By DAVID SHAYWITZ, MD

As Donald Trump seeks to build his administration, he will likely struggle with creating a science infrastructure, given his estrangement from the nation’s scientific community.

The distance between Trump and scientists seems to reflect mutual disdain. Trump famously trusts his gut over more data-driven methods. Trump’s success, against most expectations, can be read as a triumph of instinct over science, or at least to reveal the perils of data-driven overconfidence. Trump’s apparent intention to appoint a climate-change skeptic to lead the environmental protection agency suggests to many a disregard for the vast weight of scientific data here, while his comments about vaccinations during one of the Republican debates were charitably described by Steven Salzberg as “wildly inaccurate” and “thoroughly discredited.”

For their part, most scientists take a very dim view of Trump: Science prides itself on being inclusive, international, objective and collaborative–not generally the first adjectives used to describe Trump. (Whether science in practice lives up to these ideals is another question.) Add to this Trump-specific distaste the left-leaning bias of universities (well documented by centrist academics like Jon Haidt, among others–see here and references therein), and the result is a community that seems solidly united against the President-elect. (That said, I’d note that I’ve met more than a few political independents within academia who chafe at current norms.)

Continue reading…

By ROBERT ROWLEY, MD

The outcome of the recent election caught many people, and many forecasters, by surprise. How could their predictions have missed the mark so significantly? Granted, there were a number of people who predicted the outcome more accurately, but many of those who used data models to analyze the likely outcome are left now with head-scratching and postmortem analysis in order to improve their methods.

In their book Superforecasting, The Art and Science of Prediction, authors Philip Telock and Dan Gardner describe a subset of people who, on average, are significantly more accurate in their ability to predict upcoming events. “What makes them so good is less what they are than what they do—the hard work of research, the careful thought and self-criticism, the gathering and synthesizing of other perspectives, the granular judgments and relentless updating.”

What does this mean for healthcare? I’m not talking about the impact of the new presidency on health policy and healthcare delivery (that’s another discussion) – I’m talking about whether predictive analytics is really all that accurate in the first place. Where does it fail?

Continue reading…

By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD

President-Elect Trump recently announced: “for every one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated.” Regulatory capture, the topic of a recent THCB post by Nortin Hadler, has enabled many regulations based on HITECH that restrict competition by allowing information blocking. Many other regulations around quality measures, documentation, decision support, contract transparency, and kickback safe harbors are now needed to counteract EHR vendor consolidation through regulatory capture.

One regulation designed to establish a patient-controlled interface (a patient-controlled API) to health records will enable competition for all aspects of the institutional EHR by decentralizing access to the patient information. The impact on health reform, ACA reform, and medical research would be immense.

Continue reading…

By ANISH KOKA, MD

Mike Milligan, a Harvard medical student, recently wrote in THCB about the shock felt throughout his medical school upon the election of Donald Trump.  Seeking to understand how it may be that ‘equality, service and compassion’ were defeated, Mike settles on the narrative that appears to have taken hold of the elites on the left – Trump did not really win, Hilary lost.  While he does not say so in explicit terms, clearly we are to understand that the recent election was lost, and that in order to assure a better outcome the next election, physicians should urge their patients, and particularly their ‘poorer and less educated patients’ to register to vote.   Hopefully, these voters can then ensure that access to ‘affordable, high-quality medical care’ through constructs like Obamacare and MACRA are nevermore placed in jeopardy.

What complete hogwash.

Let me start with the factually incorrect parts.

Mike writes that ‘Mr. Trump received fewer votes in victory than the previous two republican nominees garnered in defeat.’  As of today Donald Trump has received 62.2 million votes out of a total of 126.6 million votes cast.  Mitt Romney received 60.9 million votes out of a total of 126.8 million votes, and John Mccain received 59.9 million votes out of a total of 129.4 million votes cast.  So despite the fact that his opponent raised and spent close to 1 billion dollars on ads promising the literal apocalypse if Trump was elected, no republican candidate in history garnered more popular votes than Donald Trump.  While it is true that nearly half of all Americans did not cast a ballot in this election, 3 million more votes were cast in 2016 than were cast in 2012.  The percentage of eligible voters casting their vote in 2012 was 55%.  The percentage of voters casting their vote in 2016?  Also 55%.  I realize the desire to deligitimize Trump by arguing this was a low turnout election that delivers no mandate is a very strong one among the millions on the losing side.  Unfortunately, wishes and reality sometimes find themselves in conflict.Continue reading…

By PAUL KECKLEY

I like certainty and routine. I like my daily Tall Dark Roast with no room for cream at 5 am at Starbucks. I like the same restaurants, the same suits and ties and the same TV shows. Holidays throw me off and I get bored quickly when I have down time.

For six years, the healthcare industry in the U.S. has been adjusting to its new normal based on the regulatory framework of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It became routine to discuss the volume to value, accountable care organizations, bundled payments, Medicaid expansion and Healthcare.gov. We were certain they’d be around for years to come.

Then came the election. When 61 million voters elected Donald Trump to the White House and kept GOP majorities in both houses of Congress, it signaled our routines in healthcare would be disrupted. The campaign promised to repeal and replace the ACA: its repeal appears certain but it’s replacement injects uncertainty into our routines around a number of meaty issues:Continue reading…

By MIKE MILLIGAN

On the morning of November 9^th, the day after the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, a visceral sense of shock was felt throughout the campus of Harvard Medical School. Donald Trump’s victory appeared to be an abrupt rebuke of so many of our commonly held values—equality, service, compassion. As medical students and physicians in Boston, we understood that we were isolated—both geographically and ideologically—from the myriad forces that swept Mr. Trump into office. However, there was something unsettling about our collective disbelief. How was it that so many of us had failed to recognize the depth of pain and divisiveness that existed within our country? There arose, in all of us, a need to understand.

In the aftermath of the election, political analysts have ascribed Trump’s victory to several themes—condemnation of the intellectual elite, widespread economic disaffection, and the rise of a potent strain of populism.  However, closer inspection reveals another contributor to this startling election result. Though the final votes are still being tallied, it is clear that Mr. Trump will have received fewer votes in victory than the previous two republican nominees garnered in defeat. Instead of representing a powerful mandate, Mr. Trump’s victory hinged on vast portions of the electorate choosing to stay home. Nearly half of all Americans did not cast a ballot in this election¹. As captured poignantly by Jon Favreau, former speechwriter to President Obama, “democracy is fragile and belongs to those who show up.” Continue reading…

By SAURABH JHA MD

A popular meme is that the U.S. spends more on healthcare than other developed nations but has nothing to show for that spending. This is different from saying that the U.S. spends more, but achieves something, but the something it achieves is so little that it isn’t worth the public purse. The latter is difficult to assert because the asserter must then say how little is too little in regards to how much is spent, and why. It is easier believing the excess spending has no effect whatsoever, zilch in fact, because this absolves one from having to apply a value judgment on how much a life is worth. This meme, a convenient heuristic, like other convenient heuristics, is wrong.

A recent study looked at trends and outcomes in the management of abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) in the U.S. and the U.K. An aneurysm, dilation of the aorta, is more likely to burst the bigger it gets. Aneurysms should be repaired before they rupture because the mortality of ruptured aneurysms can be 50 %. The study, which analyzed several databases that recorded surgery, size of aneurysms, and cause of death, found that Americans repair twice as many aneurysms as the Brits, and the repaired AAAs are smaller, on average, in the U.S. Between 2005-2012 elective AAA repair (i.e. repair of non-ruptured aneurysms) increased from 27 to 32 per 100, 000 in the U.K, and from 58 to 64 per 100, 000 in the U.S.

Continue reading…

By NORTIN HADLER, MD

The Healthcare Dollar, the Healthcare Industry and the Healthcare System are shibboleths. All are parlance. All render terms such as Healthcare Profession, Service Profession, and Healthcare Professionals quaint. All drive linguistic determinism: if it’s labeled so, it must be so. Furthermore, all have become jingoistic. This is our dollar, our industry, our system and don’t dare tread on us.

These are shibboleths that engender considerable cognitive dissonance. If healthcare is no longer a service profession but an industry that transfers wealth in a systematic fashion, shouldn’t it comply with the legal constraints that tightly govern other industries including others that serve essential needs of the population?Continue reading…

BY DEVON HERRICK

Donald Trump made repealing Obamacare one of the cornerstones of his campaign. Now that he has won, his administration will face the daunting task of unraveling nearly seven years of Obamacare. Republican policymakers cannot agree how to proceed. Some Republicans believe Trump should repeal Obamacare piecemeal; others worry that would be a disaster.

Whether you oppose or support the Affordable Care Act (ACA), it has structural flaws that will have to be addressed. Addressing those flaws will be less painful if repeal of the costly insurance provisions is accompanied by a replacement plan. Congress can repeal some Obamacare provisions using budget reconciliation, which requires only a simple majority. Only those provisions involving taxes and the budget can be repealed this way. The individual and employer mandates and all the ACA taxes can be repealed using budget reconciliation. However, the regulations that prevent insurers from designing affordable health plans cannot. Repealing the insurance mandates require a filibuster-proof majority. A slight Republican majority in Congress means the Trump Administration likely has the power to gut the ACA. However, Trump cannot replace Obamacare without maybe a dozen Senate Democrats willing to go along.Continue reading…

By DIANA ZUCKERMAN

A major proposed law that alters the way the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves drugs and medical devices has been wending its way through Congress since 2014.  Momentum is building on Capitol Hill to pass the legislation in the current “lame-duck” session of Congress. 

That shouldn’t happen. 

The House passed its version of the legislation—the 21^st Century Cures Act (hereafter the Cures bill) —in July 2015.  The Senate health committee created and passed 19 related bills, under the banner “Innovation for Healthier Americans,” this past spring.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn) pushed, without success, to get the legislation to the Senate floor this past summer.  Now, he and proponents—which include the pharmaceutical and medical device industries and dozens of research and patient groups who get support from those industries—seek to pass the legislation in the lame-duck session.

Continue reading…