Tag: PCORI

Why the Supreme Court’s Healthcare Decision Will Mean a lot … and Not so Much

Jun 18, 2012• 4

By Bob Wachter, MD

Like waiting outside the Vatican for the puff of white smoke, the nation sits on edge awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act. The ruling, which is likely to be announced next week, could toss out the entire healthcare reform bill, chop off one of its limbs (probably the so-called individual mandate), or leave the ACA intact. Whatever the ruling, it will be chum for the blogosophere, particularly in the heat of presidential silly season.

The two fundamental challenges to American healthcare today are how to improve value (quality divided by cost) and how to improve access (primarily by insuring the tens of millions of uninsured people). The bill sought to address these twin challenges in ways that were complex and intertwined. I’ll argue that a decision by the Court to throw out all or part of the ACA will have a profoundly negative effect on the access agenda, but surprisingly little impact on the value agenda. To understand why requires that we focus less on the bewildering details (mandates, insurance exchanges, PCORI, CMMI, IPAB, etc.) and more on some big picture truths and tradeoffs.

The job of any healthcare system is to deliver high quality, safe, satisfying care to patients at the lowest possible cost. Although America certainly does specialty and high tech care like nobody’s business, on all of the key dimensions of value we aren’t very good. The numbers tell the sorry tale: we provide evidence-based care about half the time, there are huge variations in how care is delivered, we kill 44,000-98,000 patients per year from medical errors, and we spend 18% of our gross domestic product on medical care, far more than any other country.

IPAB and Medicare Costs Are Bad Medicine

Mar 26, 2012• 23

By Douglas Holtz-Eakin

During the original debate over the Affordable Care Act, I wrote that the proposed law failed to address out-of-control Medicare spending. Two years later, this urgent problem remains.

Medicare is awash in a sea of red ink — $280 billion in cash flow deficits already and getting worse — that is driving the U.S. credit rating south and threatening the very foundations of the U.S. economy. It makes no sense to sit idly by while the social safety net unravels and the promise of our future dims.

Advocates argue the health care law solves this problem. Specifically, it creates the Independent Payment and Advisory Board, which will be formed in 2014 and could make its first recommendations in 2015. This advisory board will consist of 15 officials appointed by the president. Board members will be required to make recommendations to cut Medicare funding in years when spending growth exceeds targeted rates. For Congress to block these recommendations, it must veto the board’s proposal with a 60 percent majority and pass alternative cuts of the same size.

In other words, this board puts Medicare on a budgetary diet. What’s wrong with that?

First, the system is clearly set up so that the advisory board, rather than Congress, makes the policy choices about Medicare. This means that the IPAB is not just an advisory body — despite its name. And policy choices, which should be made by elected representatives, are not.

Second, the advisory board threatens the quality of patient care. It can, in essence, ration the health care available to seniors. While technically prohibited from directly altering Medicare benefits, the IPAB will have no choice but to attempt to ratchet back spending by slashing providers’ reimbursement rates.

PCORI Paddles the Potomac

Feb 29, 2012• 2

By Merrill Goozner

Cynics say Washington is the city where good ideas go to die. A promising strategy for holding down health care costs in the Obama administration’s reform bill – providing patients and doctors with authoritative information on what works best in health care – should provide a classic test of that proposition, assuming the law survives the next election.

Experts estimate anywhere from 10 to 30 percent of the health care that Americans receive is wasted. It is either ineffective or does more harm than good. To put that in perspective, waste costs anywhere from $250 billion and $750 billion a year, or as much as three-fourths of the annual federal deficit.

Yet every effort to curb wasteful spending (health care fraud, though pervasive, is estimated at less than a quarter of the total) has come up short. Neither Medicare and Medicaid’s efforts at government price controls nor the insurance industry’s efforts at managing care has succeeded in stopping health care spending from rising at twice the rate of the overall economy. Only the recent deep recession curbed costs, and that was because people lost their insurance when they lost their jobs and stopped going to the doctor. The bill for that postponed maintenance isn’t in yet.

For over a decade, the health policy world has held out comparative effectiveness research – comparing competing approaches to treating disease – as one possible solution to eliminating waste in the health care delivery system. If only doctors and patients knew what worked best, knew what worked less well than advertised, and knew what didn’t work at all, they would, through better-informed choices, gradually eliminate much of the waste in the system.

Getting the Patient’s POV

Nov 4, 2011• 1

By JESSIE GRUMAN

One major challenge for the new Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) is to make good on its stated mission to improve health care by producing evidence “that comes from research guided by patients, caregivers and the broader health care community.”

In order to “guide” that research, patients will offer their time and their experience to serve on various panels alongside scientists and other stakeholders, many of whom have competing agendas. This means that representing the patient perspective in research governance, priority-setting, design, execution and dissemination is not a good task for the shy or the ill-prepared. Not only do you have to have reflected on your own experience as a patient, but you have to have a good sense of how much you can generalize from that experience. This is, after all, not about you. It is about us – all of us patients.

Sometimes this means gathering information from others who have a similar diagnosis and who have been treated with similar approaches. What was getting chemotherapy for breast cancer like for you?

Sometimes it means learning about how people with different kinds of heart conditions or kinds of cancer experience their diagnoses and treatments or health care in general. What happened when you were discharged from the hospital?

Continue reading…