr. Taylor? Sure, he was old. Eighty-seven.

He’d survived decades of high blood pressure, two major surgeries, unintentional weight loss, chronic pain, headaches, even a benign brain tumor. But I had never referred him to hospice.

I wouldn’t have diagnosed him as “terminal,” i.e. expected to live six months or less. As far as I could tell, he’d just keep on truckin’ for another year or three.

So why was I being asked to sign hospice paperwork for him? How did this come about?

“Mr. Taylor, why are you in hospice? Are you dying?”

-Not that he knew of. He’d just been told that he’d get more ‘home services’ that way.

“Who set this up for you?”

-It was one of those “home doctors.” Geriatric care providers that offer house calls to infirm seniors when it’s too hard for them to come to a doctor’s office.

Thing is, he was still plenty able to come to my office. And did so regularly.

Apparently, though, the opportunity to get more home services was too good to pass up.

The agency that was providing him at-home medical services referred him to a for-profit hospice firm–one that could collect the daily Medicare fee for a hospice enrollee.

Is it any wonder, then, that we’ve seen a surge in hospice enrollments in the last few years?

Finally, someone has written something about it. Thank you, Washington Post.

John H. Schumann, MD (@GlassHospital) is a general internist and medical educator at the University of Oklahoma School of Community Medicine in Tulsa, OK . He is also author of the blog, GlassHospital , where this post originally appeared.

Healthcare.Gov’s Numbers at the Deadline

Dec 30, 2013• 32

By Robert Laszewski

After the disastrous launch of Obamacare the enrollment of 1.1 million people in the 36 state exchanges run by the feds is a major accomplishment. It is likely that the enrollment in the 14 state-run exchanges will take total Obamacare’s private insurance enrollment to near 2 million for the year.

Does this mean that Obamacare is finally on track and moving toward success?

At least the front-end of HealthCare.gov is now clearly working.

I will suggest there are still some very important questions for Obamacare that need to be answered.

First, how many of these new enrollments are people whose policies have been cancelled under Obamacare?
As I have said on this blog before, I expect at least 80% of those in the existing individual health insurance market to lose their coverage by the end of 2014. Half of the market bought their coverage after March 2010 and therefore cannot continue while most of the other half of the market will not qualify under the Obama administration’s stringent grandfather rules.

What we don’t know is just how many of these people had to buy new coverage on January 1 given the widespread offers by carriers to “early renew” their coverage into late 2014. Then the President asked insurers and states to allow people to keep their coverage another year. It appears about two-thirds of the states went along with that request. Then many of the cancellations won’t occur until they renew throughout calendar year 2014.

We do know that California did not allow insurers to continue coverage for another year leading to 800,000 cancellations on January 1 and 200,000 cancellations by March. The state exchange has said that 300,000 of these are subsidy eligible and they can only get a subsidized policy on the exchange.

California will likely announce they have signed-up about 600,000 people this year. But given the cancellations that are occurring by January 1, is this a big accomplishment?

Washington State cancelled 260,000 policies and also did not allow the cancelled policies to continue past January 1. Half of these polices are subsidy eligible and can only get a subsidized policy in the state insurance exchange. Washington State might report 100,000 private plan enrollments by year-end. But if they cancelled 130,000 people who can only get a subsidized policy in their exchange, is this a big accomplishment?

The good news is that Obamacare will likely enroll almost 2 million people in 2013.

Even if we ignore that fact that many of these people were previously insured and had to replace cancelled policies (there were more than 400,000 subsidy eligible cancellations in California and Washington alone), 2 million people are only 10% of the 20 million uninsured in the U.S. who are eligible to buy coverage in the health insurance exchanges.

Why You Shouldn’t Succumb to Defeatism About the Affordable Care Act

Dec 29, 2013• 22

By Robert Reich

Whatever happened to American can-do optimism? Even before the Affordable Care Act covers its first beneficiary, the nattering nabobs of negativism are out in full force.

“Tens of millions more Americans will lose their coverage and find that new ObamaCare plans have higher premiums, larger deductibles, and fewer doctors,” predicts Republican operative Karl Rove. “Enrollment numbers will be smaller than projected and budget outlays will be higher.”

Rove is joined by a chorus of conservative Cassandra’s, from Fox News to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, all warning that the new law will be a disaster.

Robert Laszewski, president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, anticipates a shortage of doctors. “There just aren’t going to be enough of them.”

Professor John Cochrane of the University of Chicago predicts the individual mandate will “unravel” when “we see how sick the people are who signed up on exchanges, and if our government really is going to penalize voters for not buying health insurance.”

The round-the-clock nay-saying is having an effect. Support for the law has plummeted to 35 percent of those questioned in a recent CNN poll, a 5-point drop in less than a month. Sixty-two percent now say they oppose the law, up four points from November.

Even liberal-leaning commentators are openly worrying. On ABC’s “This Week,” Cokie Roberts responded to my view that the law eventually would prove popular by warning of “a whole other wave of reaction against it” if employers start dropping their insurance.

Some congressional Democrats are getting cold feet. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin recently fretted that “if it’s so much more expensive than what we anticipated and if the coverage is not as good as what we had, you’ve got a complete meltdown.”

Get a grip.

If the past is any guide, some fixes will probably be necessary – but so what? Our current healthcare system is the real disaster — the most expensive and least effective among all developed countries, according Bloomberg’s recent ranking. We’d be collectively insane if we didn’t try to overhaul it.

Why the January 1st Deadline Matters

Dec 27, 2013• 37

By Seth J. Chandler

Contrary to the views of some, the number of people who have insurance coverage through the Exchanges as of January 1, 2014, matters to everyone. It matters because the pool that exists on that date will determine, at least for a while, whether the premiums charged by insurers in the Exchange are likely to be stable and the extent of the federal government’s multiple obligations to subsidize plans purchased on the various Exchanges. It is not as if insurers get a claims paying holiday simply because more and healthier people may enroll later in the year.

It also matters because a major point of the Affordable Care Act was to increase in an efficient and relatively painless way the net number of people who have insurance or social protection against significant illness. If the numbers in the Exchanges and in the expanded Medicaid program do not way more than offset the number of persons who lose their insurance as a result of the ACA, or if the cost of extending health protection in this fashion proves too high, the ACA will not have accomplished its goals.

Given the chaos that has erupted as procrastination strains Exchange infrastructure and deadlines are repeatedly extended, it is difficult to tell right now whether the ACA is performing as hoped. A few things are clear, however. The first thing is that the Obama administration is not releasing the sort of information from which an objective assessment could be made.

Platitudes such as “Millions of Americans, despite the problems with the website, are now poised to be covered by quality affordable health insurance come New Year’s Day,” from President Obama at his last press conference are just not a substitute for knowing how many people have enrolled in the plans in the various Exchanges, and more importantly, have paid for coverage. What are their ages? How about some real numbers as a Holiday present?

Second, the Obama administration is acting as if a large number of enrollees in the aggregate is the measure of success. This is simply not true. Putting aside the problem of it being paying customers rather than mere enrollment that ultimately matters, meeting or exceeding projections in some states does not compensate for deficiencies in many other states.

Because the pools are state-based, Texas insurers and insureds are not helped if enrollment in New York or Connecticut exchanges ultimately equals or exceeds targets. The insurance market in Texas and many other states will still be unstable with some insurers likely pressing for significant premium increases, contemplating withdrawal from the Exchanges, and demanding larger subsidies from the federal government via Risk Corridors and other programs.

The Doctor Who Played With Fire

Dec 24, 2013• 3

By Hans Duvefelt, MD

The corpse, laid out on a gurney and covered with a white sheet, was wheeled onto the stage by two women in long, white lab coats. A middle aged man with a bow tie welcomed us, the incoming class of the spring semester, to Uppsala University and the Biomedicine Center, where we would spend the next two years in “pre-clinicals”, until we knew enough to start our three and a half clinical years at the Academy Hospital.

