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McAllen: A Tale of Three Counties

• 56

By DANIEL GILDEN

Daniel Gilden

Introduction

The challenge of constraining costs while maintaining or enhancing the quality of medical care is vividly brought to life by Atul Gawande in his recent widely-read New Yorker essay.  The anecdotal evidence presented in the article is compelling as a description of how physician practices can relate to excessive costs.  The assertion that the observations in McAllen also explain McAllen’s costliness is an inductive exercise that may go too far.  Physician ownership of imaging facilities, ownership interest in hospitals and more subtle forms of self-referral are all substantially present in large healthcare market areas across the country.  Is McAllen an extreme example of a bad physician culture or is there another explanation?  Our analysis of Medicare data from McAllen Texas demonstrates that exceptionally high rates of chronic disease and poverty explain much of the variation in cost.

According to Gawande, McAllen Texas has a physician culture that promotes high cost, low quality care. By comparison El Paso is portrayed as having a similar patient population to McAllen with lower costs of care.   Grand Junction, Colorado, however, the antithesis of McAllen according to the article, is credited with having a physician culture that promotes low costs and high quality.  Ultimately Gawande warns that by failing to change the physician culture nationally, “McAllen won’t be an outlier.  It will be our future.”  But is McAllen really an outlier, a harbinger of physician income-enhancing practices run amok?

A fair comparison between McAllen and Grand Junction would include a more precise analytic methodology than could be offered in Dr. Gawande’s article.  Such an analysis is important: the correct diagnosis of the health care cost crisis is an essential step in selecting an effective prescription.  If McAllen is not an outlier and Grand Junction is not a paragon, then the solution is not to simply tamp down variation by exporting Grand Junction values to McAllen.  If the physician practices reported by Dr. Gawande in McAllen lead to explainable patterns of costs according to current norms, then those practices are part of a national phenomenon right now, not in a nightmare future.

An analysis of the Medicare population in the three counties can place Dr. Gawande’s observations in a more complete context.  Medicare beneficiaries enjoy a standardized benefit package, and detailed data are available on the services they receive.  We can use cost data for Medicare enrollees in the three counties to test Dr. Gawande’s assertions regarding McAllen’s and Grand Junction’s comparative health care costs.  Medicare fee-for-service claims provide us with service level payment and patient health status information; Medicare monthly enrollment data details HMO affiliation, Part B premium assistance and beneficiary demographics.  The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service supplies researchers (including the Dartmouth Health Atlas team) with data of this type for Medicare policy analysis.

Accurate Medicare Cost Comparisons

The city of McAllen lies at the center of Hidalgo County, one of the costliest areas for Medicare.  The population is racially diverse, low income and exhibits high levels of chronic disease.  El Paso is similar to McAllen but with less poverty.  Grand Junction is the county seat of Mesa County, a largely white and relatively wealthy region.  In Exhibit 1 annualized Medicare fee-for-service payments for the counties of McAllen, El Paso and Grand Junction show wide divergence in the total Medicare spends per beneficiary.2

Exhibit 1: Annualized Payments per Medicare Beneficiary by County of Residence, 2006

County Medicare Enrollees Medicare Payments
McAllen, Texas 63,770 $12,384
El Paso, Texas 85,478 $6,163
Grand Junction, Colorado 22,887 $4,436

The payments in McAllen’s county are twice as high as in El Paso’s and nearly three times as high as in Grand Junction’s but adjustments are required to the statistics to make the comparison fair.  These adjustments should include normalization for Medicare coverage type and population health.  Relatively few McAllen area Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in HMOs (2%) in comparison to Grand Junction (42%) and El Paso (16%).   Medicare publishes costs only for services paid on a fee-for-service basis; some services supplied by cost-based HMOs (more common in Grand Junction than in either McAllen or El Paso) are included and some are not.  As a result the cost of care for counties with high numbers of Medicare HMO enrollees is under reported.  In addition, while all eligible individuals receive hospital insurance under Part A of Medicare, beneficiaries must pay a monthly premium to receive outpatient coverage under Medicare Part B, or are enrolled by Medicaid if they are poor enough to meet the state’s income requirement.  The percent of the population in the different counties without full Part A and Part B benefits varies.  In Grand Junction almost twice as many beneficiaries do not have Parts A & B coverage compared to McAllen (4% versus 8%).  The outpatient expenses of this population are not included in Medicare expenditure reports.  In Exhibit 2 HMO enrollees and Medicare beneficiaries without full Medicare benefits are removed from the comparison.

