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Tag: Medicaid

Misunderstanding Oregon

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By Ashish Jha, MD

Much has already been written about the Oregon Medicaid study that just came out in the New England Journal of Medicine. Unfortunately, the vast majority is reflex, rather than reflection.  The study seems to serve as a Rorschach test of sorts, confirming people’s biases about whether Medicaid is “good” or “bad”.

The proponents of Medicaid point to all the ways in which Medicaid seems to help those who were enrolled – and the critics point to all the ways in which it didn’t.  But, if we take a step back to read the study carefully and think about what it teaches us, there is a lot to learn.

Here is a brief, and inadequate, summary (you should really read the study):  In 2008, Oregon used a lottery system to give a set of uninsured people access to Medicaid.  This essentially gave Kate Baicker and her colleagues a natural experiment to study the effects of being on Medicaid.

Those who won the lottery and gained access were compared to a control group who participated in the lottery but weren’t selected.  Opportunities to conduct such an experiment are rare and represent the gold standard for studying the effect of anything (e.g. Medicaid) on anything (like health outcomes).

Two years after enrollment, Baicker and colleagues examined what happened to people who got Medicaid versus those who remained uninsured.  There are six main findings from the study.  Compared to people who did not receive Medicaid coverage:

  1. People with Medicaid used more healthcare services – more doctor visits, more medications and even a few more ER visits and hospitalizations, though these last two were not statistically significant.
  2. People with Medicaid were more likely to get lots of tests – some of them probably good (cholesterol screening, Pap smears, mammograms) and some of them, probably bad (PSA tests).
  3. People with Medicaid, therefore, not surprisingly, spent more money on healthcare overall.

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Why Only Business Can Save America From Health Care

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By Brian Klepper

For a large and growing number of us with meager or no coverage, health care is the ultimate “gotcha.” Events conspire, we receive care and then are on the hook for a car- or house-sized bill. There are few alternatives except going without or going broke.

Steven Brill’s recent Time cover story clearly detailed the predatory health care pricing that has been ruinous for many rank-and-file Americans. In Brill’s report, a key mechanism, the hospital chargemaster, with pricing “devoid of any calculation related to cost,” facilitated US health care’s rise to become the nation’s largest and wealthiest industry. His recommendations, like Medicare for all with price controls, seem sensible and compelling.But efforts to implement Brill’s ideas, on their own, would likely fail, just as many others have, because he does not fully acknowledge the deeper roots of health care’s power.

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The Hoax of Entitlement Reform

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By Robert Reich

It has become accepted economic wisdom, uttered with deadpan certainty by policy pundits and budget scolds on both sides of the aisle, that the only way to get control over America’s looming deficits is to “reform entitlements.”

But the accepted wisdom is wrong.

Start with the statistics Republicans trot out at the slightest provocation — federal budget data showing a huge spike in direct payments to individuals since the start of 2009, shooting up by almost $600 billion, a 32 percent increase.

And Census data showing 49 percent of Americans living in homes where at least one person is collecting a federal benefit – food stamps, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation, or subsidized housing — up from 44 percent in 2008.

But these expenditures aren’t driving the federal budget deficit in future years. They’re temporary. The reason for the spike is Americans got clobbered in 2008 with the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. They and their families have needed whatever helping hands they could get.

If anything, America’s safety nets have been too small and shot through with holes. That’s why the number and percentage of Americans in poverty has increased dramatically, including 22 percent of our children.

What about Social Security and Medicare (along with Medicare’s poor step-child, Medicaid)?
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Questions and Answers

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By Rob Lamberts, MD

Things have been crazy.  It’s much, much more difficult to build a new practice than I expected.  I opened up sign-up for my patients, getting less of a response than expected.  This, along with some questions from prospective patients has made it clear that there is still confusion on the part of potential patients.  So here is a Q and A I sent as a newsletter (and will use when marketing the practice).

About My New Practice

Q. Why did I do this?

A.  I get to be a doctor again (perhaps for the first time).  I got tired of giving patients care that wasn’t as good as it could be.  I got tired of working for a system that pays more for bad care than for good.  I got tired of forcing patients to come in for care I could’ve given over the phone.  I got tired of giving time that should be for my patients to following arduous regulations.  I got tired of medical records not meant for actual patient care, but instead for compliance with ridiculous government rules.  Making this change gives me the one thing our system doesn’t want to pay for: time devoted for the good of my patients.

Q. How can I afford to do this?

A. I have greatly decreased my overhead by not accepting insurance and keeping my charges simple.  My goal is to have 1000 patients paying the monthly fee, which will limit the number of staff I need to hire.

Q. When will it open?

A.  My office will open in January, 2013, but the exact date is still not set.  I had initially hoped to be already seeing patients, but things always are harder than they seem.

