Category: Uncategorized

Do We Really Spend More and Get Less?

Dec 1, 2011• 106

By John Goodman

The conventional wisdom in health policy is that the United States spends far more than any other country and enjoys mediocre health outcomes. This judgment is repeated so often and so forcefully that you will almost never see it questioned. And yet it may not be true.

Indeed, the reverse may be true. We may be spending less and getting more.

The case for the critics was bolstered last week by a new OECD report that concluded:

The United States spends two-and-a-half times more than the OECD average health expenditure per person … It even spends twice as much as France, for example, a country which is generally accepted as having very good health services. At 17.4% of GDP in 2009, U.S. health spending is half as much again as any other country, and nearly twice the average.

Similar claims were made recently in The New York Times by former White House health advisor, Zeke Emanuel, who added that we are not getting better health care as a result. The same charge was aired at the Health Affairs blog the other day by Obama Social Security Advisory Board appointee Henry Aaron and health economist Paul Ginsburg. It is standard fare at Ezra Klein’s blog, at The Incidental Economist and at the Commonwealth Fund. It is also unquestioned dogma for New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman.

What are all these people missing? On the spending side, they are overlooking one of the most basic concepts in all of economics.

Will Health Insurance Reform Reach Those Who Really Need It?

Dec 1, 2011• 10

By Preeti Vissa

Issues that affect our lives don’t happen in a vacuum. Everything affects everything else, and there’s no area where that’s truer than health and access to care. So I’m going to take a slight detour from the financial and economic issues I write about most of the time to say a bit about the Affordable Care Act, which marks a historic expansion of access to health care.

Thanks to the law, an estimated 32 million previously uninsured Americans will be able to purchase health insurance in 2014. But right now there are real questions about whether this historic expansion of coverage will reach those Americans who need it most.

My colleagues on The Greenlining Institute‘s health team have been looking into this, and just published their findings in the form of a new report. They focused on the new Health Benefit Exchanges, which will allow consumers to compare the price, quality, and benefits of competing health insurance plans. Maybe most important, Americans will be able to purchase coverage through their state’s Exchange with federal subsidies that will help low and middle-income families cover the cost.

The bottom line is that getting the word out about these new options may be more complicated than it seems, and state Exchanges should get communities involved in the process sooner rather than later.

Current plans call for Web portals to serve as the main route through which consumers will access the Exchanges, but these websites won’t be able to do the job by themselves. States will need to pursue a variety of outreach and enrollment strategies, strategies that must be based on the populations they must reach.

Hey East Coast Entrepreneurs: We Fail Better.

Dec 1, 2011

By David Shaywitz

Apparently, the secret to Silicon Valley’s success isn’t just the good weather and smart people – turns out, the secret to our region’s entrepreneurial preeminence just may be the way we embrace failure.

According to KPCB life-science (devices) partner Dana Mead – who notes he hails from the northeast — there’s a world of difference between Palo Alto and Cambridge (MA).

In Cambridge, he contends in a recent (and, as always, informative) lecture/podcast at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, if you tell people your last three businesses failed, “they’ll look at you sideways” and shake their heads, presumably with a mixture of sadness and pity. In Palo Alto, by contrast, the reaction will be “that’s awesome! I’m sure your next company will be a world-beater.”

The Politics of Prevention

Nov 29, 2011• 11

By JOANNE KENEN

If there’s one thing everyone in Washington can agree on it’s that prevention is good. And that’s about as far as the agreement goes.

As for the rest of it – who is responsible for prevention, how to define prevention, what is the government’s role in prevention, how much to spend on prevention and when to spend it – is not so clear, and wrapped up in the bitter politics (and difficult economics) of the day.

Then, there’s the question of the Prevention and Public Health Fund created by the Affordable Care Act to enable states and communities to try to prevent illness and promote longer, healthier lives. To backers of the law, the fund is an engine for public health, community transformation, and a pivotal part of the effort to create a “health care” system instead of a “sick care” system.

To foes, it’s a “slush fund”, a $13.8 billion monument to everything they don’t like about the 2010 legislation. It’s $13.8 billion that could easily end up on one of the deficit-cutting chopping blocks.