The Biomedicine Center was almost brand new, a glass and concrete labyrinth with a large sculpture depicting Watson and Crick’s DNA molecule by the front entrance. The vast complex lay near S-1, the Uppsala military regiment. The brick buildings diagonally across the street were very familiar to me as the place where I had met the biggest failure in all my twenty years only months before.

As I sat in the large lecture hall with the corpse on the stage, I glanced over at L., my buddy from the Swedish military’s elite division, the Interpreter School, where we had also sat next to each other on the first day, when the Captain in charge told us:

“Soldiers, you may all have been the smartest kids in your school, but it’s different here. Most of you won’t make it, and will be culled over the next two months. The Interpreter School accepts eighty recruits and graduates twenty to twenty-five. If you don’t have what it takes, don’t waste our time or yours!”

L. and I had both thought that learning Russian would be a neat way to spend our compulsory year and a half in the military, but just barely more than a month after that harsh introduction, we were both on our way back to our respective home towns to figure out what to do until we would be able to start medical school. Our military service was put on hold until we could return as medics.

The man with the bow tie went on to introduce our guest professor, on loan from the University of Bavaria. As we all knew, the Germans have been the greatest anatomists since the last century, and all of us had already been to the University book store to purchase Haeffel’s “Topografishe Anatomie”, which would be our constant companion for the next five months.

What Exactly Are Insurers Canceling? And Why?

Dec 23, 2013• 2

By THCBist

A THCB reader in New York writes in:

There is one aspect of the ACA that isn’t being discussed a lot, but is pertinent to the future landscape of health care in this country — the extent to which the ACA is causing a sort of reset, or wiping of the slate, when it comes to insurance policies and procedures.

Previously, there were multiple insurers and multiple policies, many of which had been around for a long time. If an insurer wanted to suddenly change providers in its network, ratchet down provider reimbursement, alter covered procedures or make other adjustments, this was feasible, but too much of a change would entail an outcry limiting insurers’ freedom of action. The overall system had a certain air of stability or inertia, making any changes stand out, any big changes cause for scrutiny and possibly rebellion.

Now, with the ACA, everything is being tossed up in the air and when things land, much can and will be different. Some changes are mandated by the ACA, such as minimum coverage, and insurers are cancelling inadequate policies, substituting very different ones. But even when a policy doesn’t need to be changed, insurers will justify change by pointing to the ACA.

“Given the requirements of the ACA, we must make certain changes to your policy. In particular…”

We are at the beginning of a totally new insurance landscape, even if most of the insurers remain the same. The public has been primed to expect major change and insurance companies will certainly make use of this expectation.

The result is likely to be more restrictive networks, decreased reimbursements to providers and other measures to limit cost. Everything is now up for grabs.

If you have questions about the Affordable Care Act or your buying insurance on the federal state exchanges, drop us a a note. We’ll publish the good submissions.

N = 1 My Experience with the New Health Care System

Dec 22, 2013• 88

By Robert Fogerty, MD

“You look nice today. People don’t come to chemo in suits very often.”

The friendly and familiar receptionist mentioned as I was checking out, the always full jar of lemon flavored hard candy on the shelf between us. As I pocketed a few of the candies, I managed to swallow the nausea and metallic taste just enough to say, “Thanks. I have a job interview today.”

During my senior year in college, with medical school acceptance letter in hand, I was diagnosed with metastatic testicular cancer. Initially, life became planning surgery and meeting doctors, but early in my treatment course I received a letter that my health insurance had been exhausted and I would no longer receive any health benefits. This was after my first of four chemo cycles, with a major surgery still to come. Needless to say, this was a problem. My parents were both well educated, a lawyer and a chemist-turned-teacher, but this took everyone by surprise and presented a new crisis.

We responded by dividing up tasks. My parents quickly inventoried all the assets, including the family home, and my sister called around to all the hospitals to see what could be done. She called the local and state governments asking for advice while I simply tried to eat food and get to class to graduate on time; I couldn’t have another tuition bill on top of my health expenses. I also started to look for a job, with a job came insurance – this much I knew.

