THCB

Categories

Above the Fold

QUALITY/POLICY: Gerald Ford–the poster child for what’s wrong with health care

• 23

Nysu004
Gerald Ford died last night aged 93. By any standards he had a great life. He was a moderate Republican in the House for many years, and then a stop-gap President after Nixon, famous mostly for pardoning Nixon who hadn’t yet been charged with a crime. And then lived on for nearly another 30 years. The American dream of the College jock becoming President and achieving great wealth and happiness—and people liked him!

But it’s the manner of his death that I think is very important. Just two months ago in a “discussion” I had with David Gratzer of the Manhattan Institute, I raised the point that Ford had not one but two angioplasties at the Mayo Clinic—and that as he was likely to die soon anyway that money would have been better spent on pre-natal care for an uninsured woman who was featured on ABCNews that week.

David Cutler recently estimated that adding an extra year of life for the elderly cost $145,000.

So consider Ford’s last few months of life. He was admitted to hospital last January for pneumonia. Then spent much of July in hospital in Vail; then went to the Mayo Clinic for not one but two angioplasties in August. Then went back into hospital in California in October, and now has died in December. All that time he was obviously going to die within a year or so, and all that time he was at least 92 years old.

My guess is that over the last 12 months of his life well in excess of $100,000 was spent on his health care. And that money probably extended his life by three months at most. Now for all we know they may have been the most wonderful three months ever for him and his family, but I’m inclined to think that if he’d died in the summer, his family would have been equally fine with it, and the nation wouldn’t have felt any differently about him. But the cost of extending life an extra year in this type of case is probably around $400,000.

How can that possibly have been money worth spending? The answer is that it cannot have been. And that is where the money is in our system which could pay for all the pre-natal care for uninsured mums, immunizations for sick kids, and procedures for uninsured 50 year olds that we “can’t afford.”  And frankly it’s probably better and more humane care to provide palliative care at home than to put sick old people through yet more invasive and painful procedures.

So the sooner we start having that conversation the better. And if that conversation comes out of Gerald Ford’s death, then at least that spending on the last months of his life might have done some good.

POLICY: Ezra Klein world takeover on track

• 1

Ezra Klein is famous today–he has (I think) his second fifth or sixth op-ed in the LA Times, and this one is about universal healthcare and whay that debate is coming back. My only problem with the debate coming back now is that I think it’s too soon and things aren’t bad enough for us to get to more than the debate–as in get an actual solution. But then I’m a pessimist.

INTERNATIONAL/POLICY: Canadian health care must be better!

• 1

If I was David Gratzer or John Graham’s alter egos I’d be using these two stories to good effect.

The first one one proves that Canadians are getting healthier and living longer than before they had a universal single payer system. And this one shows that your typical heart transplant patient from Canada ends up so healthy that he climbs huge mountains in Antarctica, and the only reason he didn’t get to the top is that the two doctors escorting him up couldn’t keep up the pace!

So by extrapolation the Canadian system must be perfect! With evidence like that, I should write a few op-eds saying so!

PODCAST/QUALITY/TECH: An hour with Brent James

• 1

This was a total pleasure. Yesterday I got to spend an hour talking with Dr. Brent James, one of the leaders in the patient safety movement, instituting process change in health care, and the man responsible in large part for InterMountain Healthcare’s status as the health care system known for delivering some of the best quality care in America (and the world). Brent of course was on the IOM Committee responsible for the "To Err is Human" report and is involved in the new IHI "5 Million Lives" campaign. Brent has much to say about all of that and a lot more, and it is fascinating stuff.

So for your year-end enjoyment here’s the podcast of our conversation. (A transcript will be up in a few days).

HEALTH PLANS/TECH: Looks like the Deal’s over–or is it?

• 6

So it looks like from Justen Deal’s website that he’s essentially going to be fired in absentia by Kaiser. My assumption is that he knew this was going to happen all along, and was essentially preparing the way for some kind of entry into politics and/or law career. Kaiser too seems to yet again be getting unnecessarily gummed up about the whole thing—for example according to Deal having people from the insurer side handle the case, rather than from the medical group which he works for.

I don’t know much about employment law, but I do know that California is an “at-will” state, which means that you can fire anyone for basically any reason. It’s obvious from Halvorson’s reaction, let alone the exasperated comments from Permanente’s Andy Wiesenthal on THCB, that they had no further interest in communicating with Deal after he went public, and didn’t want him around. So I don’t see why that didn’t happen straight away. Making up a (fake?) policy about “not abusing the email system” is basically a waste of time.

Deal seems to be appealing to a base of supporters within KP in order to “right” the ship. But if there really is malfeasance and/or an Enron-type meltdown going on within KP over HealthConnect–as opposed to normal teething problems from a huge IT installation (which as you know I suspect to be very, very unlikely) –the best route would be to go to those people who do oversee non-profits. That is regulators and the politicians who supervise them.

Given the various issues that Kaiser is having with the State DMHC over other aspects of its behavior , I suspect that Deal must be involved in some protracted discussions with local politicians. After all if there really is financial mismanagement going within KP, then Chuck Grassley is interested in this type of thing, as is Pete Stark.

If on the other hand, Deal is not pursuing those options, then I’m a little curious as to what this whole thing has been about. As an appeal to the massed ranks of KP employees about HealthConnect might seem appropriate if it was a worker’s collective, but it’s hardly likely to sway the board. Unless of course there’s something going on in the works that we can’t see.

TECH/POLICY/PHYSICIANS:American medical care, or Larry Weed on Speed

• 2

Denver
(This one is long on links and short on explanation….sorry, but it’s all old ground here on THCB).

Larry Weed was at IHI last week using the same line that he was using in 1998 and was probably using for years before that.

"What’s the point of outcomes data?" Weed wonders. So what if there are four times the rate of prostate surgeries in Salt Lake City as in Denver? "I wouldn’t know whether I should move to Salt Lake so they don’t miss my cancer of the prostate or move to Denver so I wouldn’t have unnecessary surgery."

That statement has been true for a while, but Eliott Fisher et al are basically now showing that care is better in Salt Lake City. As Fisher says in the roundtable in the Health Affairs blog

The increasing fragmentation — almost atomization — of medical care, and a payment system that rewards commercial behavior on the part of physicians that, from all of my work, looks as if it’s on average certainly wasteful and quite often harmful.

The situation is certainly worse in Miami (and the rest of Florida), and it costs a hell of a lot more there. I know that’s true because Brian Klepper says so too! (read down in the article for his quote). And even the pestilent sore-lickers at the NY Times have finally figured it out.

And much of the reason is the inconsistent incentives that, Jeff Goldmsith points out in a recent Health Affairs article, are making the physicians primarily in the Sunbelt leave their compact with the hospitals and open up their own shops/heart hospitals—all of which are turbocharging the natural incentives that FFS gives them to do more anyway. Not that this is exactly hurting all hospitals; some of the biggest of which are having banner years. But while everyone in the business makes hay, there are those who suffer as a consequence.

And we’ve known about this for thirty years and nothing has been done to stop it.

PS. “Larry Weed on Speed” is an Ian Morrison line about the future of the EMR. 25 years later no one is using the Problem Knowledge Coupler. Which is a pity and a problem.

assetto corsa mods