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Health Care Needs A Hero

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By MIKE MAGEE

Health care needs its heroes.

I came to that conclusion this week through a roundabout route.

First I read Maureen Dowd’s interview entitled “Dara Khosrowshahi, Dad of Silicon Valley”, in which she, with some affection, gives the reader a look behind the scenes at the personal life of the current Uber CEO. At one point, Dowd shares her conversation with Dara’s 20-year-old daughter, Chloe, a Brown student, who wants us to know her father was a seriously good dad. In support of this belief, she reports that “When she was little, her father – a fan of Joseph Campbell…would concoct children’s stories set in faraway kingdoms…”

This, of course, forced me to acknowledge that I didn’t know who Joseph Campbell was. Bill Moyers came to the rescue. His June 21, 1988 interview titled “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth — ‘The Hero’s Adventure’”, begins with a clip from Star Wars where Darth Vader says to Luke, “Join me, and I will complete your training.” And Luke replies, “I’ll never join you!” Darth Vader then laments, “If you only knew the power of the dark side.” Moyers asked Campbell to comment.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: He (Darth Vader) isn’t thinking, or living in terms of humanity, he’s living in terms of a system. And this is the threat to our lives; we all face it, we all operate in our society in relation to a system. Now, is the system going to eat you up and relieve you of your humanity, or are you going to be able to use the system to human purposes.

BILL MOYERS: So perhaps the hero lurks in each one of us, when we don’t know it.

By then, I was aware that Joseph Campbell, who died in 1987 at the age 83, was a professor of literature and comparative mythology at Sarah Lawrence College. His famous 1949 book,  “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” made the case that, despite varying cultures and religions, the hero’s story of departure, initiation, and return, is remarkably consistent and defines “the hero’s quest.” His knowledge of this quest gained him a large following that included George Lucas who was a close friend and has said that Star Wars was largely influenced by Campbell’s scholarship.

Whether health care or technology, unfettered capitalism is more than adept at breeding predatory systems that beg for redemption.  Author Emily Chang spoke to this predilection in her 2018 book, “Brotopia”, describing Silicon Valley types as “secretive, orgiastic, and dark.” Dara Kharowshaki’s  CEO predecessor at Uber, Travis Kalanick, was labeled one of the worst. When Dara took over, New York Times technology expert, Mike Issac asked in 2019, “Can this rational, charming chief without the edge, ego, or cult following of wacky founders succeed in today’s insane economy?”

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Matthew’s health care tidbits

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Each week I’ve been adding a brief tidbits section to the THCB Reader, our weekly newsletter that summarizes the best of THCB that week (Sign up here!). Then I had the brainwave to add them to the blog. They’re short and usually not too sweet! –Matthew Holt

In this week’s health care tidbits, we are talking about medical debt. Oh, not all medical debt. No, not that debt being garnished from the wages of health care workers by their own employers. Today we are just discussing the debt that has already gone to collections. Yes, the debt sold off by doctors and hospitals for pennies on the dollars so that debt collectors can hound people until they pay or despair.

This week a Harvard/Stanford team reported that the total in collections is $140 Billion! Way more than anyone thought, Nearly ONE in SIX Americans currently has a medical bill in collections. No prizes for guessing that those most likely to be being pursued are living in the poorest zip codes in the country and even more likely to be in a southern state that never expanded Medicaid.

Glad we are all proud to be American.

Biden Should Extend a “Public Option” as a Message to “Health Care Royalists”

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By MIKE MAGEE

In this world of political theatrics, with Democratic legislators from Texas forced into exodus to preserve voters’ rights, and Tucker Carlson rantings about Rep. Eric Swalwell riding shirtless on a camel in Qatar streaming relentlessly, Americans can be excused if they missed a substantive and historic news event last week.

On Friday, July 9th, President Biden signed a far-reaching executive order intended to fuel social and economic reform, and in the process created a potential super-highway sized corridor for programs like universal healthcare. In the President’s view, the enemy of the common man in pursuit of a “fair deal” is not lack of competition but “favoritism.”

To understand the far-reaching implications of this subtle shift in emphasis, let’s review a bit of history. It is easy to forget that this nation was the byproduct of British induced tyranny and economic favoritism. In 1773, citizens of Boston decided they had had enough, and dumped a shipment of tea, owned by the British East India Company, into the Boston Harbor. This action was more an act of practical necessity than politics. The company was simply one of many “favorites” (organizations and individuals) that “got along by going along” with their British controllers.  In lacking a free hand to compete in a free market, the horizons for our budding patriots and their families were indefinitely curtailed.

