Tag: Medicare

Good Things in Medicine: A Shocking Development

Mar 20, 2012• 7

By Rob Lamberts, MD

Sit down.

Really, sit down. Trust me, please. You are going to be shocked with the news I am going to give you and I don’t want any contusions, closed head injuries, street riots, or revolutions taking place in South American countries on my conscience.

Are you sitting? OK, here it goes:

Medicare got something right.

Pretty crazy, right? I am not sure if it was an accident, like the infinite monkeys typing on a keyboard producing the works of Shakespeare (they’d write all of the Harlequin romance novels too, by the way). They had to eventually do something right, something that really benefits people, makes my life better, and potentially cuts cost. The thing they got right? The Medicare preventive exam.

Up to a year ago, the only way I would ever get paid to see a Medicare patient was when they had a problem. If a person came in with the desire to keep from being sick, we would have to get a waiver signed and charge them full price. So at those visits we would fish for any problems to justify it as a disease-management visit or one for acute care. This meant that any prevention that I did perform on my Medicare patients had to be done on the side during problem-oriented visits. So the motivation to do prevention was dependent on the nature of the doc; if they are OCD, didn’t care about getting home on time, or less concerned about getting paid, patients got better care, otherwise it was hit or miss.

Plus, the chart itself was often neglected. Any time a doctor took to make the chart accurate was time away from other patients or time away from home. This sounds petty, but it takes a large effort to keep things updated, and with the low reimbursement of primary care, only those things that were grossly inaccurate got corrected in most patients’ records. I was never given the time to make sure the records were accurate.

AARP Readying Armies for Medicare Battle

Mar 19, 2012• 4

By Marilyn Werber Serafini

“Imagine a world without Medicare.” That’s the rallying cry of a new grassroots campaign being unveiled today by the giant seniors group AARP that will include town hall meetings in 50 states and national television ads.

Against a backdrop of proposals to overhaul the popular social insurance program and a presidential campaign likely to address entitlement spending, AARP is launching “probably the biggest outreach effort we’ve ever done on any issue” to activate its 37 million members, said Nancy LeaMond, AARP’s executive vice president.

The group will gather seniors at town hall meetings today in four cities – Richmond, Va.; Columbus, Ohio; Denver, Colo.; and Miami, Fla. – to start a conversation about the program’s future entitled, “You’ve Earned A Say.” It is also releasing a survey showing that less than half of adults ages 18 to 49 are confident Medicare will be there when they’re ready to retire.

In coming weeks, the group will hold town hall meetings in every state, and also conduct large-scale forums by phone. It recently sent members a survey to assess their views about potential Medicare and Social Security changes.

Groups on the other side of the political spectrum are also galvanizing. This week, a conservative seniors group called the 60 Plus Association put out television ads that targeted five Democratic senators and asked supporters to press them about their support for the Medicare provisions in the 2010 federal health law.

Is a New Federal Patient Safety Effort Doing Enough to Curb Medical Errors?

Feb 23, 2012• 1

By Michael Millenson

The Medicare program is betting on a new course of action to curb what one medical journal has dubbed an “epidemic” of uncontrolled patient harm.

The effort is pegged to the success of a little-known entity called a “hospital engagement network” (HEN). In December, the government selected 26 HENs and charged them with preventing more than 60,000 deaths and 1.8 million injuries from so-called “hospital-acquired conditions” over the next three years. That would be the equivalent of eliminating all deaths from HIV/AIDS or homicide over the same period.

Despite those big numbers, and an initial price tag of $218 million, it’s unclear whether the HENs are adequately ambitious or still only pecking away at the patient safety problem. While this is by far the most comprehensive public or private patient safety effort ever attempted in this country, it still aims to eliminate less than half the documented, preventable patient harm.

The inspiration for these networks comes from similar collaborative projects run by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and other groups. Dr. Donald Berwick, IHI’s founder and president, headed up the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for two years and launched a larger Partnership for Patients that includes the HENs.

In December, the government chose a mix of national and local groups — primarily health systems and hospital organizations — to run individual HENs. Each HEN is charged with spreading safety-improvement innovations that have been proven to work in leading hospitals to others through intensive training programs and technical assistance. Although the program lasts three years, initial HEN contracts are for two years, with an “option year” dependent upon performance.

