Tag: Harold Pollack

More About Balancing Business, Humanity, and Restraint in Cancer Care

Dec 1, 2018

By HAROLD POLLACK

I published a column in Kaiser Health News about the challenge of cost control in cancer care. KHN needed to cut one section for space, which notes that oncology has become an ecosystem of multi-billion-dollar public, private, and nonprofit ventures in pharmaceutical development, imaging, acute care, and more. This ecosystem draws upon and then reinforces broader cultural biases that promote overly aggressive approaches to diagnosis and care. I wanted to add some more discussion, and one revealing advertising table….

Consider the issue of routine mammography for younger women. In questioning the benefits of such screening, the United States Preventive Services Task Force ran afoul of Americans’ powerful draw to the notion of early detection in confronting an especially frightening disease. The USPSTF committed some political blunders in its approach to this freighted and genuinely complicated issue. It should have anticipated the powerful political, cultural, and commercial resistance it was likely to encounter.

In American popular culture–though not in the epidemiological data–breast cancer is often depicted as a young woman’s disease. A terrific 1998 paper by Paula Lantz and Karen Booth examined magazine depictions of breast cancer. Lantz and Booth concluded that “the increase in incidence is commonly portrayed as a mysterious, unexplained epidemic occurring primarily among young, professional women in their prime years.” Public service announcements concerning mammography and breast cancer show similar patterns. These announcements, with their myriad images of beautiful young swimmers, emphasize that one in nine women will be diagnosed with breast cancer. The PSAs do not emphasize that only about 12 percent of breast cancer patients are diagnosed before age 45.

Health Reform: Still the Best-Covered Social Policy Story, Ever.

Mar 26, 2012• 11

By Harold Pollack

Two years ago, I put myself in hot water by making the simple (admittedly somewhat hyperbolic) claim:

Because it is so easy to find bad reporting and public stupidity, it is easy to overlook something. Press coverage of health care reform was the most careful, most thorough, and most effective reporting of any major story, ever.

This column appeared on April Fools’ Day. Some readers didn’t quite believe that I was serious. I was. Others were simply horrified. Allison Kilkenny, writing in the Huffington Post, typified the reaction among frustrated left-of-center commentators who had just witnessed the “death panels” debacle, the demise of the public option, and similar depressing episodes: “Harold Pollack went out on a limb, and unfortunately fell off the edge.” Andrew Sullivan said something similar.

The Columbia Journalism Review’s Trudy Lieberman was more brutal:

Last week, The New Republic turned over its health care blog “The Treatment” to an odd commenter on media coverage—University of Chicago professor Harold Pollack, who runs the university’s Center for Health Administration Studies. I thought I knew most of those who dabble in these waters, but Pollack’s name took me by surprise. Pollack, a special correspondent for The Treatment, may know something about welfare programs and substance abuse, but we on Campaign Desk take issue with his credentials as a press critic and dispute his central point….

Better coverage than the Vietnam War; the civil rights movement; the consumer movement? Really? In the case of the civil rights struggle, the press helped change the discourse; Americans began to view race in a new way, which led to the eventual passage of the Civil Rights Act. During the Vietnam War, the media effectively changed the public dialogue from a war we couldn’t lose to one we could not win. In the early days of the consumer movement, media coverage of Ralph Nader led Congress to enact significant consumer protections. Coverage of health reform has hardly risen to that level.

Losing one’s credentials as a “press critic” is a particularly low blow. The only thing worse would be to lose the moniker “Democratic strategist” on the cable talk circuit. I appreciate where Lieberman is coming from, but I think she missed my point, which was actually intended to be sobering.
Continue reading…

(Some) Illinois Hospitals Losing Tax-exempt Status

Aug 17, 2011• 4

By HAROLD POLLACK

From the Chicago Tribune and AP.

The decisions were announced to the hospitals Tuesday morning, Revenue Department officials told The Associated Press. They follow last year’s Illinois Supreme Court ruling that found a central Illinois hospital wasn’t doing enough free or discounted treatment of the poor to qualify for an exemption, costing it $1.2 million in local property tax payments per year.

In addition to Prentice Women’s Hospital [a Northwestern facility] in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood, the revenue department now has decided that Edward Hospital in Naperville and Decatur Memorial Hospital in Decatur don’t quality for property tax exemptions. The hospitals have 60 days to ask an administrative law judge to review the decisions. In Illinois, property taxes are collected by county governments, and the Department of Revenue decides which institutions are eligible for tax exemptions.

In a written statement, Illinois Hospital Association President Maryjane A. Wurth said she was disappointed and “deeply concerned” by the Revenue Department’s preliminary rulings, and worries that the hospitals will be forced to reduce services and increase costs for patients and employers.

It’s neither surprising nor inappropriate that state policymakers are holding hospitals to account.

Bad Medicine: TriCare’s Noncoverage of Evidence-based Opiate Maintenance Therapy

Apr 15, 2011• 1

By KEITH HUMPHREYS & HAROLD POLLACK

This week, The New York Times gave heart-wrenching accounts of newborn babies enduring opiate drug withdrawal because of their mothers’ addictions. The story provided only one cause for optimism: Both babies and their painkiller-dependent mothers can benefit dramatically from being maintained on medications such as methadone or buprenorphine.

Unless, of course, these mothers were members of a military family, in which case such essential, life-saving care would be denied to them.

The most effective treatment for opiate addiction — long-term buprenorphine or methadone maintenance — is not covered by the Department of Defense’s TRICARE insurance program. The program limits methadone and buprenorphine prescriptions to short-term detoxification, and its regulations state, “Drug maintenance programs when one addictive drug is substituted for another on a maintenance basis (such as methadone substituting for heroin) are not covered.” The premise that prescribing opiate substitutes is no different from uncontrolled opiate abuse goes back to the anti-methadone hysteria of the 1970s. Since then, opiate-substitution treatment has become a staple of modern addiction medicine, particularly with the addition of buprenorphine in 2002. Unlike methadone, burenorphine can be prescribed for maintenance by patients’ regular primary physicians, outside traditional venues of addiction treatment, which had long posed forbidding barriers for many patients.

In fact, many of the best clinical trials of methadone and buprenorphine were conducted in Veterans Health Administration studies with former military personnel as patients. The treatment is so established that in 1997, the National Institutes of Health called for an end to the unnecessary regulation of these medications and for these medications to be included in public and private insurance coverage. These treatments are now standard within the addiction field, are FDA-approved and have been used to treat opiate dependence disorders for several decades. Long-term methadone and buprenorphine maintenance are now available to patients through Medicaid, through many state-funded programs, and, increasingly, through private insurance.Continue reading…

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