The British Primary Care System and Its Lessons for America

Nov 29, 2011• 8

By BOB WACHTER, MD

I’ve heard a lot of shocking things since arriving in England five months ago on my sabbatical. But nothing has had me more gobsmacked than when, earlier this month, I was chatting with James Morrow, a Cambridge-area general practitioner. We were talking about physicians’ salaries in the UK and he casually mentioned that he was the primary breadwinner in his family.

His wife, you see, is a surgeon.

This more than any other factoid captures the Alice in Wonderland world of GPs here in England. Yes—and it’s a good thing you’re sitting down—the average GP makes about 20% more than the average subspecialist (though the specialists sometimes earn more through private practice—more on this in a later blog). This is important in and of itself, but the pay is also a metaphor for a well-considered decision by the National Health Service (NHS) nearly a decade ago to nurture a contented, surprisingly independent primary care workforce with strong incentives to improve quality.

Appreciating the enormity of this decision and its relevance to the US healthcare system requires a little historical perspective.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, the British system cleaves the world of primary care and everything else much more starkly than we do in the States. All the specialists (the “ologists,” as they like to call them) are based in hospitals, where they have their outpatient practices, perform their procedures, and staff their specialty wards. Primary care in the community is delivered by GPs, who resemble our family practitioners in training and disposition, but also differ from them in many ways.

Joint Commission Says Texting Orders Is a No-No, but Maybe Docs Are on to Something

Nov 28, 2011• 10

By DAVID E. WILLIAMS

The Joint Commission has issued a statement indicating that health care professionals should not text patient orders. It reads:

“It is not acceptable for physicians or licensed independent practitioners to text orders for patients to the hospital or other healthcare setting. This method provides no ability to verify the identity of the person sending the text and there is no way to keep the original message as validation of what is entered into the medical record.”

I was alerted to this statement by an iHealthBeat article on the topic, which quotes a couple of experts who note that texting has security, privacy and reliability problems that make it unsuitable for critical issues.

I understand the downsides but I’d be interested to learn more about what’s driving the use of texting for orders — if there is in fact such a trend. My guess is that younger physicians in particular are used to texting in their personal lives, finding it convenient, immediate, reliable, concise and likely to be read, acknowledged and acted on quickly. Add to that the fact that texting can easily be done from personal mobile devices and the appeal becomes pretty clear.

The Doc Fix

Nov 28, 2011• 15

By Merrill Goozner

Holiday cheer and bipartisan bonhomie are still possible on Capitol Hill.

For evidence, one need only look at the so-called “doc fix,” where Congress every year overrides a previous effort at health care cost control to ensure physicians get paid at least as much as they did the year before. Expect another present to arrive at physicians’ offices sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, now that the Super Committee has failed to permanently resolve the issue as part of Medicare’s contribution to long-term deficit control.

The heretical thought that the salaries of physicians who treat Medicare patients could be held in check dates from the mid-1990s. The optimistically entitled 1997 Balanced Budget Act created a “sustainable growth rate” (SGR) for physician reimbursement that said any increase in total pay for physicians could not exceed the growth rate of the rest of the economy.

That was wishful thinking, as it turned out. Health care costs and physician pay far exceeded economic growth, largely because of Medicare’s fee-for-service system. While the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services could fix the reimbursement rate for the 7,000 price-controlled services offered by physicians, it could not put a brake on the quantity that physicians ordered.

“This system, which ties annual updates to cumulative expenditures, has failed to restrain volume growth and, in fact, may have exacerbated it,” the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) noted in its non-binding recommendations to Congress in mid-October.

The Constitution Is Not a Turkey

Nov 26, 2011• 79

By DAVID DRANOVE

I think the world of Jon Gruber, the MIT economist who helped design both the Massachusetts Health Plan and the Health Insurance Exchange provisions of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. So I was more than a bit dismayed to read this quote from Jon: “I’m frustrated that the future of the American health care system rests in the hands of one or two of these unelected people who might make the decision based on political grounds.” The “unelected people” that Jon is referring to are justices of the Supreme Court. Jon almost seems surprised that the Supreme Court has a say in the matter.

The Health Insurance Exchange is an idea that economists have floated for more than three decades and thanks to his hard work, that idea has become a reality in Massachusetts and perhaps the rest of the nation, provided that the Supreme Court doesn’t block this fine bit of economics. Unfortunately for supporters of the exchange (including myself) the health insurance purchase mandate – an essential element of any economically viable exchange – might be unconstitutional. God forbid that the U.S. Constitution might interfere with beautiful economic theories.

