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Category: Health Policy

Will Amazon Deliver a Single-Payer Health Care System for the U.S.?

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By JOE GRACE

Amazon has quietly put together a syndicate including Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan to provide better and more affordable health care for their combined 1.2 million workers. 

The joint effort, called Haven, makes sense because many companies of size today are self-insured to provide health care at lower costs. But this is different. Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett seem to be personally involved in the development of Haven. So, what could they possibility have up their sleeves?

At the same time, many Democrats running for president are promising single payer health care (Medicare For All) as the solution to controlling costs and providing quality health care for everyone. Republicans argue that this is socialism and will result in unacceptable increases in taxes that will ruin our economy.

While politicians debate, Amazon’s real objective may be to create a health care payer to rival all payers with tens of millions of Amazon Prime Members as health plan members.

With Amazon’s buying power, scale and capabilities, the ecommerce giant could create a health payer offering that could render the need for a single payer system moot.

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Price-Fixing Case Reveals Vulnerability of Generic Drug Policies

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By ANDREW MULCAHY

A massive lawsuit filed in May by 44 states accuses 20 major drug makers of colluding for years to inflate prices on more than 100 generic drugs, including those to treat H.I.V., cancer and depression. If true, the alleged behavior is not just a violation of antitrust law, but also a betrayal of the government policies that created and defended the entire generic drug industry. 

Most prescriptions in the U.S. today — 9 in 10 — are filled with generics, which are just as safe and effective as their brand-name equivalent. And yet generics account for only 22 percent of U.S. prescription drug spending. These prices are so low because of competition between makers of different versions of the same generic drug. The more competing generic alternatives, the lower the price, theoretically right down to the marginal cost of manufacturing the pill. 

This success is the result of decades of careful federal and state policymaking, all geared towards introducing competition in prescription drug markets. The entire generic industry has its origins in the Hatch-Waxman Act of 1984. Prior to Hatch-Waxman, a company that wanted to sell a competing version of a drug whose patents had expired had to conduct lengthy and expensive clinical trials to get approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Hatch-Waxman established a quicker, less-expensive path to FDA approval that leans on the scientific research supporting the already approved brand-name drugs.  

Hatch-Waxman also created incentives for generic drug makers to challenge drug patents that prevent competition. Successful challengers win a 180-day period of exclusivity during which their generic is the only one allowed to compete with the brand-name drug. The floodgates open and additional competition pushes prices down further after the 180-day period.  

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A National Patient Identifier: Should You Care?

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By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD

The rather esoteric issue of a national patient identifier has come to light as a difference between two major heath care bills making their way through the House and the Senate.

The bills are linked to outrage over surprise medical bills but they have major implications over how the underlying health care costs will be controlled through competitive insurance and regulatory price-setting schemes. This Brookings comment to the Senate HELP Committee bill summarizes some of the issues.

Who Cares?

Those in favor of a national patient identifier are mostly hospitals and data brokers, along with their suppliers. More support is discussed here. The opposition is mostly on the basis of privacyand libertarian perspective. A more general opposition discussion of the Senate bill is here.

Although obscure, national patient identifier standards can help clarify the role of government in the debate over how to reduce the unusual health care costs and disparities in the U.S. system. What follows is a brief analysis of the complexities of patient identifiers and their role relative to health records and health policy.

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Is “Medicare For All (Who Want it)” Enough?

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By MIKE MAGEE

In the 2nd night of the Democratic Primary debate on June 27, 2019, Pete Buttigieg was asked whether he supported Medicare-For-All. He responded, “I support Medicare for all who want it.” 

In doing so, he side-stepped the controversial debate over shifts of power from states to the federal government, and trusted that logic would eventually prevail over a collusive Medical-Industrial Complex with an iron lock grip on a system that deals everyone imaginable in on the sickness profitability curve – except the patient.

On July 30, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law “Medicare,” a national insurance plan for all Americans over 65. He did so in front of former President Truman, who 20 years earlier had proposed a national health plan for all Americans, and for his trouble was labeled by the AMA as the future father of “socialized medicine.”

For Truman, there was a double irony that day in 1965. First of all, the signing was occurring at around the same time as our neighbor to the north was signing their own national health plan, also called “Medicare”, but their’s covered all Canadian citizens, not just the elderly.

The second incongruity was that Truman was fully aware that in 1945, as he was being tarred and feathered as unpatriotic by taxpayers for having the gall to suggest that health care was a human right, those very same citizens were unknowingly funding the creation of national health plans as democracy stabilizers in our two primary vanquished enemies – Germany and Japan – as part of the US taxpayer funded Marshall Plan.

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Why the Health Care System Is Incapable of Reducing Its Own Costs: A Brief Structural System Analysis

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By JOE FLOWER

Leading lights of the health insurance industry are crying that Medicare For All or any kind of universal health reform would “crash the system” and “destroy healthcare as we know it.”

They say that like it’s a bad thing.

They say we should trust them and their cost-cutting efforts to bring all Americans more affordable health care.

We should not trust them, because the system as it is currently structured economically is incapable of reducing costs.

Why? Let’s do a quick structural analysis. This is how health care actually works.

Health care, in the neatly packaged phrase of Nick Soman, CEO of Decent.com, is a “system designed to create reimbursable events.” For all that we talk of being “patient-centered” and “accountable,” the fee-for-service, incident-oriented system is simply not designed to march toward those lofty goals.

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DANGER! COURSE CORRECTION ALERT!

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By JOE FLOWER

A hot take on healthcare in the Democratic debate: They’re doing it wrong.

Healthcare is not a reason to choose between the Democratic candidates. 

They are all for greater access and in some way to cover everyone, which is great. 

None of their plans will become law, but if they are elected those plans will become the starting point of a long discussion and legislative fight. The difference in their plans (between, say, Buttigieg or Biden and Warren or Sanders) is more of an indication of their general attitude toward governance rather than an outline of where we will end up.

Democrats are focused on coverage, Trump is on cost. 

Around 90% of Americans already have coverage of some sort. Polls show that healthcare is voters’ #1 priority. Read the polls more closely, and you’ll see that it’s healthcare cost specifically that they are worried about.

Democrats seem to assume that extending more government control will result in lower costs. This is highly debatable, the devil’s in the details, and our past history on this is good but not great. 

The President, on the other hand, can make flashy pronouncements and issue Executive Orders that seem intended to bring down costs and might actually. It’s highly questionable whether they will be effective, or effective any time soon. Still, they make good headlines and they especially make for good applause lines at a rally and good talking points on Fox.

But, Ms. and Mr. Average Voter will hear that Trump is very concerned about bringing down their actual costs. The Democratic plans all sound to the untutored ear (which is pretty much everyone but policy wonks like you and me) like they will actually increase costs while taking away the insurance that 90% already have in one way or another.

It is important to take care of everyone. But it is a mistake for the Democrats to allow this to become a battle of perception between cost and coverage. Voters’ real #1 concern is about cost, not coverage.

Joe Flower has 40 years of experience in the healthcare world and has emerged as a thought leader on the deep forces changing the system in the United States and around the world.

Can we move on?

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By CHADI NABHAN MD, MBA, FACP

Every so often, my cynical self emerges from the dead. Maybe it’s a byproduct of social media, or from following Saurabh Jha, who pontificates about everything from Indian elections to the Brexit fiasco. Regardless, there are times when my attempts at refraining from being opinionated are successful, but there are rare occasions when they are not. Have I earned the right to opine freely about moving on from financial toxicity, anti-vaxers, who has ‘skin in the game’ when it comes to the health care system, the patient & their data, and if we should call patients “consumers”? You’ll have to decide.

I endorse academic publications; they can be stimulating and may delve into more research and are essential if you crave academic recognition. I also enjoy listening to live debates and podcasts, as well as reading, social media rants, but some of the debates and publications are annoying me. I have tried to address some of them in my own podcast series “Outspoken Oncology” as a remedy, but my remedy was no cure. Instead, I find myself typing away these words as a last therapeutic intervention.

