Health Wonk Review is up at Ezra Klein’s blog.
Above the Fold
HEALTH PLANS: Blue Cross Settling Patients’ Lawsuits
Lisa Girion in the LA Times has had no small part in the story she reports today. Wellpoint’s Blue Cross unit is settling the patients’ lawsuits against its rather nasty habit of widespread retroactive cancellations. The settlement cannot have been that cheap, given that they had to pay all the bills, pony up cash and pay of their and the plaintiff’s lawyers. Still better than going before a jury, and better than having the state really throw the book at them. And they seem to be the only one that the plaintiff’s lawyers are getting anywhere with:
“All the other insurance carriers are in denial,” Shernoff said. “Blue Cross at least is not in denial anymore. They are in rehab now.”
On the other hand the statewide hospital lawsuit is still ongoing, and there are probably more fines to come from the Dept of Managed Health Care.
POLICY: Communism breaks out on ABC news (well apart from Stossel)
Even though I’m “starring” on their site I can’t say I’m a regular viewer (or actually ever watch) ABCNews — unless it’s being replayed on The Daily Show or Colbert Report. But I’ve been watching some of the videos, and reading the blog from their week long series on health care. And it appears that their health correspondent Dr Tim Johnson is a raving commie. Or at the least he’ll have his AMA card taken away any minute.
He thinks that the plight of the uninsured is terrible and that we need a national, government universal health care system—and that we’ll get pressure for it within a couple of years. He was asked in one video how to tell if a doctor delivered good care. He said that they needed to a) have information tech on their desk and be using an EMR, and b) it helped if they were part of a big integrated system that checked up on them—and specifically mentioned the VA and Kaiser! I can feel Eric Novack grimacing a state away!
Now all my devotees over here know that that’s perfectly sensible. But Johnson works for the Mouse! Now a more typical employee is John Stossel who dives off a cliff that surely even the Cato guys wouldn’t follow him over by suggesting that health insurance itself is a bad idea. Well we wouldn’t expect a coherent argument from Stossel but he’s lots of fun. (On a quick re-read that’s a little unfair—voluntary high-deductible plans are OK apparently) . But do you really think he turns down his Disney-provided insurance?
But given that GE’s MSNBC unit fired Phil Donahue for being too left wing, and chief Mouse guy himself Walt was a rabid anti-communist, I think Johnson will have to watch his back at those county medical society meetings and at work too!
CODA: Canada-basher David Gratzer is mentioned in Stossel’s report. I’ve read his book (and he’s at least selectively read the Commonwealth Fund studies, if apparently none of Bob Evans’ work). I’ll be interviewing him in a couple of days…should be fun. And to give David a hint, a certain recent speech by a consvervative politician might just come up.
POLITICS: Beyond belief!
I used to have a joke game called the “who’s Denny Hastert” game. Essentially none of my college educated friends in San Francisco and Silicon Valley knew who he was despite the fact that he was Speaker of the House of Representatives, and third in line to the Presidency. I played the game one Christmas (I think it was 2001) at a friend’s house where there were a dozen people, including VCs, managers of big companies, etc, etc. None of them knew (although one guy thought that a San Francisco woman was speaker of the House, and he might be right in a few weeks!). I thought then the country was screwed in terms of basic civic literacy (don’t forget I’m a damn immigrant!)
But this is a little more serious. Can You Tell a Sunni From a Shiite? Apparently not if you’re a senior member of Congress with an intelligence responsibility or the guy in the FBI responsible for counter-terrorism. My mind absolutely boggles.
POLICY: Spine surgery
I finally got to the article on spine surgery in USA Today. Exactly what you’d expect. Massive practice variation all over the place—although to be fair we’re not exactly sure that too much is bad here, as no one has a clue how to make back pain go away. (Unlike lots of other types of interventions, as Eric Novack will tell us). But there’s a killer quote from Mark Chassin at Mt Sinai.
“The U.S. health system does a great job in developing new and innovative treatments, but it does not do a good job in thoroughly and rapidly evaluating those innovations to find out when they work and when they don’t,” he says
PHARMA/POLICY: McLellan leaves offices with partisan and incorrect remarks about Part D
Someone should tell Mark McClellan that he was generally respected by everyone and that now that he doesn’t work for the White House there’s no need to become a Republican shill. But that’s what he’s doing by saying that Medicare drug costs are going down. There are two basic porkies in the statement. The first is that the cost he’s comparing it to is the inflated projection that was come up with well after the MMA was passed–not what Congress was told it was going to be. (I’ve written about how that number changed plenty before, but suffice it to say if you change it up enough and then it comes in lower, that’s not "savings"). If his optimism is correct, we’re back near the original projection, which was still way more than a proper drug benefit should have cost, and was based on more people being covered.
