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Tag: Humor

My Totally Wrong, Expert Predictions for Health Care 2025

By MICHAEL MILLENSON

January

In a blistering commentary, the American Medical Association’s flagship journal, JAMA, condemns the corrosive effect on patient care of the profit-seeking practices of health insurers. Separately, the organization announces that it’s selling the 13 journals in its JAMA Network to a private equity firm for $375 million “in order to enhance our mission of promoting the betterment of public health.”

February

Quickly following up on a campaign pledge to slash the federal budget, the Trump administration announces a radical consolidation of various entities at the Department of Health and Human Services. The new organization will be known as the Agency and Bureau for Children, Drugs, Explosives, Firearms, Families and Food (ABCDEFFF). Reflecting the new president’s strong personal preferences, “alcohol” will no longer be permitted in any agency name.

March

Bipartisan legislation demanding transparency from Pharmacy Benefit Managers dies in committee after industry executives explain that secret rebates to PBMs are like secret political action committee contributions to politicians: they allow you to loudly proclaim you’re an “advocate” for those supposedly paying you while actually serving the interests of those who are really paying you.

April

Pfizer announces that its once-a-day pill version of the wildly successful GLP-1 agonist weight loss drugs will shortly be submitted for government approval, and also that the company is moving its headquarters from New York to Louisiana, a state with a 40 percent obesity rate. Coincidentally, Louisiana is also the home state of Republican senators Cassidy and Kennedy, senior members of the Senate committees overseeing health care and all federal appropriations.

May

The new private equity owners of the JAMA Network say that all staff except one editor at each journal will be replaced by ChatGPT. A source at the private equity firm tells the Wall Street Journal that OpenAI won out over Gemini “because our CEO is a Leo” and over Claude “because nobody likes the French.”

June

Controversial right-wing firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, long the subject of rumors that she’s had cosmetic surgery, is diagnosed with a serious infection after an unspecified procedure. The House quickly schedules its first hearing on medical error in over two decades, but then cancels when the American Hospital Association points out the official term for what the Georgia Republican contracted was a “healthcare-associated infection,” so it’s entirely possible she accidentally brought the infection with her to the pristine hospital. Meanwhile, with House leadership telling Members they were free to vote their conscience, a resolution to send Greene a “Get Well” card passes unanimously after deletion of the word, “Soon.”

July

Following through on years of promises to reveal a “really great” replacement for the Affordable Care Act, President Trump on July 4 announces the “100-100-100” Make America Healthy Again plan. In keeping with the GOP’s advocacy for “skinny” plans with low premiums that encourage “consumers” to “comparison shop,” the plan will cover 100 percent of any medical bill for up to $100 a day for a premium of just $100 a month. Separately, Elon Musk tells a meeting of health insurance executives the plan can also replace both Medicare and Medicaid, enabling the federal government to cut spending by almost as much as the market capitalization of Tesla.

August

Before Congress recesses, a coalition of progressive organizations issues a press release declaring that all basic health services, whether provided by government agencies or the private sector, should be “available to the entire population according to its needs.” Shortly afterwards, the coalition is forced to make an embarrassing retraction after ChatGPT alerts the lone editor of JAMA that the coalition accidentally re-released a section of the report of the Committee on the Costs of Medical Care, formed in 1927.

September

The Business Roundtable says its members are committed to improving the quality of health care for all employees because “quality health care is good business.” An 85-year-old freelancer for The New York Times notes that this was the exact title of a September, 1997 policy paper by a Roundtable task force in which an executive for Sears, which at the time operated over 3,500 stores, declares, “We believe that quality health care is lower-cost health care.” Sears currently has about a dozen stores.

October

Medicare Advantage plans step up their advertising expenditures after public opinion polls show that nobody anymore believes the portrayal of happy and healthy seniors playing pickleball instead of writing tear-soaked letters pleading for approval of hip surgery. The trade associations for hospitals, drug and device companies and PBMs call on Congress to provide greater oversight of greedy insurers. The editor of JAMA resigns after ChatGPT writes an editorial extolling the merits of MA plans run by for-profit companies.

November

The National Rural Health Association says that in the spirit of the Thanksgiving holiday, its members will accept live turkeys in partial payment of the medical debts that now affect 99.99 percent of all Americans after passage of the administration’s “100-100-100” Make America Healthy Again plan. A KFF survey explains that the number is not 100 percent because Congress retained conventional health insurance for itself and top federal officials and because America’s billionaires had opted for self-pay.