I went to the interview, a job as a management trainee in a car rental agency, with hopes that this job would be something I could get, could do during treatment, and would provide the insurance that would save my family from financial ruin at my hands – my disease. I went to a Jesuit college and learned that truth and honesty are paramount. So, I told the recruiter that I had cancer, I was in treatment, and that I would likely be done soon – all true.

I didn’t get the job. I still didn’t have insurance and my next chemo session, with its massive bill, was coming very quickly.
My sister learned that this would not be fun. One hospital said to her that they would treat me and then take us to court to get paid. Thankfully, I went to school in Massachusetts where a law was on the books that allowed me to enroll in health insurance without a pre-existing condition exclusion because my insurance being exhausted counted as a special qualifying event. I enrolled in an individual insurance plan, my care went uninterrupted, and I graduated on time. To this day, my sister and I remain grateful to Massachusetts for that single law, which is as much a part of my success as cisplatin and etoposide, the chemotherapy agents I received.

The bills still mounted, but were manageable. I survived, personally and financially. I pushed off medical school for a few years to get my life back in order, and moved on. I had many scary moments during my treatment, from the plastic surgeon telling me my arm might need amputation to my neutropenic fever to being discharged just in time for my college graduation. However, what bothers me the most was, and stillis, the sense of abandonment from my society when my insurance ended.

The Obamacare Slippery Slope–What’s Your “Hardship?”

Dec 20, 2013• 33

By Robert Laszewski

As of this morning, here are the new rules.

If you had a health insurance policy that was cancelled, you are now exempt from the individual mandate and its tax penalty should you not decide to buy a replacement policy. In addition, you can now sign up for the very high deductible Catastrophic Plan that was originally reserved only for those under the age of 30.

If you did not have a health insurance policy that was cancelled, you are still subject to the individual mandate and you are not entitled any special treatment toward signing up for the Catastrophic Plan. You must pay the full price for an exchange plan and accept whatever out-of-pocket costs and network limits it might have for the money.

The administration made this change under the “hardship” provisions already part of the law. They have simply defined hardship as having lost your old individual plan and your not being able to find something without it being a “hardship” to purchase, presumably over price or coverage.

This change was brought about when a number of Democratic Senators, some of them facing a tough reelection battle, demanded this concession.

The change was made without consulting the health insurance industry and it was a surprise to them. It is another Obamacare change months after their 2014 rates were set under the presumption all of these cancelled policyholders would be paying a lot more premium into the pool than they pay today.

One has to believe this will not be the last concession to Democrats under reelection pressure.

One has to wonder how this can’t other than undermine further how people feel about Obamacare––particularly its fairness––and taking their “social responsibility” to sign-up seriously.

Healthcare Innovation Is Not Just About Cutting Costs

Dec 20, 2013• 7

By David Shaywitz, MD

Aspiring healthcare entrepreneurs could be forgiven for assuming our most significant challenge is the need to reduce the cost of care. Investors and policy wonks alike seem to agree on the overriding need to focus on innovations that will improve efficiency and take costs out of the system.

The appeal of this approach is easy to understand: rising healthcare costs are a real problem, and business process improvement feels like something we already know how to do. Large companies like GE and Oracle are thrilled by the opportunity to apply their process methodologies to healthcare. Management journals love the idea of improving healthcare through operational excellence. An increasing number of foundations have also joined the fray, focused explicitly on supporting innovations that reduce the cost of care.

Yet, as much as operational improvements are urgently needed, they should not represent the primary goal of healthcare innovation.

If we’re truly interested in high value healthcare, we’d do well to keep in mind that for many, if not most serious or chronic diseases, at least in the absolute sense, high value care simply isn’t an option. We have embarrassingly few therapeutic approaches that can really do much to restore the lives of these patients. Sufferers afflicted with Alzheimers Disease, pancreatic cancer, brain tumors, and so many other conditions desperately require transformative breakthroughs, not the mucking around the edges that passes for treatment today.

Make no mistake: it’s critical we do the very best we can to provide compassionate, evidence-driven care for patients who are sick right now, and innovations that contribute to the identification and humanistic delivery of the best available care are vitally important.Continue reading…