There is a solution. I am almost too modest to say it but I proposed this idea in my book Code Red long before Barack Obama put his hand on the bible to be sworn in as Regulator-in-Chief. The beauty of the solution is that it respects, nay, was inspired by Jon’s work in Massachusetts, and is constitutional to boot! The solution is in its own way conservative, because it does not mandate a single approach to health reform. Congress should have given each state a block grant conditional on expanding health insurance coverage. The states could have chosen how to proceed. The U.S. Constitution might prohibit a federal mandate to purchase insurance, but it says nothing about what the states may do.

Some states might have chosen to adopt their own versions of the Massachusetts Health Plan. A few states may have centralized insurance, creating their own versions of single payer systems. Others may have given individuals vouchers and encouraged the growth of private insurance exchanges. This would be the closest to a free market solution, keeping the government out of it, except as a vehicle for transferring wealth. Perhaps all of these ideas would have been better than the status quo. Perhaps states could have learned from each other. Even Jon Gruber might have learned something new! Through this experimentation, we could have rapidly expanded health insurance coverage and also put lots of theories to the test. I still think this is a terrific idea. But in 2009 when politicians and economists huddled together to write the Affordable Care Act, no one invited me to the party. Alas. Continue reading…

Drawing a Hard Line on Resident Work Hours

Nov 26, 2011• 6

By Sammy Almashat, MD, MPH and Sidney Wolfe, MD

Last year, Public Citizen and other groups filed a petition – the second in 10 years – calling on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to take over responsibility for enforcing medical resident work hours from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). This past September, the Obama administration denied our groups’ petition on the grounds that the ACGME is the appropriate entity to handle the issue, an identical argument to one put forward by the Bush administration nine years earlier to justify the denial of our first petition.

Both petitions were filed as a result of the long-standing failure of the ACGME to adequately protect residents from the proven deleterious effects of long work hours. Six years after the ACGME implemented the first limits on resident work hours in 2003, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) concluded an exhaustive 12-month review examining the existing system of medical training and the evidence regarding fatigue, resident physicians, and patient safety. The IOM concluded that the 2003 ACGME rules were not adequately protective and that major changes were needed, including a limit of 16 hours in a row for all resident work shifts.

In response, the ACGME updated its guidelines in 2010, but unfortunately, the new rules failed to incorporate the majority of the IOM’s recommendations. The rules limited medical interns ― first-year residents ― to 16-hour shifts but inexplicably allowed all other residents to continue to work up to 28 hours straight. There is no biological rationale to support the notion that residents suddenly become able to withstand the adverse effects of extended shifts upon completing their first year of residency. In addition, the new rules, in permitting averaging over several weeks to achieve the 80-hour weekly limit, continued the practice of allowing residents to work 100 or more hours in certain weeks.

Are Doctors Becoming Obsolete?

Nov 26, 2011• 9

By David Shaywitz, MD, PhD

The idea that physicians are going to be far less important in the medicine of the future seems to be a central assumption of many next-generation health companies, an assertion that, like undergraduate Shakespeare productions set in the present day, may once have felt daring and original, but now seems merely tedious.

The logic goes something like is: Patients are accustomed to seeking insight from their doctors but doctors are far less good at providing this advice than most patients realize. As more consumer-based tools for managing health become available, patients will recognize that they now have the means and the motivation to take care of their health better than their physicians, and medical care will move directly into their hands.

Arguably, a form of this already happens today, as patients make extensive use of non-prescription products (e.g. the Vitamin Shoppe reported net sales of $750 million in fiscal year 2010), non-traditional practitioners (e.g. total revenue received by chiropractors is estimated by Hoovers to be about $10 billion), and seek medical advice from friends on Facebook (which may have directly saved at least one life).

What these data don’t convey, however, is something I’ve had the privilege to experience first-hand: Doctors enjoy an exceptionally durable bond with patients — especially those patients with chronic illnesses. The level of trust reported by patients for their physicians is remarkable, and the role of physician as trusted adviser is difficult to overstate. It’s a huge burden to manage disease on one’s own, and it’s generally reassuring to know your physician is with you at every step — something I believe still happens, by the way, although obviously not in every case.