Exhibit 2: Comparative Annualized Payments per Medicare Beneficiary by County after Managed Care and Medicare Part A&B Adjustments, 2006

County Medicare Enrollees Medicare Payments
McAllen, Texas 59,665 $13,150
El Paso, Texas 67,133 $7,656
Grand Junction, Colorado 12,355 $5,579

When the analysis is restricted to cost and enrollment data only for Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries covered by both Part A and Part B, Grand Junction’s beneficiary annual costs rise by almost 25%.  The difference between McAllen and Grand Junction beneficiary costs falls, but McAllen Medicare costs, now for populations with the same coverage, are still well over twice those for Grand Junction.

County Socio-Demographic Characteristics

The dissimilarities between the McAllen and Grand Junction county populations are extensive.  The socio-demographic characteristics of a population affect its access to care, ability to pay out of pocket for uncovered care and rates of disease associated with diet and life history.  The costs of Medicare co-pays and deductibles can be substantial barriers to access, and history of health care coverage and access to preventive care vary substantially based on socio-demographic variables.  Low-income individuals often reach Medicare enrollment age with a lifetime history of access and cost barriers, a potent mixture.  Barriers to access to care can lead to expensive hospital care for conditions normally treated on an outpatient basis.

Grand Junction Medicare enrollees are 98% white and only 11% require assistance in paying for their Medicare Part B premium (a proxy for low income status).  In contrast McAllen and El Paso are both 26% Hispanic, and a higher proportion of Medicare beneficiaries rely on Medicaid to pay for Part B — 36% in El Paso and 48% in McAllen. To assess how socio-demographic factors affect Medicare costs, Exhibit 3 compares costs for beneficiaries with and without Part B premium assistance.

Exhibit 3: Comparative Annualized Payments by County and Need for Premium Assistance, 2006

County Premium Assistance-No(not low income) Premium Assistance-Yes(low income)
McAllen, Texas $10,012 $16,518
El Paso, Texas $6,709 $9,374
Grand Junction, Colorado $4,853 $11,425

Expenditures are consistently higher for low income beneficiaries, but McAllen is still more expensive than Grand Junction for both income groups — more than 45% more expensive for low-income beneficiaries and more than twice as expensive for those not receiving premium assistance.  However, the Grand Junction advantage is not as great for the low-income population as for higher income beneficiaries.  Could it be that a good part of the McAllen “excess” is simply due to its larger proportion of low-income Medicare beneficiaries compared to Grand Junction?

But socio-economic differences in themselves cannot explain cost differences. What makes the low income population so much more expensive to care for? And why is El Paso, which also has a large low-income Medicare population, so much less costly to Medicare than McAllen?

Population Health

Exhibit 4 uses estimates of population rates of disease derived from Medicare hospital and physician claims to reveal that the prevalence of chronic disease is substantially higher in the McAllen Medicare beneficiary population than in Grand Junction or El Paso; and that the proportion of the McAllen Medicare population with more than two of these conditions is a whopping 52%, in comparison to 23% in the Grand Junction area and 34% in El Paso.