Q.  What makes this better for patients?

A.  The main advantage is that I am finally able to give them the care they deserve: care that is not hurried, not distracted by the ridiculous complexity of the health care system, and not driven by the need to see people in person to give care.  This means:

  1. I don’t ever have to “force” people to come to the office to answer questions.  This means that I will let people stay at home (or work) for most of the care for which I would have required an office visit in the past.
  2. I will be able to give time people deserve to really handle their problems
  3. I won’t have to stay busy to pay the bills, so I can take care of problems when they happen (or when they are still small), rather than having to make people wait to get answers
  4. Patients won’t get the run-around.  They will get answers.
  5. I won’t wait for patients to contact me to give them care.  I will regularly review their records to make sure care is up to date.
  6. I will help my patients get good care from the rest of the system.  Avoiding hospitalizations, emergency room visits, unnecessary tests, and unnecessary drugs takes time; I will have the time to do this for my patients.  This should more than make up for my monthly fee.

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Can Too Much Preventive Care Be Hazardous to Your Health?

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By AL LEWIS

Politicians and pundits everywhere call for more disease prevention as a way to reduce healthcare costs. Certainly you cannot argue with the logic that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Or can you? It turns out that you can not only argue against that so-called logic, but – just as with cancer detection, which may have been done to excess in some protocols — you can mathematically prove that, at least for asthma, it takes a pound of prevention to avoid an ounce of cure.

The database of the Disease Management Purchasing Consortium Inc. (www.dismgmt.com) tracks both asthma drugs and visits to the emergency room (ER) and hospital stays associated with asthma. The average cost of an attack requiring an ER visit or inpatient stay is about $2000. The average cost to fill a prescription to prevent or recover from an asthma attack is about $100. It turns out that asthma attacks serious enough to send someone to the ER or hospital are rare indeed. In the commercially insured population, these attacks happen only about 3-4 times a year for every thousand people. (The rate is much greater for children insured by Medicaid; additional resources spent on prevention could very well be cost-effective for them.)

For a million-member health plan, that might be 3000 or 4000 attacks Yet that same million-member health plan is paying for hundreds of thousands of prescriptions designed to prevent or recover from asthma attacks. Depending on the health plan, the ratio of drugs prescribed to asthma events serious enough to generate an ER or hospital claim ranges from 60-to-1 to 133-to-1. Using those statistics of $2000 per event and $100 per prescription, a health plan would pay, on average, anywhere from $6000 to $13,300 to prescribe enough incremental drugs to enough incremental people to prevent a $2000 attack.

Averages lump together people at all risk levels. Surely some of those people really are at high enough risk of an attack that they are already inhaling their drugs regularly to prevent one, and have a “rescue inhaler” nearby. By definition their risk of attack is much greater than for low-risk people. Assume, very conservatively, that low-risk patients have a risk of attack which is half that of the average patient. This means that putting most low-risk patients on drugs costs $12,000 to $26,600 for every $2000 attack prevented.

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Trust But Verify: Why CMS Got It Right on EHR Oversight

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By Ashish Jha, MD

Yesterday’s New York Times headline read that “Medicare Is Faulted on Shift to Electronic Records.”  The story describes an Office of Inspector General (OIG) report, released November 29, 2012, that faults the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for not providing adequate oversight of the Meaningful Use incentive program. Going after “waste, fraud, and abuse” always makes good headlines, but in this case, the story is not so simple.

For those not intimately familiar with the CMS policy, in 2009, Congress passed the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act.  The program, administered through CMS and state Medicaid programs, created financial incentives for doctors (and other eligible professionals) and hospitals to adopt and “meaningfully use” a certified electronic health record (EHR).  To receive financial incentives, which began to be paid in May 2011, doctors and hospitals “attest” that they have met the meaningful use requirements, providing an affirmation for which they are held legally accountable.

The process works as follows: health care providers visit a CMS website, register, and enter data demonstrating that their EHRs are “certified” and that they met each of the individual requirements for meaningful use. Then they attest that that all the data they entered is true.  For example, a physician might have to report, to meet just one of the 20 meaningful use measures, how many prescriptions she wrote over the past 90 days, and how many she wrote electronically.  My conversations with colleagues suggest that it can take a lot of time for providers to gather all the data they need to “attest” to meeting Meaningful Use.  Then, CMS runs logic checks to ensure that the numbers entered make sense and, if there are no errors, they cut the provider a check. Through September, 2012, CMS paid out about $4 billion in incentives to 82,000 professionals and more than 1,400 hospitals.

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What the Rick Scott Decision Says About the Future of Health Care in the U.S.

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By Dan Diamond

In 2009, Rick Scott founded Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, a health care pressure group opposed to President Obama’s health reforms.

In 2010, Scott ran for governor of Florida on a mission to repeal Obamacare.

In 2012, Scott … will work to implement Obamacare.

For some conservatives, it’s a shocking reversal. Leaders of Americans for Prosperity, the conservative organization backed by the influential Koch brothers, were publicly disappointed in the Florida governor — who not so long ago said the Affordable Care Act was “the biggest job killer in the history of the country.”

Now, it will be Scott’s job to help implement it.

Changing Tune

Given his prominence, Scott’s move from Obamacare opponent to grudging supporter may be the biggest symbolic shift on the law since its passage.

The Florida governor was reportedly pressured by state legislators to negotiate with federal officials over the ACA, once November’s election made clear that Obamacare was here to stay.

But Scott won’t be the last GOP official to change his tune. More health care groups in other Republican-led states are putting similar pressure on their leaders to opt into the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, in hopes of securing additional dollars for providers.

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What If Success Sucks?

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By Rob Lamberts, MD

“This could be big,” he said after I told him about the company who wants me to cover their 100+ employees.  I pay him to give me the stark reality of things, but his optimism made me uncomfortable.  ”You’ve got to go for this.  I know you don’t feel ready for it yet, but this could really be huge for your business, and I don’t think you should pass this up.”

I sighed.  Yes, this is a victory of sorts (still only theory, not reality), but what if I can’t deliver?  What if I fail?

“You know,” a colleague told me during another phone conversation, “you are the buzz of the medical community right now.  We talked about you for half an hour at lunch today…and it was all good!”  He went on to use phrases like “our only hope,” and “the way out,” to describe the potential for my practice model.

“No,” I thought, “I am not Obi-Wan.  I’m not your only hope.”  I sighed.  I don’t want that kind of pressure on me before I even see my first patient.  What if I fail?

Even worse: what if I succeed?

One of the main things that separates good clinicians from the rest is the ability to think through contingencies.  When I order a test or prescribe a treatment I have to consider the possible outcomes: if the test shows X, then we do Y; if it shows not-X, then we do Z.  Or, here’s the plan if you get better on the medication, and here’s the plan if you don’t.  The more contingencies I can anticipate and plan for, the more direct the path to the ultimate destination: resolution (or management) of the problem.  I find that my experience in thinking through contingencies serves me well in my current job of building a new and innovative practice.

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Is It Time To Charge Medicaid Members for ER Usage?

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By Al Lewis

No one would deny that we’ve reached a point in public healthcare finance where tough choices have to be made about what gets covered and what doesn’t. There is, however, one fairly easy choice, and that is to reconfigure the $3 copay for Medicaid members using the emergency room.

I would propose a replacement benefit of $0 for the first visit and $20 for each subsequent one, in a given calendar year. Not every state, but any state that reaches certain thresholds for physician access or urgent care availability may switch to this policy.

Here are the arguments in favor. First, each $3 visit costs the state and federal government about $500.  There are few discretionary or semi-discretionary patient decisions that cost so little to trigger so much taxpayer spending.  (Hospitalizations have that kind of ratio, but a patient can’t check himself into a hospital the way he can visit an ER.)

Second, one must consider the historical context. The $3 copay (“$3” is a shorthand for $0 to $10 — I don’t think it is over $10 anywhere) is a vestige of the bad old days when it was very difficult to find physicians who accepted Medicaid patients. That is still the case in some locales; they would not be eligible for this waiver. The world has changed, but the copay hasn’t.

Third, ER utilization rates in the TANF population, which because of its average age is generally pretty healthy, far exceed that of the commercially insured population. This is despite the fact that TANF members in general cost much less than commercially insured people, a gap that widens still further once birth events are removed from the calculation. Clearly there is much excess utilization.

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Roundup of State Ballot Initiatives on Health Issues

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By Katie Booth

This November, voters weighed in on an array of state ballot initiatives on health issues from medical marijuana to health care reform. Ballot outcomes by state are listed below (more after the jump).

Voters in Alabama, Montana, and Wyoming passed initiatives expressing disapproval of the Affordable Care Act, while a similar initiative in Florida garnered a majority of the vote but failed to pass under the state’s supermajority voting requirement. Missouri voters passed a ballot initiative prohibiting the state executive branch from establishing a health insurance exchange, leaving this task to the federal government or state legislature.

Florida voters defeated a measure that would have prohibited the use of state funds for abortions, while Montana voters passed a parental notification requirement for minors seeking abortions (with a judicial waiver provision).

Perhaps surprisingly, California voters failed to pass a law requiring mandatory labeling of genetically engineered food. Several states legalized medical marijuana, while Arkansas voters struck down a medical marijuana initiative and Montana voters made existing medical marijuana laws more restrictive.

Colorado and Washington legalized all marijuana use, while a similar measure failed in Oregon.

Physician-assisted suicide was barely defeated in Massachusetts (51% to 49%), while North Dakotans banned smoking in indoor workplaces. Michigan voters failed to pass an initiative increasing the regulation of home health workers, while Louisiana voters prohibited the appropriation of state Medicaid trust funds for other purposes.

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