Large power differentials not only threatened them as individuals but also the proper functioning of the new representative government that would emerge after the American Revolution. Let’s recall that only white male property owners over 21(excluding Catholics and Jews) had the right to vote at our nation’s inception.

Over the following two centuries, power imbalances have taken on a number of forms. For example, during the industrial revolution, corporate mega-powers earned the designation “trusts”, and the enmity of legislators like Senator John Sherman of Ohio, who as Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, led the enactment of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.

He defined a “trust” as a group of businesses that collude or merge to form a monopoly. To Sen. Sherman, J.D. Rockefeller, the head of Standard Oil, was no better than a monarch. “If we will not endure a king as political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessities of life”, he said.   The law itself stated “[e]very contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.”

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Matthew’s health care tidbits

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Each week I’ve been adding a brief tidbits section to the THCB Reader, our weekly newsletter that summarizes the best of THCB that week (Sign up here!). Then I had the brainwave to add them to the blog. They’re short and usually not too sweet! –Matthew Holt

In this week’s health care tidbits, Shannon Brownlee and her fellow rebels at the Lown Institute decided to have a bit of fun and compare which non-profit hospitals actually made up for the tax-breaks they got by providing more in community benefit. A bunch of hospitals you never heard of topped the list. What was more interesting was the hospitals that topped the inverse list, in that they gave way less in community benefit than they got in tax breaks. That list has a bunch of names on it you will have heard of!

Given how many of that list run sizable hedge funds and then do a little health care services on the side, perhaps it’s time to totally re-think our deference to these hospital system monopolies. And I don’t just mean making it harder for them to merge and raise prices as suggested by Biden’s recent Executive Order.

A Hamiltonian View of Post-Pandemic America

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By MIKE MAGEE

“In countries where there is great private wealth much may be effected by the voluntary contributions of patriotic individuals, but in a community situated like that of the United States, the public purse must supply the deficiency of private resource. In what can it be so useful as in prompting and improving the efforts of industry?”

Those were the words of Alexander Hamilton published on December 5, 1791 in his “Report on the Subject of Manufactures.” He was making the case for an activist federal government with the capacity to support a fledgling nation and its leaders long enough to allow economic independence from foreign competitors.

Today’s “foreign force” of course is not any one nation but rather a microbe, gearing up for a fourth attack on our shores with Delta and Lambda variants. This invader has already wreaked havoc with our economy, knocking off nearly 2% of our GDP, as the nation and the majority of its workers experienced a period of voluntary lockdown.

Our leaders followed Hamilton’s advice and threw the full economic weight of our federal government into a dramatic and direct response. Seeing the threat as akin to a national disaster, money was placed expansively and directly into the waiting hands of our citizens, debtors were temporarily forgiven, foreclosures and evictions were halted, and all but the most essential workers sheltered in place.

Millions of citizens were asked to work remotely or differently (including school children and their teachers) or to not work at all – made possible by the government temporarily serving as their paymaster and keeping them afloat.

As we awake from this economic coma, many of our citizens are reflecting on their previously out-of-balance lives, their hyper-competitiveness, their under-valued or dead-end jobs, and acknowledging their remarkable capacity to survive, and even thrive, in a very different social arrangement.

If our nation is experiencing a trauma-induced existential awakening, it is certainly understandable. America has lost over 600,000 of our own in the past 18 months, more people per capita than almost all comparator nations in Europe and Asia. This has included not just the frail elderly, but also those under 65. In the disastrous wake of this tragedy, 40% of our population reports new pandemic-related anxiety and depression.

A quarter of our citizens avoided needed medical care during this lockdown. For example, screening PAP smears dropped by 80%. And so, Americans’ chronic burden of disease, already twice that of most nations in the world, has expanded once again. There will be an additional price to be paid for that.

The Kaiser Family Foundation’s most recent Health System Dashboard lists COVID-19 as our third leading cause of death, inching out deaths from prescription opioid overdoses. Year-to-date spending on provider health services through 2020 dropped 2%, but pharmaceutical profits, driven by exorbitant pricing, actually increased, bringing health sector declines overall down by -.5% compared to overall GDP declines of -1.8%. The net effect? The percentage of our GDP devoted to health care in the U.S. actually grew during the pandemic – a startling fact since our citizens already pay roughly twice as much per capita as most comparator nations around the world for health care.

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Community Health Plans Are Serious: Support Major Federal Action to Reduce Rx Drug Costs

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By CECI CONNOLLY

Equal treatment under the law. A foundational pillar of American life. Except when it comes to drug makers who benefit from favorable treatment by the federal government.

For far too long, prescription drug companies have profited immensely under a system that affords them monopolistic powers to set prices devoid of government or public scrutiny.

