THCB

Categories

Above the Fold

Why Hillarycare failed…and what we need to learn from that failure

• 2

By MATTHEW HOLT

In July 2005 George W Bush had relatively recently won a Presidential election in which the Republican won the popular vote (something that will likely never happen again) & the Republicans controlled all three branches of Government. Those of us liberals at the bottom of a dark trench were wondering if and how we’d get to health reform. So in another reprint to celebrate THCB’s 15th birthday, here was my then take on what went wrong in 1994 and what would happen next–Matthew Holt     

There are lots of versions about what killed the 1993-4 health care reform effort.  Hillary Clinton has now decided that the problem was the lack of incrementalism in her plan.  Last week the New York Times said that since becoming a Senator:

“She has deliberately avoided the major mistake she made as first lady, namely trying to sell an ambitious plan to a public with no appetite for radical change. <SNIP>. She summed up her approach in the first floor speech she delivered in the Senate about four years ago, when she unveiled a series of relatively modest health care initiatives. “I learned some valuable lessons about the legislative process, the importance of bipartisan cooperation and the wisdom of taking small steps to get a big job done,” she said, referring to the 1994 defeat of her health care plan.”

On the other hand, some people are still claiming victory for the plan’s defeat even if they were at most modest bit players.  Here’s what one fawning bio says about former New York Lt Governor Betsy McCaughey

“A 35-year-old senior fellow named Elizabeth McCaughey…wrote an article for The New Republic on what she discovered in a close reading of the 1,431-page document containing the Clinton Health Care Plan: Namely, that it would put every citizen in a single government-operated HMO. That one article shot down the entire blimp, and Betsy McCaughey became a 35-year-old Cinderella. One of the richest men in America chose her as his wife, and George Pataki made her lieutenant governor of New York.”

Ignoring the fact that McCaughey spent her time thereafter putting poor New Yorkers into those HMOs she so despised, and then went off the deep end en route to divorce from Pataki, the rich guy, and reality (not necessarily in that order), it’s not really true that one article in The New Republic can be quite that influential. (Sorry Jon!).  Even if the overly geeky Clintonistas in the White House did feel that they had to come out with a point by point rebuttal. And anyway, the article only came out in January 1994 by which time the die was more or less cast the other way. Again we have to look elsewhere for the explanation.

If you want to go back and spend a few minutes wallowing in the era of trial balloons and secret task forces, there’s a very interesting time line of the whole process on the NPR website, as well as a briefer information over at the Clinton Health Plan Wikipedia site.Continue reading…

Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 43

Jessica DaMassa cracks her whip and in just 2 minutes gets answers out of me about the bidding for #athenahealth, the new clinics at #Amazon, the #FDA approving #NaturalCycles as a contraceptive, and the tech giants getting on stage unprompted at ONC’s Blue Button 2.0 day to tell the world that they are going to fix the interoperability problem. Oh, and a shout out to THCB’s 15th birthday–Matthew Holt

As I’ve always suspected, Health Care = Communism + Frappuccinos

By MATTHEW HOLT

Happy 15th birthday THCB! Yes, 15 years ago today this little blog opened for business and changed my life (and at least impacted a few others). Later this week we are going to celebrate and tell you a bit more about what the next 15 years (really?) of THCB might look like. But for now, I’m rerunning a few of my favorite pieces from the mid-2000s, the golden age of blogging. Today I present “Health Care = Communism + Frappuccinos”, one of my favorites about the relationship between government and private sector originally published here on Jan7, 2005. And like the Medicare one from last week, it sure holds true today. Matthew Holt

Those of you who think I’m an unreconstructed commie will correctly suspect that I’ve always discussed Marxism in my health care talks. You’d be amazed at how many audiences of hospital administrators in the mid-west know nothing about the integral essentials of Marx’s theory of history. And I really enjoy bring the light to them, especially when I manage to reference Mongolia 1919, managed care and Communism in the same bullet point.

While I’ve always been very proud of that one (err.. maybe you have to be there, but you could always hire me to come tell it!), even if I am jesting, there’s a really loose use of the concept of Marxism in this 2005 piece (reprinted in 2009) called A Prescription for Marxism in Foreign Policy from (apparently) libertarian-leaning Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff. He opens with this little nugget:

“Karl Marx may have suffered a second death at the end of the last century, but look for a spirited comeback in this one. The next great battle between socialism and capitalism will be waged over human health and life expectancy. As rich countries grow richer, and as healthcare technology continues to improve, people will spend ever growing shares of their income on living longer and healthier lives.”

Actually he’s right that there will be a backlash against the (allegedly) market-based capitalism — which has actually been closer to all-out mercantilist booty capitalism — that we’re seen over the last couple of decades. History tends to be reactive and societies go through long periods of reaction to what’s been seen before. In fact the 1980-20?? (10-15?) period of “conservatism” is a reaction to the 1930-1980 period of social corporatism seen in most of the western world. And any period in which the inequality of wealth and income in one society continues to grow at the current rate will eventually invite a reaction–you can ask Louis XVI of France about that.

But when Rogoff is talking about Marxism in health care what he really means is that, because health care by definition will consume more and more of our societal resources, the arguments about the creation and distribution of health care products and services will look more like the arguments seen in the debates about how the government used to allocate resources for “guns versus butter” in the 1950s. These days we are supposed to believe that government blindly accepts letting “the market” rule, even if for vast sways of the economy the government clearly rules the market, which in turn means that those corporations with political influence set the rules and the budgets (quick now, it begins with an H…). Continue reading…

The Doctor Who Thwarted the Charge of the General Medical Council- Part 2

By SAURABH JHA

This is the second part of Dr. Jha’s conversation with Dr. Jonathan Cusack, who was the former supervisor and mentor of Dr. Bawa-Garba, a pediatrician convicted of manslaughter of fetal sepsis in Jack Adcock. Read the first part of this series here.

Dr. Jonathan Cusack versus the General Medical Council

I spoke with Dr. Jonathan Cusack, consultant neonatologist at Leicester Royal Infirmary (LRI), and former supervisor and mentor of Dr. Bawa-Garba, the trainee pediatrician convicted of manslaughter for delayed diagnosis of fatal sepsis in Jack Adcock, a six-year-old boy with Down’s syndrome. We had drinks at The George, pub opposite the Royal Courts of Justice.

In the first part of the interview we discussed the events on Friday February 18th, 2011, the day of Jack presented to LRI. In the second part of the interview we talk about the events after fatal Friday – how the crown prosecution service got involved, the trial, the manslaughter charge, the tribunal and the General Medical Council.

Dr. Jonathan Cusack, a consultant neonatologist at Leicester Royal Infirmary (LRI), and a former supervisor and mentor of Dr. Bawa-Garba’s.

The Role of Dr. O’Riordan

Saurabh Jha (SJ): After Jack’s death what was Dr. Bawa-Garba’s immediate reaction?

Jonathan Cusack (JC): I think it’s one of those moments one neither forgets nor recalls. I imagine the most overwhelming feeling was one of incredulity. How and why did Jack decompensate? It’d have struck her as physiologically implausible. Though she was experiencing that grief familiar to all pediatricians when a child dies, she was trying to understand why. She didn’t know that he died from Group A Streptococcal septicemia, then.

Continue reading…

Surrogate End Points Ain’t all that Bad

• 4

By CHADI NABHAN MD MBA

Life is busy, yet we somehow find time to stay engaged on social media, remain engrossed in the 24/7 news cycle, and continue our futile efforts to resist clickbait. While social media can allow us to mindlessly scroll through feeds, it also provides an avenue to provoke vigorous dialogue, however diverse, controversial, or even rooted in unfettered biases. These exchanges have served as the primordial soup for a virtual friend or foe-ships. Tense and argumentative Twitter exchanges are especially entertaining given the challenges in justifying a position in fewer than 280 characters. Thus, tweetorials have emerged to explain a point of view via a thread of comments since it is not always easy to do so in 1 or 2 tweets. The longer the tweetorial, the more heated the debate. What I am trying to get at here, somewhat obtusely, is the concept of surrogates.

I have already suggested a surrogate. Length of a tweetorial is a surrogate for degree of controversy of the topic. Meaning, length is a surrogate, a proxy. We are surrounded by surrogates. Longer wait lines at restaurants and bars imply a hipper joint or tastier menu. My child being extra nice to me is a surrogate for him wanting more time on electronics. Not a day goes by without folks arguing about surrogate endpoints. I wanted to dig deeper into surrogates and since I am a physician, I’m focusing on surrogates in medicine. Apologies to those who thought I would be discussing restaurants or exotic trips.

I want to make sure my definition of surrogates is accurate: Merriam-Webster dictionary for enlightenment. The first use of the word “surrogate” was in 1533, B.T. (“Before Twitter”). A surrogate is defined as “one appointed to act in place of another” or “one that serves as a substitute”. We use surrogate endpoints in clinical trials as a substitute for other end points.

Continue reading…

The First Post: What’s Wrong with Medicare?

• 8

By MATTHEW HOLT

So The Health Care Blog  (which I like to think of as the first proper health care blog whatever Jacob Reider says about his Docnotes which started in 1999!) is 15 yrs old this month.  This is the start of our little anniversary celebration. We are going to be running some of the earlier classic posts. The very first post on “What’s wrong with Medicare” still rings true- Matthew Holt

For the first post, don’t expect a big essay despite that subject line. It came up because while I was away from the US for the first part of this year, yet another incarnation of NME or HCA — the two original for profit hospital chains of the 1970s that amalgamated into Columbia (now calling itself HCA again!) and Tenet — got caught with its hand in the cookie jar.  You’ll remember NME getting bad press and worse in the 1980s for imposing unwanted inpatient stays on “psychiatric patients”. After that NME morphed into Tenet. Columbia of course said that “health care had never worked like this before” and they were right — to the extent of the upcoding and fraudulent billing going on in its hospitals in the mid 1990s.  I remember one cover of Modern Healthcare in which Tenet’s strategy was encapsulated as “We’re not Columbia”.  Apparently only slogan deep. Last week they settled with the state and feds in California due to massive amounts of upcoding and worse at Redding Medical Center. Several other settlements are pending.

The New York Times’ description (registration req’d) of the level of unnecessary surgery at the Redding Medical Center is quite shocking. But I do recall Alain Enthoven at Stanford telling me in 1991 that one third of carotid andarterectomies in California were found to be counter-indicated after chart review.  Why were they done?  Well everyone — surgeons, hospitals, supplier– made money by doing them. Given the imbalance in knowledge between a patient and a doctor, it’s not too surprising that a very aggressive surgeon can do way more than he or she should.  Medicare is still basically a fee-for-service program with very little oversight, and so this type of thing is going to go on and on. And it has been going on for a while, as this partial list of whistlebower suits shows. Enthoven’s view was that everyone should be put into competing managed care plans which would act as patient (and payer) sponsors, and look after the money better than the government could.  It didn’t happen that way, and the backlash against managed care’s ham-fisted attempts to do so ensured that most health plans gave up on trying to control what providers did.  Medicare never really ever tried, as all its internal review cases were co-opted by providers.  Its only weapons were inquisitions and indictments from the FBI and others well after the fact. Eventually Medicare will have to have more controls, but that will need reform as well as more money. I’ll talk more about this when I get to drug coverage later this week.  Suffice it to say, don’t hold your breath.

Meanwhile, Uwe Reinhardt says in the NY Times article that (despite Wall Street’s desires) hospitals “can’t be a growth industry like some Internet company”. Well maybe not a “growth” sector, Uwe, but look at Yahoo’s stock price in 2000, Tenet’s this year, and tell me that you’re not getting some of that Internet fever coming back!

Matthew Holt is the Founder of THCB.

Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 42

As I’m back from a week’s vacation, Jessica DaMassa is slowly pulling me back into the groove with questions about Walmart dumping Castlight, yet more money for telemedicine with MDLive adding $50m, and get.health sponsoring a few tickets to health2con. All in 2 minutes, with a bit of filler!–Matthew Holt

 

The Following is an Excerpt from the Book “Let’s Talk About Death (Over Dinner): An Invitation and Guide to Life’s Most Important Conversation”

• 3

By MICHAEL HEBB

The train sped along from Seattle to Portland on a spectacular summer morning, following the track along the waterways of the lower Puget Sound. One of my daughters lived in Portland at the time, so I found myself on the train frequently. Like most of us, I don’t seek out conversations with strangers while traveling, which is unfortunate, as I have had transformative moments when I decide to engage and treat fellow passengers as fellow humans.

That day the train was crowded, and I didn’t have the option of keeping my distance. I found myself at a table with two women—both physicians and both of whom had left the conventional healthcare system because the chaos had disgusted and beaten them down. They didn’t know one another before that crowded train ride but weren’t surprised when they’d so quickly found common ground.

I asked them what piece of our healthcare system was most broken? They both immediately answered, speaking at the same time: “How we die. End of Life.” This was in 2012, and how we die in America was not front-page news. (Atul Gawande’s Being

Mortal wasn’t published until two years later.) I was taken aback and asked for more information. I quickly learned two devastating statistics: that end-of-life care is the number-one factor in American bankruptcies and that although 80 percent of Americans want to die at home, only 20 percent do.

Continue reading…

The Doctor Who Thwarted the Charge of the General Medical Council – Part 1

• 2

By SAURABH JHA

After Dr. Hadiza Bawa-Garba was convicted for manslaughter for delayed diagnosis of fatal sepsis in Jack Adcock, a six-year-old boy who presented to Leicester Royal Infirmary with diarrhea and vomiting, she was referred to the Medical Practitioners Tribunal (MPT). The General Medical Council (GMC) is the professional regulatory body for physicians. But the MPT determines whether a physician is fit to practice. Though the tribunal is nested within the GMC and therefore within an earshot of its opinions, it is a decision-making body which is theoretically independent of the GMC.

The tribunal met in 2017, 6 years after Jack’s death, to decide whether Dr. Bawa-Garba, after the manslaughter conviction, should be allowed to practice medicine again, whether she should be suspended for a year, or her name be permanently erased (“struck off”) from the medical register. The GMC wanted Dr. Bawa-Garba to be struck off from the medical register because they felt that her care of Jack fell so short of the expected standard, that her return to practice would not only endanger patients but undermine public confidence in the medical profession. The GMC expected the MPT to agree with its uncompromising stance, and the MPT might well have, and probably would have, but for the efforts of Dr. Jonathan Cusack, a consultant neonatologist at Leicester Royal Infirmary (LRI), and a former supervisor and mentor of Dr. Bawa-Garba’s.

Cusack is unassuming even by British standards. You will not find him on social media or taking selfies. A soft-spoken northerner with a steely nerve and an uncompromising deference to facts, Cusack is both old-school and new-school. He has that unassailable integrity which is immeasurable but instantly recognizable. But he’s also savvy – and understands the British medical, regulatory and legal systems inside out. If Dr. Bawa-Garba’s license is reinstated, Cusack’s role would be akin to that of the code breakers in the Second World War. Dr. Bawa-Garba trusts him implicitly. Her legal team can’t function without him.

Cusack was loyally involved in both the rehabilitation of Dr. Bawa-Garba’s clinical confidence after Jack’s death, and her trial. I met him after the first day’s appeal hearing in the pub opposite the Courts of Justice. Originally hesitant to speak to me, being the ostentatious expat Brit that I am, he agreed to an interview on the condition that I not make too much of a song and dance about his contribution. I promised that I wouldn’t. I lied.

Continue reading…

Can We Teach a New Dog Old Tricks? A Conversation with Gary Klein

By SAURABH JHA

There is a rage against expertise these days. Data is all rage. What is the value of experience and judgment when we have abundant information, guidelines, and protocols? Can’t we just have a protocol for every situation? Are doctors overly concerned about making errors? I discuss these issues with Gary Klein, a renowned cognitive scientist and author of Streetlights and Shadows.

Listen to our discussion on Radiology Firing Line.

About the Author:

Saurabh Jha is a radiologist and contributing editor on THCB. He hosts Radiology Firing Line podcasts. He can be reached on Twitter @RogueRad

assetto corsa mods