Exhibit 4: Disease Prevalence by County, 2006

McAllen El Paso Grand Junction
Single Selected Condition Rates per 1,000
Diabetes 422 330 145
Ischemic Heart Disease 443 252 211
Heart Failure 168 107 74
Cerebro-Vascular Disease 202 93 56
Chronic  Respiratory Disease 266 190 169
Arthritis 405 290 239
Dementia 107 57 51
Parkinson’s 20 15 12
Multiple Conditions Population Percentage
None of the Selected Conditions 23% 36% 46%
One Condition Only 22% 27% 30%
Multiple Conditions 55% 37% 24%

Many of the disease rates for the McAllen population are more than double those for Grand Junction.  If the Medicare population in McAllen is truly that much sicker wouldn’t we expect the payments to be greater?  A comparison of expenditures for Medicare enrollees without a diagnosis of diabetes or heart disease in the last year shows that costs for these standard populations are statistically very close (Exhibit 5).

Exhibit 5: Medicare Monthly Payments per Patient without a Diagnosis in the Year for Diabetes or Heart Disease, 2006

Row Labels Medicare Enrollees Monthly Per Person Payments
McAllen, Texas 28,680 $3,147
El Paso, Texas 47,960 $2,564
Grand Junction, Colorado 11,160 $3,307

By eliminating diabetes, ischemic heart disease or heart failure from the population payment measures the Grand Junction advantage is completely removed.  Grand Junction is just as costly as McAllen for populations without one of these conditions.

Even though diabetes and heart disease are both costly and highly prevalent in McAllen, beneficiaries experience a wide range of costly illnesses, and patients with multiple conditions are difficult to treat.  We used a more sophisticated risk adjustment method to take into account an array of concurrent conditions.3 Beneficiaries in the top risk scores, the sickest patients, make up 27% of the McAllen, 16% of the El Paso and only 12% of the Grand Junction populations. Average Medicare payments were then computed for each risk group in each county (Exhibit 6). The effect on costs of accounting for this measure of illness burden is dramatic.

Exhibit 6: Annual Medicare Payments by Risk Level

Graphic for Daniel G post

Taking into account the disease combinations eliminates the apparent low cost difference across the full range of disease risk scores. If the disease levels in the McAllen population were magically made to match the Grand Junction disease distribution, but experienced McAllen-level costs, annualized Medicare payments would fall from $13,150 to $6,145.  The morbidity-adjusted per beneficiary payment rate for McAllen is 10% higher than the $5,579 Medicare per beneficiary annualized payments observed in Grand Junction, substantially less than the observed 300% payment differential seen in the unadjusted data.

Discussion and Implications

McAllen is different from many areas of the United States: it is sicker and poorer.  The observed differences in the rates of chronic disease are highest for those conditions rampant in low income American populations: diabetes and heart disease. Further, Medicare beneficiaries in McAllen have significantly higher rates of co-occurring chronic conditions. As a result the costs of caring for McAllen Medicare population appears high in comparison to other areas but not abnormally so.  McAllen suffers from a tremendous burden, but it not caused by its physicians: the care they provide leads to costs that are substantially comparable to the other counties in the article once adjustments are made for the magnitude of the health problems they face.  The disturbing pattern of physician practices uncovered by Dr. Gawande sounds a warning not because it foretells a McAllen-like future but because it portrays the on-going crisis that affects both McAllen and Grand Junction and it is national in scope.  Physician culture is only part of the McAllen story.

Patients with chronic disease, especially those with multiple conditions, are extremely costly to treat.  Cost savings will not be realized by denouncing and penalizing medical systems because they treat patient populations with high rates of disease.  Instead health care reform must develop policies that support streamlining and coordinating care for beneficiaries with multiple chronic conditions, wherever they reside. Policies that support lifetime continuity of coverage, disease prevention and early treatment, could reduce healthcare costs for populations who now reach Medicare eligibility with a history of under-service.  Physician culture has a role to play: Accountable Care Entities are intended to reduce barriers to access by facilitating care coordination. The high costs of care in places like McAllen will not be dramatically reduced by transforming physician ethics and organization if the roots of the crisis are in the interaction between class, demographics and chronic disease.


Notes:

1)  The payment amounts and beneficiary counts are from CMS claims and enrollment data that includes a 5% sample of the Medicare population.  The data is hosted by JEN Associates Incorporated of Cambridge Massachusetts, a CMS MRAD contractor.