Here are my random thoughts on the topics that have been rehashed & restated all over social media outlets (think: Twitter feeds, LinkedIn posts, Pubmed articles, the list goes on), that you will simply find no way out. Disclaimer, these are NOT organized by level of importance but simply based on what struck me over the past week as grossly overstated issues in health care.  Forgive my blunt honesty.

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Patient Privacy Rights: Comment on Regulatory Capture

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Deborah C. Peel
Adrian Gropper

By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD and DEBORAH C PEEL, MD

To ONC and CMS

We begin by commending HHS, CMS, and ONC for skillfully addressing the pro-competitive and innovative essentials in crafting this Rule and the related materials. However, regulatory capture threatens to derail effective implementation of the rule unless HHS takes further action on the standards.

Regulatory capture in Wikipedia begins:

“Regulatory capture is a form of government failure which occurs when a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.  When regulatory capture occurs, the interests of firms, organizations, or political groups are prioritized over the interests of the public, leading to a net loss for society. Government agencies suffering regulatory capture are called “captured agencies.” (end of Wikipedia quotation.)

The extent to which HHS has allowed itself to be influenced by special interests is not the subject of this comment. This comment is just about how HHS and the Federal Health Architecture can act to more effectively implement the sense of Congress in the 21st Century Cures Act.

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Remembering the Real Stakeholders: Patient Privacy Rights Comments to TEFCA Draft 2

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Deborah C. Peel
Adrian Gropper

By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD and DEBORAH C. PEEL, MD

TEFCA will succeed where previous national health information exchange efforts have failed only if it puts patients’ and families’, and/or their fiduciary agents, in control of health technology. This is the only path to restore trust in physicians, and to ensure accurate and complete data for treatment and research.

As physicians and patient advocates, we seek a longitudinal health record, patient-centered in the sense of being independent of any particular institution. An independent health record is also essential to enhancing competition and innovation for health services. TEFCA Draft 2 is the latest in a decade of starts down the path to an independent longitudinal health record, but it still fails to deal with the problems of consent, patient matching, and regulatory capture essential for a national-scale network. Our comments on regulatory capture will be filed separately.

We strongly support the importance in Draft 2 of Open APIs, Push, and a relationship locator service. We also strongly support expanding the scope to a wider range of data sources, beyond just HIPAA covered entities in order to better serve the real-world needs of patients and families.

However, Draft 2 still includes design practices such as the lack of patient transparency, lack of informed consent, and a core design based on involuntary surveillance. This institution-centered design barely works at a community level and leaves out many key real-world participants. It is wishful thinking to believe that it will work with expanded participant scope and on a national scale.

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Remembering the Real Stakeholders: Patient Privacy Rights Comments on the Proposed CMS Regulation Pursuant to the Cures Act

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Deborah C. Peele
Adrian Gropper

By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD and DEBORAH C. PEEL, MD

Electronic health records (EHRs) are a polarizing issue in health reform. In their current form, they are frustrating to many physicians and have failed to support cost improvements. The current round of federal intervention is proposed rulemaking pursuant to the 21st Century Cures Act calls for penalties for “information blocking” and for technology that physicians and patients could use “without special effort.”

The proposed rules are over one thousand pages of technical jargon that aims to govern how one machine communicates with another when the content of the communication is personal and very valuable information about an individual. Healthcare is a challenging and unique industry when it comes to interoperability. Hospitals spend lavishly on EHRs and pursue information blocking as a means to manipulate the physicians and patients who might otherwise bypass the hospital on the way to health reform. The result is a broken market where physicians and patients directly control trillions of dollars in spending but have virtually zero market power over the technology that hospitals and payers operate as information brokers.

What follows below are comments by Patient Privacy Rights on the proposed rule. The common thread of our comments is the need to treat patients and physicians, not the data brokers, as the real stakeholders.

Comments to the ONC Rule

Overview: 21st Century health care innovation, policy, and practice is increasingly dependent on personal information. This is obvious with respect to machine learning and risk adjustment, but personal information is now central to the competitive strategy for most of the health care economy, clinical as well as research. ONC’s drafting of this rule reflects the importance of competition to innovation and cost containment.

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