Where Have All the Liberals Gone?

Feb 17, 2012• 20

By John Goodman

There are two conservatives for every liberal in America. That’s the message of a recent David Brooks column as well as a Gallup survey. I think the imbalance is much starker. I would guess there are four conservatives for every liberal. Maybe even more.

Here’s a test I invite you to take. Watch C-Span’s morning call-in show and listen to what people who phone in on the “Democrat” or “liberal” line have to say. When is the last time you heard a caller say, “We should all pay higher taxes so that the government can provide us with universal day care”? Or how about, “We should all pay higher taxes so the government can provide us with universal long term care”? I bet you can’t remember ever hearing that.

Here is what I suspect you will hear: Teachers complaining that teachers aren’t paid enough. Union members complaining about competition from workers overseas. Senior citizens whining about the meagerness of Social Security or Medicare benefits. Minority callers advocating more affirmative action. What is the common denominator of these comments? Self-interest.

Yes, I know. Special interests are in both parties. Why wouldn’t they be? Yet as I wrote in my analysis of “progressivism,” the left in America has elevated special interest privilege to an art form.

Here’s the point: people wanting more, more, more are just people pursuing their own self interest in politics. They are not in principle different from any other special interest group. Importantly, they have nothing in common with what we normally have in mind by the term “liberalism.”

Why the Pilot Programs Failed

Feb 1, 2012• 12

By John Goodman

Just about everybody in the health policy blogosphere has noted with disappointment the failure of Medicare’s demonstration projects to reduce the costs of care. Recall that these are critical to President Obama’s challenge “To find out what works and then go do it.”

If nothing works, the fallback weapon in Obama Care is to reduce fees paid to doctors and hospitals. Yet the Medicare actuaries tell us that squeezing the providers in this way will put one in seven hospitals out of business in the next eight years, as Medicare fees fall below Medicaid’s. Under this scenario, senior citizens may be forced to line up behind welfare mothers, seeking care at community health centers and in the emergency rooms of safety net hospitals.

I believe this is the only blog that has confidently predicted that health care costs will never be controlled by running pilot programs and trying to “copy what works.” (Note, however: the Congressional Budget Office has shared our viewpoint from the beginning; see their previous conclusions here and here.) I’ll explain why I predicted failure all along below. First let’s review the latest results.

Over the past two decades, Medicare’s administrators have conducted two types of demonstration projects.

Disease management and care coordination demonstrations consisted of 34 programs that used nurses as care managers to educate patients about their chronic illnesses, encouraged them to follow self-care regimens, monitored their health, and tracked whether they received recommended tests and treatments. The primary goal was to save money by reducing hospitalization. With respect to these efforts, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) finds:

On average, the 34 programs had little or no effect on hospital admissions.
In nearly every program, spending was either unchanged or increased relative to the spending that would have occurred in the absence of the program.

What Does Failure Mean?

Jan 23, 2012• 2

By Aaron Carroll, MD

I’ve seen a number of responses to the news that the Medicare demonstration projects were not successful. Some have claimed that they were only demonstration projects, and the fact that some succeeded means we should look into those further. Others asserted that this once again proves that the government is incapable of making the health care system better.

As to the first point, it’s hard to get excited about this. By chance alone, a couple of programs were likely to save money. Four out of 34 reducing hospitalizations (when the best of them might have had inadequate data)? Hardly something to get excited about. Remember that two out of the 34 actually saw increased hospitalizations, too. I think it’s totally reasonable to think hard before just assuming there was something special about those four programs, and throwing more money at them.

But I think the latter point, made by Peter Suderman, is a bit of an over-reach as well. It’s important to remember that these were attempts by private hospitals and private physicians to change the way they care for patients. Granted, government was paying the insurance bills through Medicare, but this would have looked awfully similar if a private company had footed the bill. And, yes, private insurance companies have tried to use care coordination and disease management to reduce costs as well.