Even during the pandemic, while much of the economy took a beating, the pharmaceutical industry continued to benefit from the high prices they charge. In fact, 9 of the 10 biggest profit margins recorded last summer belonged to drug companies.

As the nation’s economy sputters back, Big Pharma continues to raise prices and block patient access to lower-cost alternatives. It is beyond time to tame the soaring prices of prescription drugs once and for all.

For years, health care players have skirted around concrete actions to truly impact drug prices. Efforts to cut costs for consumers have translated to higher costs for health plans, resulting in a cost shift instead of a cost reduction. We, as private, nonprofit insurers, believe in the ambition and innovation possible in a free market – but the  market has failed in this instance and it’s time for the government to take action.

That is why the Alliance of Community Health Plans (ACHP) is putting its support behind reforms that can make a real, lasting impact for consumers and the entire health system. For the first time, a national health care payer organization is stepping up and supporting pragmatic and progressive reforms that can truly begin to rein in the price of prescription drugs.

This includes backing the dramatic step to grant the Secretary of Health and Human Services the power to negotiate lower prices for the highest-priced medications for which there is no competition, in addition to other actions.

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Matthew’s health care tidbits

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Each week I’ve been adding a brief tidbits section to the THCB Reader, our weekly newsletter that summarizes the best of THCB that week (Sign up here!). Then I had the brainwave to add them to the blog. They’re short and usually not too sweet! (And yes, this week’s is a tad late!) –Matthew Holt

In this week’s health care tidbits, you may be wondering what happened to health policy under Joe Biden. He said no to Medicare for All because instead he was going to create a public option and lower the Medicare age to 60. Yet both those two policies seem to have vanished into the night. Presumably that’s because they think they’re a hard political sell and maybe that’s right. But why? This past week a massive study of American consumers shows that Medicare recipients are much happier with their experience than people with employer-based coverage. And employer based coverage is no better than Medicaid! To wit, the study showed:

Compared with those covered by Medicare, individuals with employer-sponsored insurance were less likely to report having a personal physician and were more likely to report instability in insurance coverage, difficulty seeing a physician because of costs, not taking medication because of costs, and having medical debt. Compared with those covered by Medicare, individuals with employer-sponsored insurance were less satisfied with their care.

Compared with individuals covered by Medicaid, those with employer-sponsored insurance were more likely to report having medical debt and were less likely to report difficulty seeing a physician because of costs and not taking medications because of costs. No difference in satisfaction with care was found between individuals with employer-sponsored private health insurance and those with Medicaid coverage.

I guess the new AHIP slogan is, “we’re just as good as Medicaid!” But you have to wonder, why are the rest of us being forced to consume an inferior product?

U.S. Science Embrace of Wuhan “Gain-Of-Function” Viral Research Proved A Slippery Slope

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By MIKE MAGEE

The truth hurts.

Eighteen months into a disaster that has claimed 3.5 million lives around the globe, the truth is seeping out. Human error likely caused the Covid pandemic, and America’s Medical-Industrial Complex was right in the middle of it.

Signs of a “great awakening” have emerged from various corners in the month of May.

On May 14, UNC’s top virologist, Ralph Baric, who worked closely with Wuhan chief virologist and batwoman extraordinare, Shi Zhengli, signed on with 17 other scientists to a Science editorial that demanded a reexamination of Covid’s causality writing “theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.”

On May 26, Francis Collins, head of the NIH, which funded in part Zhengli’s risky bat virus research (more on that in a moment), admitted to Congressional investigators that “we cannot exclude the possibility of some kind of a lab accident.”

And on June 3rd, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the ever-present Tony Fauci advised all who would listen “to keep an open mind.” What he would like us to open our minds to is not a Chinese run weaponized microbe conspiracy, but simply scientific recklessness and human error.

It’s now well established that three Wuhan virology scientists were hospitalized in the Fall of 2019 with Covid. But the initial report from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission, China, of this cluster of cases of pneumonia was only released on the last day of 2019.

It took only 50 more days for the tight knit group of global research virologists to get their act together and pen a Lancet editorial in which they stated “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” and that they  “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.”

Their coordinator-in-chief was one Peter Daszak, chartered power broker within the U.S. Medical Industrial Complex and president of New York based EcoHealth Alliance which was a major funder of Shi Zhengli’s work in Wuhan.

Daszak is known for adopting militarized terms in the battle against global infectious diseases. In 2020 he wrote in the New York Times, “Pandemics are like terrorist attacks: We know roughly where they originate and what’s responsible for them, but we don’t know exactly when the next one will happen. They need to be handled the same way — by identifying all possible sources and dismantling those before the next pandemic strikes.”