2)  A risk score ranging from 1 to 13 was computed for each beneficiary using diagnoses found on Medicare physician and hospital claims.  Beneficiaries with scores greater than 9 are not observed in the Grand Junction 5% data in numbers sufficient for analysis.  The grouping and scoring system was developed by JEN Associates Inc. of Cambridge Massachusetts for Medicare and Medicaid program planning and evaluation applications.  Diagnoses are selected based on correlation with future hospitalization, nursing home entry and death and grouped according to a disease’s functional impact.

Daniel Gilden is a health services researcher with 20 years of hard core quant experience.He’s the President of JEN Associates which provides highly specialized analysis of Medicare and Medicaid data. He contacted THCB regarding the fuss about the  McAllen, TX “overuse” story. In his calculations the data suggests something very different from the “practice variation” theory–the patients really are sicker. As this goes counter to decades worth of work by Wennberg et al, we invited Daniel to share his data and methodology with THCB. And we invite those of you who like this kind of research but may disagree with Daniel’s analysis to respond. Finally it’s worth noting that if his conclusions are true this has huge implications for overall health care policy…Matthew Holt

Op-Ed: It’s the Waste, Stupid.

• 6

By MICHAEL PAINTER

-5 A recent Wall Street Journal editorial strongly challenged the notion that there is enormous waste in American health care.  In the article the editors acknowledge that dramatic variation in health care spending exists across the country–but point out that the precise reason for that variation remains uncertain.  They also note that much of the data about regional variation comes from the Dartmouth Atlas–and that work, they point out, is limited in that it only examines Medicare data.  And they cite work from Richard Cooper at the Wharton School that directly challenges some of the Dartmouth Atlas conclusions–essentially arguing that the Dartmouth observed regional variation is actually simply an artifact of Medicare.   They conclude that “Dr. Cooper’s assault on the Dartmouth Atlas is controversial but compelling. He argues that the less-is-more theory is based on the flawed premise that when a region’s outcomes did not improve as spending increased, the difference is simply classified as ‘waste’ – even if it isn’t.”

Continue reading…

MedPac on Steroids

• 15

By MAGGIE MAHAR

I’ve long argued that Medicare reform will pave the way for healthcare reform, and that the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission’s (MedPac’s) recommendations could serve as a brilliant blue print for overhauling Medicare.  (Also see our Century Foundation report on Getting More Value From Medicare).

Now President Obama appears to be backing a proposal that would empower MedPac to realize its vision for reform.  Earlier this week, in a White House meeting with Senate Democrats, the president  reportedly “went out of his way” to mention a bill, introduced by Senator Jay Rockefeller ( D-W.Va)  that would move decisions about Medicare benefits away from Congress, by turning MedPAC into an independent executive agency.  Currently, MedPac is an independent panel that advises Congress. It has no formal power. But under Rockefeller’s bill it would be able to implement its recommendations and fund policy initiatives.

Wednesday afternoon, the White House announced that the President has gone a step further by releasing a letter from President Obama to Senators Max Baucus and Ted Kennedy.  The letter extends the remarks that the president made yesterday, which came close to endorsing Rockefeller’s bill. Writing to Kennedy and Baucus, the  President indicated that the administration could find another $200 to $300 billion for health care reform, linking that proposal to “giving special consideration to the recommendations of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission” (MedPAC), “a commission,” he noted, “created by a Republican Congress . . . Under this approach,” the president continued, “MedPAC’s recommendations on cost reductions would be adopted unless opposed by a joint resolution of the Congress. This is similar to a process that has been used effectively by a commission charged with closing military bases, and could be a valuable tool to help achieve health care reform in a fiscally responsible way.”

These savings,  he added, “will come not only by adopting new technologies and addressing the vastly different costs of care [in different parts of the country], but from going after the key drivers of skyrocketing health care costs, including unmanaged chronic diseases, duplicated tests, and unnecessary hospital readmissions.”

Giving MedPac the Authority to Take the Politics Out of Fees for Doctors & Hospitals

Under Senator Rockefeller’s bill, MedPac would have the authority to set reimbursements for doctors and hospitals.  As Rockefeller explained in a recent Senate Finace Committee meeting:  “I think that [this is] the best way to take politics out of all of this is to take Congress out of the setting of reimbursements for doctors under Medicare and Medicaid and for hospitals, because there  is a group of 17  . . . completely dispassionate people,” who could do this, Rockefeller explained, referring to MedPac.

“And I think one of the [reasons] you have your $700 billion of wasted money every year,” Rockefeller added,  “is the fact that there are too many political judgments made because there’s too much lobbying and Congress can — you know, unless they’re all health care experts, can fall victim to that. So the idea of MedPAC having the power to set those fees, reimbursement fees, to me is enormously attractive, takes politics right out of it and takes Congress right out of it.”

At the hearing, White House budget director Peter Orszag indicated circumspect support for Rockefeller’s bill: “Your idea of — I think we’ve referred to it as  MedPac on steroids, or a much more powerful role for a body that is widely respected– is one approach.”

What Exactly Does MedPac Recommend?

Until now, most reform advocates have ignored MedPac. The reports that the independent advisory panel issues in March and June of each year are long.  They are dense with detail. And they are very, very smart. The commissioners  understand that health care quality could be higher if we spent less on care.

They have digested the Dartmouth research revealing that when patients in some parts of the country receive more aggressive and more expensive care, outcomes often are worse.  They realize that doctors and hospitals should be rewarded for the quality of the care they provide, not the quantity.  As HealthBeat has reported, they know that the fee schedule that Medicare now follows favors specialists while underpaying primary care physicians,  and they have suggested re-distributing Medicare’s dollars “in a budget neutral way”– hiking fees for primary care while lowering fees for some specialists’ services. They have pointed out that some very lucrative procedures appear to be done too often, in part because they pay so well. The Commission has advised targeting these procedures and comp ring them to alternative treatments—just in case a less expensive approach might turn out to be more effective (and not as risky for the patient), as pricier, more aggressive treatments.

Finally, MedPac notes that some hospitals actually make a profit on Medicare’s payments. This is because these hospitals are more efficient: patients typically spend fewer days in the hospital and see fewer specialists. There are fewer readmissions, And generally, outcomes are better. MedPac suggests that when private insurers pay hospitals more, they may simply be rewarding less efficient hospitals for lower quality care. (And of course, private insurers pass those higher payments along to their customers in the form of higher premiums.)

MedPac goes beyond looking at how we pay providers.  Investigating Medicare Advantage, it has described the care that private insurers are providing as somewhere between “disappointing” and “depressing.”  Taking a look at the boom in hospital construction, MedPac noted, in its March 2008 report that “much of the added capacity is located in suburban areas and in particular specialties, raising the possibility that health care costs will increase without significantly improving access to services in lower income areas”. (Here, I can’t help but think about the current controversy over whether Hackensack University Medical Center should be building a new for-profit facility in a nearby suburb.)

As for the drug industry, in its June 2008 report to Congress MedPac observed that “researchers have shown that bias in industry-sponsored trials is common.” Because we lack disinterested, “evidence-based” information about new products, MedPac noted “we do not know which treatments are necessary for which types of patients. Guidelines do not exist . . . to delineate how much care is typically needed . . . and when patients are unlikely to improve with additional treatment.” In the same report, MedPac cast a cold eye on just how quickly we adopt bleeding-edge medical product and procedures to treat “most common clinical conditions” without “credible, empirically based information” to tell us “whether they outperform existing treatments and to what extent.” In other words, we need unbiased comparative effectiveness research. Those who make a profit on new products and procedures should not be involved.

These are exactly the radical but truthful recommendations that would make any well-paid health care lobbyist shudder.  No wonder the Bush administration ignored MedPac’s advice for eight years.

Now, a new White House is taking MedPac’s recommendations to heart. And Congressional leaders also seem to recognize the link between Medicare reform and national healthcare reform.  In April, HealthBeat reported that Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus had declared that Medicare would become “the big driver” behind national health reform. Now, it’s becoming clear what Baucus meant.

Maggie Mahar is an award winning journalist and author. A frequent contributor to THCB, her work has appeared in Barron’s and Institutional Investor. She is the author of “Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Why Healthcare Costs So Much,” an examination of the economic forces driving the healthcare system, and the increasingly influential HealthBeat blog, one of our favorite health care reads and where this piece first appeared.

Should We Open the VA to All Comers?

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By MERRILL GOOZNER

Merrill Goozner has been writing about economics and health care for many years. The former chief economics correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, Merrill has written for a long list of publications including the New York Times, The American Prospect and The Washington Post. Until March of 2009, Merrill directed the Integrity in Science project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. His first book, “The $800 Million Dollar Pill – The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs ” (University of California Press, 2004) won acclaim from critics for its treatment of the issues facing the health care system and the pharmaceutical industry in particular. You can read more pieces by Merrill at  Gooznews.com,where this post first appeared.

Public plan proponents point to Medicare and its low administrative costs as their primary argument for why a similarly-structured public insurance product, offered through a Massachusetts-style insurance exchange (the connector), would dramatically lower health care costs. Not so, says blogger and health plan consultant Joe Paduda, who offered a persuasive rebuttal on the Campaign for America’s Future website last week. Joe made the following points:

1) Medicare has no underwriting or sales expenses or marketing costs. No commissions, either. This saves a lot of admin dollars. This differential would disappear in a health connector-type system, with the playing field leveled by dramatically reducing commercial healthplans’ marketing costs and elimination of their underwriting expense.

2) Medicare has one-time enrollment and dis-enrollment, and greatly simplified eligibility processes. This cuts their costs, but would not continue under a connector model.

His solution? Make the public plan an extension of the Veterans Administration, which he points out has lower costs, higher quality, higher patient satisfaction and lower utilization rates than virtually every other public or private insurance plan.

Good points. But what Paduda failed to note was that the VA also is a single-payer-type system that delivers health care directly, just like the British National Health Service. All its physicians are salaried; it owns its hospitals and clinics. The problem with using the VA as a model for the public plan is that those who would accuse its proponents of advocating for “government-run health care” would be right. How many of those proponents would be willing to stand up and say at that point: “Yes, that’s what we’re for.” Even Physicians for a National Health Plan over its more than three decades of advocacy for a single national health payer (“Medicare for all”) has never called for nationalizing the provision of care.

Reforming Long-Term Care and Post-Acute Care Could Save Billions

• 21

By Anne Tumlinson

Tumlinson Anne_46025_46026

Despite the extreme inside-the-Beltway focus on healthcare reform, there’s been hardly a mention of tackling reform of our long-term care system.  This is curious when you stop to consider that these services are used by the same seniors who use the most healthcare resources and that they account for hundreds of billions of dollars of personal and federal spending.  Our existing system strains already-stretched government resources and family networks and will become only more expensive as our nation ages.

A new report finds that a proposal to reform Medicare post-acute care could provide the funding needed to reform the long-term care system, resulting in overall savings of $35 billion over ten years—all the while improving efficiency in our post-acute care (PAC) system and creating a new, consistent, voluntary long-term care (LTC) benefit for seniors.

Reforming PAC is, in simple speak, a must-do.  Currently, Medicare payments for post-acute medical care – the kind of care that follows a stroke or major fall – are first based on where the care is provided, not on the actual patient condition and needs. There is widespread bipartisan agreement that reforming this disjointed, inefficient payment system could enhance care while also adding a healthy dose of spending discipline to Medicare. In addition, this could be a great area to showcase better evidence-based decision-making.

The question becomes what to do with the money generated through PAC reform.  The proposal at hand – which was developed by the American advanced by the American Health Care Association, the National Center for Assisted Living, and the Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care – directs those savings toward the creation of a new, fully federalized, and voluntary LTC benefit system.

And there is certainly rationale for reforming LTC financing.  The nation currently spends more than $230 billion annually on a LTC system that inadequately protects today’s senior population from the financial devastation of a long-term disabling condition such as Alzheimer’s disease or stroke.  Seniors often rely on their savings, home equity, or children to pay for their care.  In the current economic climate, these sources of financing have proven to be a house of cards rather than a stable foundation—a problem that will gain urgency as the Baby Boomers swell the ranks of our Medicare population and families slowly recover from deep financial losses.

Specifically, the proposal seeks to combine PAC with LTC reform through the following measures:

  • Creation of a new, site-neutral Medicare payment system for post-acute care based on patients’ conditions and medical needs. Decisions would be based on more evidence using a standardized patient assessment tool.
  • Creation of a fully federalized, voluntary, catastrophic long-term care benefit. Medicaid would no longer pay for LTC for seniors.
  • An increased amount of private funds used for long-term care services. Individuals would share the cost burden of the new LTC benefit in the form of a personal responsibility allowance, scaled to income.

Using methods and assumptions similar to those employed by the Congressional Budget Office, Avalere Health built a model to assess the federal costs of these changes. According to the results, these Medicare PAC reforms would likely generate $81 billion in savings over 10 years of operation through more cost-effective placement of Medicare patients in PAC settings.  Those savings would offset the costs of launching a federal LTC program, which by Avalere estimates would cost $46 billion over 10 years.

The total 10-year program savings is $35 billion.

Any meaningful reform effort will involve a careful analysis of choices, policy options, and trade-offs.  This report illustrates how these types of tradeoffs and investments could play out—this time using PAC savings to fund urgently needed improvements to our LTC system.   It is precisely these types of policy choices that will guide this new chapter in national healthcare reform.

Anne Tumlinson has nearly two decades of experience in long-term care financing policy. She is currently a vice president at Avalere Health, directing research and analysis on post-acute and long-term care policy for government, foundation, and commercial clients.  She has co-published work with health reform experts including Jeanne Lambrew.


Are We Mature Enough to Make Use of Comparative Effectiveness Research?

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By ROBERT WACHTER, MDRobert_wachter

Thanks to White House budget director Peter Orszag, a Dartmouth Atlas aficionado, $1.1 billion found its way into the stimulus piñata for “comparative effectiveness” research. Terrific, but – to paraphrase Jack Nicholson – can we handle the truth?

In other words, are we mature enough to use comparative effectiveness data to make tough decisions about what we will and won’t pay for? I worry that we’re not.

First, a bit of background. Our health care system, despite easily being the world’s most expensive, produces (by all objective measures) relatively poor quality care. Work begun 3 decades ago by Dartmouth’s Jack Wennberg and augmented more recently by Elliott Fisher has made a point sound-bitey enough for even legislators to understand: cost and quality vary markedly from region to region, variations that cannot be explained by clinical evidence and do not appear to be related to health care outcomes. In other words, plotting a 2×2 table with costs on one axis and quality on the other, we see a state-by-state Buckshot-o-Gram.

Three key conclusions flow from this “variations research”:

  • Lots of what we do in health care is costly and ineffective
  • We must somehow goose the system to move all providers and patients into the high quality, low cost quadrant on that 2×2 table; and
  • Better evidence about what works would help with such goose-ing.Continue reading…

Disruption breaking out over at Scott Shreeve’s place

• 2

Clayton Christensen's publisher is pressing me to read The Innovators Prescription and then interview him. Sadly I haven’t had the time to pay the book the attention it deserves. Messrs Kuraitis & Kibbe already did a review on THCB and probably said what I’d say, which was that like several other Harvard Business School profs, they got the problem right but the solution wrong. I’m on record from a couple of years back saying that Christensen’s guns are aimed in the wrong direction.