A Promise Made to Be Broken

Jan 23, 2012• 8

By David Dranove

In last week’s Wall Street Journal, Princeton economist Alan Blinder exposes four myths about the federal deficit. He saves the most important myth for last. After noting that the long term deficit problem does not cut across all areas of spending, he observes that the problem is almost entirely rooted in the need to fund Medicare and Medicaid. If we base future spending projections on past trends, then Blinder is absolutely correct. Spending growth on Medicare and Medicaid nearly always outstrips the growth in tax revenues. The main contributors to spending growth – demographics, labor costs, and, especially, technology – are likely to keep this trend alive indefinitely. Blinder challenges us to focus the debate about the deficit on the key facts, which essentially means that we should focus on Medicare and Medicaid spending. Let me take up his challenge.

Let’s start with the obvious debating points. There is a lot of fat in both programs. CMS just acknowledged that as much as 10 percent of spending in Medicare and Medicaid is “improper.” This does not include spending on defensive medicine, unnecessary services demanded by fully insured patients, unwarranted variations in practice, and all the other usual suspects. Nor does it reckon with all the waste due to poor health behaviors, although eventually the grim reaper will have his say and dying is usually very costly no matter how well you have pampered your body along the way.

(Almost) Nothing Works

Jan 21, 2012• 49

By Robert Laszweski

I will suggest that most of us believe the way to control health care costs, and at the same time maintain or improve quality, is to both use the managed care tools we have developed over the years, and perhaps more importantly, change the payment incentives so that both cost control and quality are upper most in the minds of providers and payers.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has just released an important review of Medicare’s results in testing those ideas. The news is not good.

From the CBO’s blog post:

In the past two decades, Medicare’s administrators have conducted demonstrations to test two broad approaches to enhancing the quality of health care and improving the efficiency of health care delivery in Medicare’s fee-for-service program. Disease management and care coordination demonstrations have sought to improve the quality of care of beneficiaries with chronic illnesses and those whose health care is expected to be particularly costly. Value-based payment demonstrations have given health care providers financial incentives to improve the quality and efficiency of care rather than payments based strictly on the volume and intensity of services delivered.

In an issue brief released today, CBO reviewed the outcomes of 10 major demonstrations—6 in the first category and 4 in the second—that have been evaluated by independent researchers. CBO finds that most programs tested in those demonstrations have not reduced federal spending on Medicare.

Continue reading…

Bring Back the Public Option

Jan 13, 2012• 108

By Scott Carroll

The way health care is administered in the United States is unsustainable and in need of fundamental reengineering — right? During the 2008 presidential race, the country appeared to be in agreement on this point. But that all changed somewhere, somewhere after the election of a dark-skinned new president with a foreign-sounding name whom even proud Medicare card-carrying Americans were viscerally driven to deride as a socialist.

This was recently reported in The Hill: “The six largest investor-owned health insurance companies saw a 22 percent increase in combined net income in the third quarter, putting them on pace to break profit records for 2010.” The president was castigated by loud little crowds around the country for championing the overwhelmingly popular idea of a publicly funded, public health insurance alternative to challenge the partly publicly funded, private health insurance companies’ assertion that they simply cannot provide their services any cheaper. Rather than groundbreaking legislation, what we got was the president being caricatured on national television, in effigy, as The Joker — and health insurance executives laughed all the way to the bank.

What if They Had Had to Pay?

Jan 9, 2012• 44

By Paul Levy

A true story, with changes made to protect privacy. An 89-year-old man with dementia, a heart condition, and other serious medical conditions fell in his Arizona apartment and broke his hip. His children, wanting the best possible care, arranged for him to be air-lifted to New York. There, the orthopaedic surgeon advised them that the chance of their father surviving hip surgery was very low, but he would do as the family wished. The man’s three children could not agree. Two would have avoided the surgery, but a third felt very strongly that everything that could be done for the father should be done. The other siblings, out of guilt and respect for the third, acceded. The surgery took place, and the father spent three days in the ICU before his heart gave out.

Here’s the terrible and hard-hearted question I pose: If the costs of this procedure and hospitalization had not been covered by Medicare, would the man’s children have proceeded along the chosen path? I am guessing not. I don’t know the total bill incurred, but it was certainly in the range of tens of thousands of dollars.

In the US, we don’t have a good societal process for making these decisions. In the United Kingdom, though, they do, as reported by Bob Wachter in a recent blog post. Here are some excerpts: