I spent the last couple of days at an IFTF conference which looked at impediments to improving health and creating a better health care system–a small topic as you may have guessed. I’ll report a little more about the conference in due course but one of the most interesting talks was from Brad Kimler from Fidelity Investments, who laid out then projected future costs of health care, and the consequent impact on what a couple retiring at 65 would need to have saved to pay their premiums for Medicare and cover their out of pocket expenses. The number was $175,000! And if you are 45 now, you’ll need $650,000 by the time you’re 65. And neither of these included long term care. In fact for a retired couple with a good pension plan, and retiree insurance from their company, by 2015 80% of their income will be going to pay their health care premiums. There was a certain amount of shock and awe around the room. While Brad admitted some self-serving interest in getting people to save more (and have Fidelity manage that process), we still have an enormous challenge facing us as a society. Currently the average 401K account retiree at Fidelity has under $100,000 in it, and of course there are no real funds in dedicated health care retirement accounts yet.

What’s even more intriguing is that Brad based his calculations on an 8% increase in costs. Of course recently we’ve seen even bigger increases in costs. Hewitt Associates yesterday came out suggesting that employers will face premium increases of up to 14%. Unless we generate some amazing productivity miracle and get much richer very quickly, there are only two ways that this can go, as the baby boomers start moving into their 60s (starting next year). Either we start dropping more people into un- or underinsurance, or we add more people to something like the Medicare program. That of course that eventually means either higher taxes for working people or lower incomes for the people providing health care services and products.

From the THCB Sacramento office Matt Quinn, who wasn’t at the conference, seems to be thinking in similar ways:

Hewitt Associates estimates that health insurers will seek 14% premium hikes from employer groups, but probably won’t get all of it. The survey notes that all of the major insurers surveyed seem to be "pricing rationally": they are reflecting increases in medical costs as increases in premiums. And – at least before they get into negotiations with large employers – none of them seems to be playing the "take a loss / make it up on volume" ponzi scheme of the past. What the survey doesn’t note, however, is how much of these premium increases employers will pass onto their employees (or how many employers will simply drop coverage for some or all employees).

So that leaves us with the current state of affairs: Employers (purchasers) expect to pay double digit premium increases each year, but can only "afford" single digit increases. Health insurers expect that their medical costs will increase at a double digit clip each year – and faster when the baby boomers hit. Hospital and drug costs are rapidly increasing, while almost all physicians expect – and most non-primary care physicians are receiving – annual pay raises. And consumers continue to want the "best" (i.e. newest and most heavily advertised) care at low or no cost.

The recent CalPERS showdown with Sutter (and other "expensive" hospitals) illustrates the growingly activist role of purchasers in managing costs, but their efforts are clearly not stemming the tide. And, as we have seen at GE, SBC, and Safeway, employee tolerance for healthcare cost increases is quite low.

I think that only one question remains: Who – other than the federal government – has the market clout to manage the cost and quality of care?

Several of the representatives from large employers at the meeting yesterday were starting to mouth the same opinion. Don’t expect anything big to happen with this Administration or Congress, so realistically even with a Kerry presidency this won’t be on the front burner till 2008-12. But absent a 1990s type productivity boom, this question is not going away.

Like Robert Centor at MedRants, Chris Rangel MD and many, many others I’m a strong opponent of the War on Drugs, but I rarely bring that up in THCB. That’s because the Drug War is largely a political, social and criminal justice issue rather than a health care issue. However, in one arena, the War on Drugs–as prosecuted both by Ashcroft’s justice department and many Republican and Democrat state and local attorneys-general is not only completely out of control, but is a direct assault on health care provision.

I’m referring of course to the draconian prosecutions of physicians who treat chronic pain by prescribing opiates. Given my other recent posts on access to rural healthcare in California, the case of Dr. Frank Fisher is very relevant. Fisher is a Harvard trained doc, who until 1999 was running a general health center for the poorer residents of Shasta county–a very rural area in far northern California–including pain management. Some time around 1996 the California and Federal authorities decided to come after him because a few people had died with only the vaguest connections to his prescribing of opiates. One had been in a car crash where he was the passenger. The charges faced by Fisher? Murder!

Last week, five years later, Fisher was cleared at trial of the only remaining criminal charge. That charge was of defrauding Medi-Cal of, wait for it, $150! (I know THCB has been critical of non-prosecution of fraud in the Medi-Cal system, but that wasn’t what we meant!). So now Fisher has to get the state medical board to give him his license back in order to go back to work. Given the history of outright lying and corrupt behavior by prosecutors in this case, that ought to be simple. Whether any of those individuals will be held accountable is less likely.

Meanwhile, what do you think happened to the patients at his clinic, which was destroyed by this action? Go read the full interview with Fisher at DRCNet, but this is an extract about what happened to the people he was serving. As you might have guessed their transition from his care to that of others in that rural underserved area was not exactly smooth:

You ran a large clinic serving a predominantly poor and rural clientele. What happened to your patients after your practice was shut down?

Fisher: The impact on the patients has been devastating, it’s been an unmitigated disaster. Their health has deteriorated, they’ve been unable to get medical care, some appear to have aged 20 years in five years, others haven’t even survived. Some patients have gained enormous amounts of weight, others have their blood pressure out of control. I suspect there has been at least one suicide. Patients are having to travel great distances to get their care; they go to Eugene or Fresno or San Francisco. Of the patients I still talk to, I don’t think a single one is being adequately treated.

Chronicle: The majority of your patients were Medi-Cal patients, poor people. Is there a class issue involved in the availability of pain treatment?

Fisher: The availability of pain management for poor people is even worse than for the rest of us. And it’s not good for the rest of us. Everyone who develops chronic pain is likely to be killed by it because of medical neglect. It’s a malignancy in the sense that if it is not controlled, it will spread and progress. My patients were effectively tossed out on the street to fend for themselves. The local medical clinic saw them as drug addicts who needed to be detoxed.

Leonard Soloniuk, MD, wrote in to THCB to comment on my post on Frday linking the care for Medicaid and uninsured patients in California with the Canadian experience. A post in which I was a little shrill about certain American and Canadian critics of the Canadian system. He has an interesting perspective on the type of problems the CHCF reports were describing.

I’m always surprised by the continued criticism that the Canadian health care system gets for lack of access when I see equally serious problems in the US.

My perspective: I am a specialist in a rural, mostly indigent county in Far Northern California. Medi-Cal patients can get primary care easily enough (wait list for a new patient is about 2 months) because the county clinic is heavily subsidized by the Feds and the state (the clinic gets about $75 per patient visit, while I get about $18 per Medi-Cal patient visit). Because of the disconnect between cognitive and procedural reimbursement (a whole different subject), there is usually not much of a problem getting surgery for Medi-Cal patients. Medi-Cal actually pays better than private insurance for many surgeries. However, there are still significant waits for certain specialities: 12 months for Urology, 6-12 months for Neurosurgery, for example. For non-procedural specialities, there are significant delays, such as 12 months for Rheumatology.

These waits sound just as bad as the Canadian system, but I just don’t see them mentioned in articles comparing the two systems.

Of course, the uninsured can face significant barriers to care. The barriers are so discouraging that it is my office policy not to see uninsured patients (I policy that I violate only once a week or so). I don’t see them because I can’t provide good care for them. I can’t order lab work, xrays, scans. Interestingly, the lowest barrier for the uninsured patient is for medications. Between samples and pharmaceutical programs for indigents, I can almost always get meds for the patients.

Thinking about this issue some more, I think that the speciality with the worst problems for access to care is psychiatry. Access to mental health care is difficult even for insured patients, because of higher co-pays, etc. For the indigent, the resources are awful. “It really sucks to be mentally ill and poor in America.”

I’ve never seen any comparison about access to mental health care in Canada or England. Any comments?

While some of my fellow bloggers have seized on the opportunity afforded by the Canadian election to criticize the alleged "monstrosity" of the Canadian health care system, the true "stinking" is emanating from the system for care of the poor here at home. CHCF is out with two new studies which, while not exactly new news, confirm that access to care for uninsured Californians is terrible, access for those on Medi-Cal is not much better, and that those who receive their care at Federally Qualified Health Centers have enormous problems getting to specialist care.

I won’t dwell on this here and you can go read the reports, but suffice it to say that the Fraser Institute’s analysis of what’s wrong with Canada continually omits to tell the truth about the relative difference between the systems. THCB analyzed the actual situation (rather than some Libertarian fantasy) in the "Oh Canada" post last year. The story from exhaustive studies is that all Canadians have to accept some limitations on getting to highly expensive care, but that has no discernable effect on their overall health or real access to necessary care, and no Canadians have real financial problems associated with getting that care. On this side of the border, well insured Americans have more or less immediate access to expensive care, but poorer and even lower-middle class Americans have much worse access than wealthier Americans (as borne out by the recent CHCF studies) and also than poor Canadians. And up to 25% of Americans have significant financial trouble due to health care expenses. If that means that the Canadian system is morally inferior to ours, let me just say that I have a hard time grokking the morality of those who think so.