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Category: OP-ED

Would ACOs Work if They Were Turned into HMOs?

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By KIP SULLIVAN, JD

CMS has now conducted three demonstrations of the “accountable care organization,” and all of them have failed. The Physician Group Practice (PGP) Demonstration, which ran from 2005 to 2010, raised Medicare costs by 1.2 percent. [1] The Pioneer ACO program, which ran from 2012 through 2016, cut Medicare spending by three- or four-tenths of a percent on average over its first four years. And the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP), which began in 2012 and may lumber on indefinitely, has raised Medicare costs by two-tenths of a percent on average over its first four years.

It is way past time for CMS and health policy researchers to determine why all three ACO demos failed. In the first two installments in this three-part series I laid out one of the reasons: CMS’s method of assigning patients to ACOs guarantees ACOs must apply their magic to a rapidly changing pool of patients and doctors. In the first essay , I demonstrated that this method, which assigns patients first to doctors based on where they get the plurality of their primary care visits and then to ACOs if their doctors are in ACOs, guarantees high churn rates among doctors and patients, shunts sicker patients away from the ACOs, and assigns few ACO patients to each ACO doctor. In the second essay I reviewed the series of evidence-free decisions that led to CMS’s plurality-of-visits method. I noted that the first of these decisions was one Congress made: They instructed CMS to figure out how to assign patients to ACOs without making patients enroll in ACOs.

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MD vs. DNP: Why 20,000 Hours of Training and Experience Matters

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By NIRAN AL-AGBA, MD

As southern states entertain legislation granting nurse practitioners independent practice rights, there are some finer details which deserve careful deliberation. While nurse practitioners are intelligent, capable, and contribute much to our healthcare system, they are not physicians and lack the same training and knowledge base. They should not identify themselves as “doctors” despite having a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) degree. It is misleading to patients, as most do not realize the difference in education necessary for an MD or DO compared to a DNP. Furthermore, until they are required to pass the same rigorous board certification exams as physicians, they should refrain from asserting they are “doctors” in a society which equates that title with being a physician.

After residency, a physician has accrued a minimum of 20,000 or more hours of clinical experience, while a DNP only needs 1,000 patient contact hours to graduate. As healthcare reform focuses on cost containment, the notion of independent nurse practitioners resulting in lower healthcare spending overall should be revisited. While mid-level providers cost less on the front end; the care they deliver may ultimately cost more when all is said and done.

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How CMS Undermines ACOs and What to do About It

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By KIP SULLIVAN

In my first post  in this three-part series, I documented three problems with Pioneer ACOs: High churn rates among patients and doctors; assignment to ACOs of healthy patients; and assignment of so few ACO patients to each ACO doctor that ACO “attributees” constitute just 5 percent of each doctor’s panel. I noted that these problems could explain why Medicare ACOs have been so ineffective.

These problems are the direct result of CMS’s strange method of assigning patients to ACOs. Patients do not decide to enroll in ACOs. CMS assigns patients to ACOs based on a two-step process: (1) CMS first determines whether a doctor has a contract with an ACO; (2) CMS then determines which patients “belong” to that doctor, and assigns all patients “belonging” to that doctor to that doctor’s ACO. This method is invisible to patients; they don’t know they have been assigned to an ACO unless an ACO doctor tells them, which happens rarely, and when it does patients have no idea what the doctor is talking about. [1]

This raises an obvious question: If CMS’s method of assigning patients to ACOs is a significant reason why ACOs are not succeeding, why do it? There is no easy way to explain CMS’s answer to this question because it isn’t rational. The best way to explain why CMS adopted the two-step attribution method is to explain the method’s history.Continue reading…

What’s Behind the Spike in Food Allergies?

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By BASIL KAHWASH, MD

We are surrounded by evidence of the enormous impact food allergies are making in our society. The peanut butter and jelly sandwich, once a staple of elementary school lunchboxes, has been banned in numerous school districts across the country. Candy bars are required to alert consumers about any other products processed in the factories where they were made. Gluten-free diets are trumpeted by celebrities and have spawned communities of devoted followers (there’s even a “gluten-free” dating site – I’m not making this up).

However, the spectrum of food allergies is still poorly understood by the general public. The phrase “food allergy” conjures one image: a child who, after eating, say, a kiwi, becomes flushed and has trouble breathing until an Epi-pen can be administered. While certainly dangerous, that scenario represents only one aspect of what may be called modern food allergy (or the broader spectrum of food intolerance). Other, milder-appearing food allergies may exist in a larger percentage of the population than previously thought. These mild intolerances can still cause a great deal of discomfort, and when they go unrecognized, may lead to years of expensive and unnecessary testing.

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Open Season on Health Privacy in Washington DC

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By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD

With Senate bill S.3530, data brokers would remove the last shreds of transparency and control that patients still have over our health data and drive healthcare costs even higher in the process. Will hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry go along?

It’s been 17 years since patients lost control over how our hospitals and insurance companies use our personal health data without any consent or a convenient accounting for disclosures. HIPAA allows so-called Covered Entities to use and sell our data without consent and, separately, often under the pretense of de-identification, through a $100 Billion network of hidden data brokers that we know don’t know about, choose, or oversee. Our data is worth $100 Billion because it helps health businesses to maximize profits and it contributes to an unknown extent to the uniquely high cost of healthcare in the US.

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On Teaching Hospitals and Conflict of Interest and Other Politically Charged Topics

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By ASHISH JHA, MD

How much does it matter which hospital you go to? Of course, it matters a lot – hospitals vary enormously on quality of care, and choosing the right hospital can mean the difference between life and death. The problem is that it’s hard for most people to know how to choose. Useful data on patient outcomes remain hard to find, and even though Medicare provides data on patient mortality for select conditions on their Hospital Compare website, those mortality rates are calculated and reported in ways that make nearly every hospital look average.