Second, claiming that premiums for seniors in Part D have gone down is not true, as Pete Stark’s office pointed out. Premiums have gone down on average only if you count Medicare HMO/Advantage premiums with those for Part D standalone plans. Medicare Part D standalone premiums have in many cases gone up. Joining a Medicare HMO is a much different thing than adding a Part D standalone plan–just ask anyone who was kicked out of their Medicare HMO in the late 1990s. And of course the HMOs were given a huge subsidy in the MMA legislation separate from the drug coverage part of the legislation, and that’s the money that they are using to reduce their premiums. And we’ve seen this movie before too, including the part when the subsidy is reduced and the private HMOs give up. Just ask anyone who was kicked out of their Medicare HMO in the late 1990s
By the way, you can tell what McClellan is saying here is a lie because Karen Ignagni agrees with him! No need to bother actually researching it, she’s that good a barometer of avoiding the truth! Here’s her quote, if you care:
"There’s no doubt that Medicare is providing valuable benefits for
seniors, and costs are far less than what was expected at the time
legislation passed" creating the new drug benefit, Ignagni says.
Finally, where did Medicare Part D really fall down on the job? It was in failing to enroll low income seniors who would actually have benefited from it. That’s because it was a confusing "market-driven" voluntary program, not a compulsory extension of traditional Medicare. And are low income seniors able to make sensible "market-driven" choices? Apparently not!
NEW YORK, Oct. 13 (UPI) — U.S. seniors with low incomes or no
prescription coverage are less likely to use generic cardiovascular
drugs than more affluent seniors, a study finds. Researchers at
the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York say that seniors with
low incomes or no prescription coverage were less likely to use generic
cardiovascular drugs than more affluent seniors and those with
prescription-drug coverage.The study, published in The American
Journal of Managed Care, is the first nationally representative study
that examines the association of income and prescription drug coverage
with generic medication use by Medicare beneficiaries, according to
lead author Dr. Alex D. Federman. Federman and colleagues
examined generic cardiovascular drug use in a nationally representative
sample of elderly Medicare beneficiaries with hypertension. The
findings showed that older patients with cardiovascular diseases often
used costly brand name drugs when equivalent but lower cost generic
versions are available. "The patients that we were concerned
about are low-income and underinsured seniors," said Federman. "Our
findings show this group in-particular are missing opportunities to
save money on prescription drugs without sacrificing quality of care."
But if we had put all seniors into a guaranteed drug benefit program that ensured that they got the best pricing on all drugs (a la VA) and actively managed them so that they were given generics where relevant, then both they and the taxpayer would have been better off. And don’t even start me on the subject of how much the whole benefit would have cost the taxpayer if it had been designed sensibly rather than by PhRMA and AHIP.
I just hope that now he’s out of the Administration McClellan can go back to realizing that there are many shades of gray.
POLICY/HOSPITALS: New Orleans health care, not rebounding
This is long but well worth a read. Modern Healthcare ran a roundtable on health care in New Orleans post Katrina with 2 health care execs and 2 consultants who did a study on the state of play. Essentially because the Oschner clinic was on slightly higher ground than the rest of the city, and stayed open, it’s had its financial ass handed to it on a plate. And despite the $90 billion rescue package (or whatever it was) no one is helping. It’s basically having to suck up the loss. And is the city ready for another hurricane? No prizes for guessing the answer.
POLICY: Demographics getting simpler and more complicated
So today is the day that the U.S. population hit 300 million which will make all those percentage divisions we’re always doing easier. But we’ve also seen unmarried households become a majority of the 110 million households, which confirms that social policies designed around a 1950s nuclear family, like employment-based health insurance, need to become more sophisticated for a more complex world.
PHARMA/POLICY: Crawford goes down
Small beer by the standards of this corrupt Administration (Halliburton anyone?) but given that former F.D.A. Chief Crawford is going down in a conflict of interest scandal, I can safely assume that at least one THCB reader is quietly smiling over his cornflakes today!
POLICY: Why Is Fixing American Health Care So Difficult?
ABC News is running a special on health care this week and they asked two bloggers to stick in our 2c. I’m up asking Why Is Fixing American Health Care So Difficult? David Williams from The Health Business Blog pens an article about IT and transparency that is slightly more optimistic.
Feel free to come back here and comment.
Almost all the problems with the American
health care system boil down to two questions. How do we create a
system that ensures that all citizens, and perhaps residents, have
access to health insurance? And how do we contain the huge cost
increases?Of course, behind these questions lies the question of how to reform
the nation’s largest industry that serves and richly rewards many
powerful interests. Continue.