December

A Washington Post editorial declares, “The bottom line is that if we want to contain spending, we will have to make critical choices about how care is delivered, to whom, and under what conditions.” Different chatbots differ on where that quote originally came from, but agree that if any humans believe the American public is ready to make critical choices, they’re hallucinating.

Michael L. Millenson is president of Health Quality Advisors & a regular THCB Contributor

“Healthcare” vs. “Health Care”: The Definitive Word(s)

A recent contributor to this blog wondered about the correctness of “health care” versus “healthcare.” I’d like to answer that question by channeling my inner William Safire (the late, great New York Times language maven). If you’ll stick with me, I’ll also disclose why the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is not abbreviated as CMMS and reveal something you may not have known about God – linguistically, if not theologically.

The two-word rule for “health care” is followed by major news organizations (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal) and medical journals (New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine). Their decision seems consistent with the way most references to the word “care” are handled.

Even the editorial writers of Modern Healthcare magazine do not inveigh against errors in medical care driving up costs in acutecare hospitals and nursinghomes. They write about “medical care,” “acute care” and “nursing homes,” separating the adjectives from the nouns they modify. Some in the general media go even farther, applying the traditional rule of hyphenating adjectival phrases; hence, “health-care reform,” just as you’d write “general-interest magazine” or “old-fashioned editor.”

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The trifecta: Reform idiocy, Hospital CEOs and the Obesity Problem

It’s rare that you get such a delicious health care story combining human frailty, blindness and multiple stereotypes, but Julie Rovner of NPR found it. In fact I literally thought she’d been set up but she confirmed to me that it was true and put me in touch with the CMS spokesman who confirmed it. So remember, this really happened.—Matthew

An interim hospital CEO in Ohio Valley Medical Center, in West Virginia “found out” “advanced intelligence” from “word of mouth” sources in Washington DC that the “High Commissioners of the Healthcare Reform Bill” were going deny Medicare payments  to any hospital of which than 5% of employees were 25% overweight.

This rumor prompted the said CEO to panic. Now before I tell you what he did, let me tell you a little of his story. To quote the CEO as he tells it:

I am five feet, 10 inches tall. The guidelines (he’s referring to standard BMI guidelines) suggest that I should weigh between 151 and 163 for my medium frame. If you add 25 percent to the upper limit, I would need to be no heavier than 204 pounds. I currently weigh 272 pounds, down from 335. I would have three years to lose 68 pounds

That is indeed some challenge. Not to mention that the hospital is in West Virginia (albeit the northern sliver between Ohio & Pennsylvania) where the obesity rate is among the nations highest—there’s a reason that Jamie Oliver took his childhood obesity crusade there. In fact Ohio County, WV’s obesity rate is 32% according to the rather fun County Sin Rankings site. And as obesity tends to mean a BMI of roughly 25% more than the outer band of the guidelines, it’s a fair bet that somewhere close to 32% of the workforce is obese. So getting that number down to 5% would be a major struggle.

The interim CEO also wanted to promote not only his own weight loss story but the laudable activities of his hospital’s dietitians and its weight-loss programs. Here’s his counsel to hospital employees.

I strongly urge you to take advantage of the programs OVMC and EORH are currently offering employees who are battling with excess weight. Mary Velez is doing a fabulous job with Weight Watchers programs, and in addition, I have also been offering a program known as “Diet and Fitness for Love.”

And who could be against that advice?

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Humor: Voluntary Cost Control? Never Mind!

Michael Millenson

Health Care Stocks Hurt as “Promise” Spooks InvestorsNEW YORK – Major health care stocks plunged today as investors worried that a series of voluntary actions the industry pledged in order to control costs represented a serious threat to profits.“Leaders of drug, device and health insurance companies gave their solemn word to the president of the United States that they will cut costs,” said Pinocchio Paparazzi, an analyst with Bear, Bulle and Morbull.  “Simple math says if you trim two trillion dollars from spending, that’s two trillion dollars lower revenue. That reality should be reflected in stock prices.”Merck and Edwards Lifesciences, two companies whose CEOs personally attended a White House briefing announcing the coalition’s goals, led the decline with double-digit drops. Health insurance giants Wellpoint and UnitedHealth Group also slumped, as did the for-profit hospital sector, as investors decided that making the health care system “more affordable and effective for patients and purchasers” might be good politics but was bad for the bottom line.

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