Tag: US Healthcare system

I Have Some Silly Questions

Apr 18, 2023

BY KIM BELLARD

Last year I used some of Alfred North Whitehead’s pithy quotations to talk about healthcare, starting with the provocative “It is the business of the future to be dangerous.” I want to revisit another of his quotations that I’d like to spend more time on: “The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development.”

I can’t promise that I even have intimations of what the totally new developments are going to be, but if any industry lends itself to asking “silly” questions about it, it is healthcare. Hopefully I can at least spark some thought and discussion.

In no particular order:

Why do we prefer to spend money on care when people are no longer healthy than we do on keeping them healthy?

The U.S. healthcare system well known for being exorbitantly expensive while delivering rather mediocre results. Everyone laments it but we keep throwing more money into the system that is producing these results.

We’d be smarter to invest in upstream spending. Like making sure people get enough to eat, with foods that are good for us. We’d rather spend money on diabetes or obesity drugs rather than addressing the root causes of each disease. Or like making sure the water we drink, the air we breathe, the things we eat, aren’t polluted (how many toxins or microplastics have you ingested today?). Not to mention reducing poverty, improving education, or fixing social media.

We know the kinds of things we should do, we say we want to do them, but we lack the political will to achieve them and the infrastructure to ensure them. So we end up paying for our neglect through our ever-more expensive healthcare system. That’s silly.

Why is everything in healthcare so expensive?

Out of Network? Cigna, RICO and where’s the line?

Feb 20, 2020• 5

By MATTHEW HOLT

Sometimes you wonder where the line is in health care. And perhaps more importantly, whether anyone in the system cares.

The last few months have been dominated by the issue of costs in health care, particularly the costs paid by consumers who thought they had coverage. It turns out that “surprise billing” isn’t that much of a surprise. Over the past few years several large medical groups, notably Team Health owned by Blackstone, have been aggressively opting out of insurers networks. They’ve figured out, probably by reading Elizabeth Rosenthal’s great story about the 2013 $117,000 assistant surgery bill that Aetna actually paid, that if they stay out of network and bill away, the chances are they’ll make more money.

On the surface this doesn’t make a lot of sense. Wouldn’t it be in the interests of the insurers to clamp down on this stuff and never pay up? Well not really. Veteran health insurance observer Robert Laszewski recently wrote that profits in health insurance and hospitals have never been better. Instead, the insurer, which is usually just handling the claims on behalf of the actual buyer, makes more money over time as the cost goes up.

The data is clear. Health care costs overall are going up because the speed at which providers, pharma et al. are increasing prices exceeds the reduction in volume that’s being seen in the use of most health services. Lots more on that is available from HCCI or any random tweet you read about the price of insulin. But the overall message is that as 90% of American health care is still a fee-for-service game, as the CEO of BCBS Arizona said at last year’s HLTH conference, the point of the game is generating as much revenue as possible. My old boss Ian Morrison used to joke about every hospital being in the race for the $1m hysterectomy, but in a world of falling volumes, it isn’t such a joke any more.

Healthcare Has a Moral Injury

Feb 13, 2020• 1

By KIM BELLARD

The term “moral injury” is a term originally applied to soldiers as a way to help explain PTSD and, more recently, to physicians as a way to help explain physician burnout. The concept is that moral injury is what can happen to people when “perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.”

I think healthcare generally has a bad case of moral injury.

How else can we explain physicians practicing surprise billing, hospitals suing patients, health plans refusing to pay for pre-authorized treatments, or pharmaceutical companies charging “skyrocketing” costs even for common, essential prescription drugs? There are people involved in each of these, and countless more examples. If those people haven’t suffered a moral injury as a result, it’s hard to understand why.

Melissa Bailey, writing for Kaiser Health News, looked at moral injury from the standpoint of emergency room physicians. One physician decried how “the real priority is speed and money and not our patients’ care.” Another made a broader charge: “The health system is not set up to help patients. It’s set up to make money.” He urged that physicians seek to understand “how decisions made at the systems level impact how we care about patients” — so they can “stand up for what’s right.”

A Millennial Doctor’s Experience with Industrial Medicine

May 6, 2019• 5

By TALAL HILAL, MD

A survey of 200 physicians under the age of 35 showed that 56% reported unhappiness with the current state of medicine. That number didn’t seem surprising to me at first. I was not particularly “happy” at the time of reading this survey either.

I’ve aspired to become an oncologist for as long as I can remember. In oncology, despite my inability to cure, I can always try to heal. I form connections with patients and their families as they embark on a journey that is quite often their last. I learn from my patients as much as, and at times more than, they learn from me.

But all of this is overshadowed by a sense of heaviness that I frequently encounter as I enter the clinic room. That sense of heaviness hits when a patient tells me of the time when they were placed on a “brief hold” for more than half an hour in order to reach someone to get a prescription refilled or reschedule an appointment. Or when their insurance refused to cover the drug that I had prescribed to them. It is when I hear that clinic visits or treatments are not scheduled due to insurance authorization delays. Or when I’m asked about the cost of drugs and end up having to explain how nobody really knows.

By the time I hear these stories, the “allotted time” for the clinic visit is coming to an end. The emotional burden and physical symptoms of my patient’s cancer diagnosis or chemotherapy side effects often not adequately addressed.

When Health Care Organizations Are Fundamentally Dishonest

Mar 19, 2019• 4

By BRIAN KLEPPER

A class action legal ruling this month, on a case originally filed in 2014, found that UnitedHealthCare’s (UHC) mental health subsidiary, United Behavioral Health (UBH), established internal policies that discriminated against patients with behavioral health or substance abuse conditions. While an appeal is expected, patients with legitimate claims were systematically denied coverage, and employer/union purchasers who had paid for coverage for their employees and their family members received diminished or no value for their investments.

Central to the plaintiff’s argument was the fact that UBH developed its own clinical guidelines and ignored generally accepted standards of care. In the 106 page ruling, Judge Joseph C. Spero of the US District Court in Northern California wrote, “In every version of the Guidelines in the class period, and at every level of care that is at issue in this case, there is an excessive emphasis on addressing acute symptoms and stabilizing crises while ignoring the effective treatment of members’ underlying conditions.” He concluded that the emphasis was “pervasive and result[ed] in a significantly narrower scope of coverage than is consistent with generally accepted standards of care.” Judge Spero found that UBH’s cost-cutting focus “tainted the process, causing UBH to make decisions about Guidelines based as much or more on its own bottom line as on the interests of the plan members, to whom it owes a fiduciary duty.”

In a statement to FierceHealthcare, UnitedHealth said it “looks forward to demonstrating in the next phase of this case how our members received appropriate care…We remain committed to providing our members with access to the right care for the treatment of mental health conditions and substance use disorders.”

It is important to be clear about what transpired here. Based on evidence, a subsidiary of UnitedHealthCare, America’s second-largest h ealth care firm, has been found in a court of law to have intentionally denied the coverage of thousands of patients filing claims. The organization justified the restrictions in coverage using internal guidelines tilted to favor financial performance rather than accepted standards of care. In other words, UBH’s leaders (as well as those at UHC) knowingly defrauded their customers and devised a mechanism to rationalize their scheme. In his ruling, Judge Spero described testimony by UHC representatives as “evasive — and even deceptive.”

The Incredible and Wasteful Complexity of the US Healthcare System

Mar 24, 2011• 152

By HUMPHREY TAYLOR and IAN MORRISON

During the health care reform debate, we wrote that most people’s attitudes to it were “confused, conflicted, clueless and cranky.” A major reason was that the American health care “system” is fiendishly complicated and few people really understand it. As a result hardly anyone knows much about what is actually in the reform bill (but that does not prevent them from having strong opinions about it). Sadly, the reforms, whatever their merits, will make the system even more complicated, the administration more Byzantine and the regulatory burden more onerous.