But to be fair my criticisms are pre-publication. Scott Shreeve has a great interview with Christensen’s co-author Jason Hwang (the late Jerome Grossman is also a co-author). and in this interview several of the incentive issues which concern those of us who understand how innovation gets stopped in health care, are addressed. Well worth reading.

Continue reading…

Viciously Vladeck

The new Health Affairs is out and with it a lovely piece of vintage Vladeck.

In a review of a new book on Medicare  by old Brookings warhorse Henry Aaron and fast rising UT Longhorn star Jeanne Lambrew, Bruce Vladeck soon turns off the main topic (their book) and onto his favorite–the inevitability of the outcome when Medicare tries to do something about health care costs, and the inability of the political system to do much about it.

Policy analysts make fun of politicians who claim they can balance the budget by eliminating "waste, fraud, and abuse," but with a straight face they then propose to control health care costs by making the system more efficient. Efficiency has hardly anything to do with it. What health care costs are all about is market power and the distribution of monopoly rents. Every other industrialized nation understands that and does something about it. U.S. providers and insurers understand it, too, which is why the more sophisticated providers resist any efforts to aggregate power on the buyers’ side. But the mainstream of U.S. policy analysis just doesn’t seem capable of even framing the question, let alone solving it.

Of course despite me convening panels with Valdeck on them a couple of times, he probably doesn’t think THCB is mainstream policy analysis 🙂

But just last week I said:

As I’ve been saying for a long time, to rationally rationalize the
health care system, we need to make cardiologists in Miami behave like
cardiologists in Minnesota with a consequent impact on the incomes of
doctors, hospitals and stent & speedboat salesman in high cost
areas (Yes, Jeff, I do mean Louisiana, New York, Los Angeles and Boston
too). If the Federal Health Board has teeth, that’s what it’ll do, and
the AMA, AHA, AdvaMed, PhRMA et al know it. Which is why the PhRMA front organizations have been railing against cost-effectiveness for so long.

We know the question. Sadly we also probably know the answer. Vladceck’s short piece is great fun, nonetheless.

Is Massachusetts a model for national reform?

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By Charlie BakerCharlie_baker

I get asked this question a lot these days, which shouldn’t be that surprising.  Harvard Pilgrim is headquartered in Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts health care reform plan is already a couple of years old.  More importantly, it has added about 440,000 people to the insured ranks (185,000 through unsubsidized private plans and another 255,000 through subsidized, Medicaid-like coverage), has maintained high employer participation (over 70%) and doesn’t appear to be crowding out private coverage as public coverage expands.

But my answer to this question remains “it depends.” There were profound differences between Massachusetts and the rest of the country before health care reform took center stage here that make relying on our experience somewhat challenging for the nation as a whole. For example, Massachusetts already had guaranteed-issue requirements for individual health insurance coverage even before reform. Today, most states don’t. So in Massachusetts, individual coverage was available to anyone who wanted to buy it, but it was really, really expensive.

That’s because most of the people who buy individual coverage — absent a mandate to purchase — usually plan to use health care services once they purchase the insurance. Insurance works through risk pooling – a small number of people who get sick spend the premiums paid by a much larger group of people who don’t.  If most of the people who buy the product plan to use it, there’s not enough healthy people to keep the overall price down.Continue reading…

The Medicare Ponzi Scheme

• 21

By Eric Novack

Just today, our next President spoke out against the largest investment swindle in US history.  The alleged behavior of Bernard Madoff may have cost investors up to $50 billion.

“In the last few days, the alleged scandal at Madoff Investment Securities has reminded us yet again of how badly reform is needed when it comes to the rules and regulations that govern our markets. … And if the financial crisis has taught us anything, it’s that this failure of oversight and accountability doesn’t just harm the individuals involved, it has the potential to devastate our entire economy. That’s a failure we cannot afford.” — Barack Obama Dec. 18, 2008

What did Madoff do?  He lured investors with big returns, and used the “profits” as a means to encourage additional investment by investors, while luring new ones.

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