Daszak’s argument that risks involved in Shi Zhengli’s Wuhan bat viruses were justified as defensive and preventive was convincing enough to the NIH and the Department of Defense that his EcoHealth Alliance was funded from 2013 to 2020 (contracts, grants, subgrants) to the tune of well over $100 million – $39 million from Pentagon /DOD funds, $65 million from USAID/State Dept., and  $20 million from HHS/NIH/CDC.

As veteran Science reporter Nicholas Wade deciphered in a classic article in Science – The Wire, “For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game. In their laboratories they routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature. They argued they could do so safely, and that by getting ahead of nature they could predict and prevent natural “spillovers,” the cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people. If SARS2 had indeed escaped from such a laboratory experiment, a savage blowback could be expected, and the storm of public indignation would affect virologists everywhere, not just in China.”

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Bias, Before First Breath

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How structural racism and implicit bias impact America’s babies, even prior to birth

By ELLIE STANG

Becoming a new mother in America is more dangerous for some mothers than it should be. Each year, 700 women die in childbirth or from pregnancy-related causes in the United States, the highest number of any developed nation. 

Health inequities in America mean that overwhelmingly, Black women and their infants are the ones impacted: Black mothers are 243% more likely to die from pregnancy than white ones. These discrepancies are wide ranging: American Indian and Alaska Native women are also 2x more likely to experience an adverse outcome as compared to  their white counterparts. Too many of our mothers are dying of preventable causes. The CDC estimates that 70% of maternal deaths are avoidable – which helps underscore the urgent need to create tangible change. 

Recent forces have helped shine a long overdue spotlight on the Black maternal mortality crisis in America. In April, the Biden Administration released a proclamation during Black Maternal Health Week, and planned legislative changes to address implicit bias in healthcare and apply funding where it is truly needed. Congress is fielding the “Momnibus” bill, which would fund grassroots organizations at the community level, actively establish bias training programs, and fill gaps created by social determinants of health (SDOH). Late last year, the HHS released an action plan to reduce maternal mortality and adverse outcomes by 50% in five years.

It is heartening to see action finally being taken: our mothers deserve more. At the same time, while we champion standardized and equal access to care for all of our mothers, we cannot overlook the newest cry in the room: the infant’s. Even before drawing her first breath, a baby girl’s future will be irrevocably shaped by structural racism and socioeconomic factors way beyond her control. 

That’s why, to address health inequities, we must begin with our babies. Despite great advances in NICU technology and managed healthcare, infant mortality is on the rise – and it disproportionately affects Black babies. Today, black infants are twice as likely to die as their white counterparts. 

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Make Some Microbe Friends

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By KIM BELLARD

It’s the coolest story I’ve seen in the past few days: The New York Times reported how an Italian  museum cleaned its priceless Michelangelo sculptures with an army of bacteria.  As Jason Horowitz wrote, “restorers and scientists quietly unleashed microbes with good taste and an enormous appetite on the marbles, intentionally turning the chapel into a bacterial smorgasbord.”

And you just want to kill them all with your hand sanitizers and anti-bacterial soaps. 

The Medici Chapel in Florence had the good fortune to be blessed with an abundance of works by Michelangelo, but the bad fortune to have had centuries of various kinds of grime building up on them.  In particular, over time the corpse of one Medici “…seeped into Michelangelo’s marble, the chapel’s experts said, creating deep stains, button-shaped deformations…”

This is, I assume, why they tell you not to touch the art.

Scientists picked a bacteria — Serratia ficaria SH7, in case you’re taking notes – that ate the undesired grime without also eating the underlying marble.   It wasn’t hazardous to humans either and didn’t create spores that might go elsewhere.  “It’s better for our health,” one of the art restorers told NYT.  “For the environment, and the works of art.”

The technique was a success, allowing the sculptures to look like they did centuries ago. 

Using such bacteria to clean art has been around for at a decade, and not just for sculptures.  Perhaps more surprising is bacteria isn’t just cleaning art, it’s also creating it; the American Society for Microbiology hosts an annual Agar Art Contest. 

If you’re impressed by that, researchers are teaching bacteria to read, or at least to recognize letters.  That’s not all they might learn to do.  “For example, the framework and algorithm in our study can be used to facilitate the design of living therapeutics, such as targeted drug release systems based on engineered probiotic bacteria systems,” the researchers say.   

The thing is, we not only don’t know what microbes do, or could do, but we have only a vague understanding how they surround us.  That’s starting to change.  We’ve known for some time that each of us has a unique microbiome (including mycobiome!).  What we didn’t realize until recently was that each urban area has its own microbiome as well. 

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