Some people select to receive their care at teaching hospitals. Studies in the 1990s and early 2000s found that teaching hospitals performed better, but there was also evidence that they were more expensive. As “quality” metrics exploded, teaching hospitals often found themselves on the wrong end of the performance stick with more hospital-acquired conditions and more readmissions. In nearly every national pay-for-performance scheme, they seemed to be doing worse than average, not better. In an era focused on high-value care, the narrative has increasingly become that teaching hospitals are not any better – just more expensive.

But is this true? On the one measure that matters most to patients when it comes to hospital care – whether you live or die – are teaching hospitals truly no better or possibly worse? About a year ago, that was the conversation I had with a brilliant junior colleague, Laura Burke. When we scoured the literature, we found that there had been no recent, broad-based examination of patient outcomes at teaching versus non-teaching hospitals. So we decided to take this on.

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Only Alternative Facts Can Support the Protecting Access to Care Act

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By CHARLES SILVER and DAVID HYMAN

In late March of this year, JAMAInternal Medicine published a study finding that the “the overall rate of [malpractice] claims paid on behalf of physicians decreased by 55.7% from 1992 to 2014.”  The finding wasn’t new.  In 2013, the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies published a study co-authored by one of us (Hyman) which found that “the per-physician rate of paid med mal claims has been dropping for 20 years and in 2012 was less than half the 1992 level.”  In fact, peer-reviewed journals in law and medicine have published lots of studies with similar results.  It is (or should be) common knowledge that claims of an ongoing liability crisis are phony.

But inconvenient facts have never stopped interest groups or politicians from making false claims about med mal litigation.  Since 1991, when Dan Quayle struck gold by asserting that the U.S. had too many lawyers, Americans have heard non-stop about “jackpot justice” in which patients who weren’t even injured win millions; about the flood of frivolous lawsuits in which doctors are sued even though they didn’t make any mistakes; about jury verdicts skyrocketing out of control; and about doctors working all their lives only to have their savings wiped out by a single malpractice suit.  All of these charges are false—you can find the evidence here, here, here, and here.  But in politics, it’s staying on message that counts; it doesn’t seem to matter whether the message is true.Continue reading…

Why Health Reform is a Risky Business for Politicians: Even Winning Can Cost You at the Polls!

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By JEFF GOLDSMITH

In August 1989, Chicago Congressman Daniel Rostenkowski, then Chairman of the “powerful” House Ways and Means Committee, narrowly escaped an angry mob of seniors in his own district who attacked his car with umbrellas. His crime: eliminating the gaping patient financial exposure built into the Medicare program in 1965 by raising taxes on the “high income” elderly.   In November, 1989 Congress rescinded the so-called Catastrophic Coverage Act, a bipartisan reform signed into law by Ronald Reagan just sixteen months earlier.

In the spring of 1994, Bill and Hillary Clinton abandoned their famously arcane health reform plan and months later, forfeited control over Congress in the 1994 mid-term elections. Health reform was a major factor giving Newt Gingrich’s House Republicans control for the first time in forty years. Twenty five years later, Barack Obama succeeded, with huge Democratic majorities, in passing the Affordable Care Act and . . . lost control of the House less than eight months later in the largest Republican landslide since 1938, due in major part to voter backlash against “ObamaCare”.

What was the common denominator of all these political events? The answer: powerful voter retribution for tinkering with the healthcare system, successfully or not.  Why is health reform such risky business for politicians?

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Universal Coverage Means Less Care and More Money

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By JANE ORIENT, MD

The reported success of the Affordable Care Act (ACA or ObamaCare) is based on enrollment numbers. Millions more have “coverage.” Similarly, the predicted disasters from repeal have to do with loss of coverage. Tens of thousands of deaths will allegedly follow. Activists urge shipping repeal victims’ ashes to Congress—possibly illegal and certainly disrespectful of the loved one’s remains, which will end up in a trash dump.

Where are the statistics about the number of heart operations done on babies born with birth defects, the latest poster children? How about the number of babies saved by this surgery, and the number allowed to die without an attempt at surgery—before and after ACA? I haven’t seen them. Note that an insurance plan doesn’t do the operation. A doctor does. The insurer can, however, try to block it.

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Would the World End if We Eliminated the Deductible?

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BY CARL FRANZEN

While Congress ponders a true fix for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), consider this about health coverage.

Problem #1, Can’t Use It: Healthy people, or people who don’t make a lot of money, sign up for the cheapest health insurance policy available. It gives them catastrophic coverage, protecting their family and home in the event of a big-time medical condition. But it also makes them mad. They pay a monthly fee for health insurance they can’t use until a large deductible is satisfied. For example, a person might pay $300 a month but have a $7,000 deductible. Do the math. That’s well over $10,000 before that person gets to use what they are paying for every month.

Problem #2, January Comes Too soon: Health is not an annual event. Maybe you go all year and suddenly need a bunch of medical help in December. The deductible hasn’t been reached so you pay the bill “out of pocket.” Nasty, because in January you still need medical care for the same thing, yet the deductible goes back to square one. Not nice. This makes more people mad. Solution for Problem #1 and Problem #2: eliminate all annual deductibles and replace with co-pays.

Problem #3, We Need To Build a Wall: Even by eliminating deductibles there are people who are required to pay more than they can afford. Fixing or replacing the ACA needs to build a wall of protection that limits the total amount—a percentage of income—paid by individuals or families in a calendar year—a guarantee that includes the cost of prescription drugs.

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