System complexity.

The American healthcare system is already by far the most complex and bureaucratic in the world. We were once asked to spend ninety minutes explaining American health care to a group of foreign health care executives. Ninety minutes? We probably needed a few weeks. Most other countries have relatively simple systems, whether insurance coverage is provided by a government plan or by private insurance or some combination of these. But in the United States insurance coverage, for those who have it, may be provided by Medicare Parts A, B, C, and D, 50 different state Medicaid programs (or MediCal in California), Medicare Advantage, Medigap plans, the Children’s Health Insurance Plan, the Women, Infants and Children Program, the Veterans Administration, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, the military, the hundreds of thousands of employer-provided plans and their insurance companies, or by the individual insurance market. This insurance may be paid for by the federal or state governments, by employers, labor unions or individuals. Some employers’ plans cover retirees, others do not. The result is that the system is pluralistic, mysterious, capricious and impossible for most patients and providers to understand.

Administrative complexity

The administrative complexity is amplified by the multiplicity of insurance plans. About half of all Americans with private health insurance are covered by self-insured plans, each with its own plan design. Employers customize their plan documents, led by consultants who make a good living designing their plans and tailoring their contracts. As one prominent consultant told us recently, if all the self-insured plan documents were piled on a table they would not just exceed the 2,700 pages of Obamacare, they would probably reach the moon. For the rest of the commercially insured population, health plans may be traditional indemnity plans, Preferred Provider Organizations or Health Maintenance Organizations.

The coverage provided by different plans varies dramatically. They may or may not include large or small deductibles, co-pays or co-insurance. Beneficiaries may pay a large, small or no part of their health insurance premiums. Some plans cover dependent family members and children, others do not. The Medicare Part D pharmaceutical benefit plan involves a “doughnut hole,” which will disappear as health reforms are implemented. Surveys have found that few people fully understand their own insurance plans let alone the bigger picture. While health reform takes some steps toward standardization of insurance offerings and improving transparency, overall it is likely to increase complexity.Continue reading…

Health Care Reform in the U.K. and U.S

Feb 5, 2011• 21

By HERBERT MATHEWSON, MD

“England and America are two great nations separated by a common language.”
-attributed to both Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw

In 1965 I spent the summer of my third year in medical school at the General Practice Teaching Unit of the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, Scotland because I wanted to learn more about the National Health Service (NHS). My impression then was that both the U.K. and U.S. medical care systems were evolving toward the same end result from very different directions. (1) That viewpoint has been reaffirmed by recent events. Both countries have embarked this past year on significant health care reform. Both countries are seeking to reduce costs, improve quality, become more patient-centered, and invest in health information technology (HIT). In both countries the majority of patients are highly satisfied with the NHS or Medicare and are vigilant about not giving up any of its benefits.

Both health care reform acts are being criticized for being too timid, or too bold, or too incremental, or too radical. The U.K. plan is being attacked by some as a disastrous turn toward privatization while the U.S. plan is “another step toward socialism”, i.e. very little change in the tenor since 1965. Vocal U.K. critics on the left decry the proposed move away from regulation (NHS) toward competition and market-place economics while the vocal U.S. critics on the right warn against more regulation and movement away from reliance on competition and market-place forces.

Increased Primary Care Support
The basic foundation of the NHS has always been General Practice physicians (GPs) who have no hospital privileges and refer all patients needing hospitalization to full-time hospital specialists (Consultants). (2) In 1965, and in 1996, such a separation of outpatient and inpatient medical practice was threatening to community physicians in the U.S. (3) Today it is difficult to recruit primary care physicians (and some specialists) to a community unless the hospital has hospitalists to care for inpatients. The community-based internist in U.S. is now more like the GP in U.K. then ever before, and that is not a bad thing.

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