By KIP SULLIVAN, JD

What would you do if you were a member of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) and you were told Medicare Advantage and Medicare’s ACO programs are losing money and there’s no way to determine why they’re losing money? That is what happened over the course of two MedPAC meetings, one in October and another in November. At the morning session of the October 6, 2016 meeting, MedPAC staff reported data on the Pioneer and MSSP ACO programs indicating that the two programs together raised Medicare’s costs slightly in 2015. And at the morning session of the November 3, 2016 meeting, staff reported that Medicare Advantage (MA) raised Medicare costs by 5 percent in 2016 (which is down from 14 percent in 2009) and, moreover, that it’s extremely unlikely anyone will ever know why MA plans and ACOs are raising costs.

If you were a commission member, wouldn’t you at least inquire why the staff thinks it’s impossible to determine the causes of the MA and ACO programs’ failure to cut costs? And if you confirmed that it really is impossible to know why they’re failing, wouldn’t you say it’s high time to terminate those programs? Not one of the 16 commission members present at those meetings did that. Many of the commissioners expressed frustration with the poor performance of the ACO programs (for some reason they spared the MA program from similar criticism). But not one demanded to know why the commission knows so little about what goes on inside HMOs, PPOs and ACOs, nor why the staff thinks the information vacuum will go on forever. Surprisingly, two commissioners (Buto and Gradison) did suggest it was time to terminate the MSSP ACO program. But they received no support from any other commissioners or staff.Continue reading…

By NIRAN AL-AGBA, MD

U.S. life expectancy declined in 2015 for the first time in more than two decades, according to a National Center for Health Statistics study released last week. The decline of 0.1 percent was ever so slight ― life expectancy at birth was 78.8 years in 2015, compared with 78.9 years in 2014.  However, this reversal of a long-time upward trend makes these results significant.

While many researchers are scratching their dumbfounded heads in utter astonishment, I hypothesize the decline in life expectancy is partly due to the decrease in the primary care physician supply.  Studies have shown the ratio of primary care physicians per 10,000 people inversely correlates with overall mortality rate.  It is a well-known and reproducible statistical relationship that holds true throughout the world.  In the U.S., increasing by one primary care physician per 10,000 population, decreases mortality by 5.3%, ultimately avoiding 127,617 deaths per year.

Headlines last week highlighted how much these unexpected results left the researchers baffled.   Jiaquan Xu, a lead author of the study told The Washington Post, “This is unusual, and we don’t know what happened…so many leading causes of death increased.”   Age-adjusted death rates went up by 1.2 percent, from 724.6 deaths per 100,000 people in 2014 to 733.1 in 2015.  Death rates increased for eight of the ten leading causes of death, including heart disease, chronic respiratory illness, unintentional injuries, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, renal disease and suicide.  Differences in mortality were most prevalent in poorer communities, where smoking, obesity, unhealthy diets, and lack of exercise are ubiquitous. 

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By GILBERT WELCH, MD and ELLIOTT FISHER, MD

If confirmed as Secretary of HHS, Tom Price will oversee a $1 trillion budget – roughly one-third of all health expenditures.  His proposed legislation “Empowering Patients First” seeks to control costs by giving patients more choices and providing the information required to make them. He calls for publicly available standardized information on the price and quality of physicians, hospitals and other health care institutions.

It sounds like Dr. Price is prescribing a single data system. 

Medicare has had a single data system on the over-65 population for decades.  Since 2005, these data have informed Hospital Compare, a consumer oriented website comparing the quality of over 4000 hospitals.  And while prices in Medicare are relatively fixed, these same data have shown substantial variation in costs because the quantity of service – the number of hospital admissions, procedures and physician visits – varies substantially from place to place.

But Medicare is only one piece of the data puzzle.  A National Bureau of Economic Research report[nber.org] added another piece last year with data from large insurance companies like Aetna and United.  For the under-65 commercially insured population, it’s not just the quantity of services that are all over the map – it’s also the prices. 

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By BOB HERTZ

Here is why we need a Medicare buy-in:

Take the case of a male age 62, in Omaha Nebraska , whose Income is $50,000 a year

His only offers of ACA-qualified health insurance are from Medica and Aetna.

With Medica, he can choose a bronze plan that has a monthly premium of $1,242, a deductible of $6.850.

What an awful policy! For a premium that equals about 35% of his after tax income, he gets no benefits until he paid over $20,000 a year. The insurance company is essentially trying not to cover this person- they are just offering the worst policy they can.

The ultimate solution is simple — this man should be on Medicare.

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By HANS DUEVEFELT, MD

Our clinic is worried about qualifying for this year’s Meaningful Use incentive payments. We have this hastily purchased EMR that was supposed to make life easier and quality better for all of us. The EMR vendor got paid a long time ago but we are still dealing with the administrative burdens imposed by our new system.

By attesting that we can use this thing reasonably properly, we can receive some Government incentive monies, which even under the best of circumstances don’t even begin to make up for all the extra expenses and productivity losses we have incurred through going digital.

What we are up against is a product that doesn’t do, or doesn’t easily do, what we were told it could.

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By MARSHALL CHIN, MD

Major disparities in health outcomes have stubbornly persisted throughout both democratic and republican administrations.  If you have diabetes and you live in a predominantly African-American neighborhood of Chicago, you have a two-to-five times higher risk of having your leg amputated than if you live in one of the city’s white neighborhoods.  If you are a Hispanic child with asthma, you are 50% more likely to be admitted to the hospital than if you are white. And if you are a Vietnamese woman, you are five times more likely to develop cervical cancer than your white counterpart. The incoming Trump administration’s vow to repeal the Affordable Care Act presents a great danger for vulnerable populations.  However, incentive principles that underlie Republican Party health policies could be designed to encourage health care organizations and clinicians to reduce health disparities.

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