By ANDY SLAVITT

So, you decided to come to Washington to see what was new and how things might be changing… I am sure we did not disappoint.

I am honored to have been invited to address this summit, which I’m sure will be your first of many. It’s a certainty that making our delivery system work better for patients and spend money more wisely will always be in season no matter which party is in charge. And, while many new approaches and changes may come to bear, ultimately health is not a partisan issue.

However, I do hope you all think of a better name– the MACRA MIPS/APM summit sounds like the world’s hardest word scramble. We’ve tried to make MACRA more accessible by naming it the Quality Payment Program… something to think about.

Looking at your speakers today, you have gathered some of the most experienced people across the country focused on the most difficult health care problems we as a nation face. Simply put, how to complete the changes we have begun to make the system more patient centered and accountable. So today, I come here to add my perspective to this discussion and continue to ask for your valuable help.

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By IAN MORRISON

New POTUS Donald Trump doesn’t like the White House, it is drafty and was occupied by black people, and so he and his family have decided to stay in New York to run the country on Twitter.   The State of the Union address will be a live Twitter event from Trump Tower at 3.00 AM.  THCB has received the secret first draft from an anonymous POTUS speechwriter.

Heading to U.S. Bank Arena in Cincinnati, Ohio for a 7pm rally.
Join me! Tickets: https://t.co/HiWqZvHv6M

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 1, 2016

TRUMP

Thank you.  We won.  We won big.  It was huge.  And we would have won popular vote except for all illegals voting.  Hillary poor loser. Sad.

State of the Union is not strong.  Weak.  We don’t win anymore, but we will make America Great again!

Priorities:  Jobs, Repeal and Replace Obamacare, Immigration and National Security.  Already working on them all.  I am doing this for you.

Jobs.  Will bully CEOs to keep manufacturing in US & throw tax breaks at them. Expect air conditioners to get expensive.  Sorry Florida.

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By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

The brand new President Barack Obama, whether wittingly or not, invested his entire political capital in reforming health care in America. He gambled and he lost, not because he had nefarious intentions, but because he left the gory details to a corrupt Congress and a shady cadre of lying and conniving technocrats, ending up with something vastly different from what he campaigned on. From everything I’m reading now, Mr. Trump is about to walk in Mr. Obama’s footsteps, and if he does, the results will be unsurprisingly identical.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump repeatedly stated that Bernie Sanders forfeited his place in history when he “made a deal with the devil” and embraced the corrupt Democratic Party establishment that fought his candidacy in most abject fashion. Guess what? Mr. Trump seems to be making the same deal with the red version of the same devil. Mr. Trump’s cabinet choices indicate that he is now embracing the ultra-conservative factions of the Republican Party, the same people who actively or passive-aggressively opposed his candidacy. Nowhere is this peculiar and completely unnecessary capitulation more evident than in the beleaguered health care sector.Continue reading…

By NIRAN AL-AGBA, MD

Recently, President-Elect Trump selected Rep. Tom Price, MD to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.  Suffice it to say, this signals Mr. Trumps’ resolve and commitment to definitively repealing and replacing.  Dr. Price has already sunk his teeth into health care reform, having proposed alternative healthcare solutions in every Congressional session since 2009.  As a physician myself, I am delighted at the prospect of having another doctor at the helm of HHS. The last physician to lead HHS was Louis Sullivan, MD as part of the administration of George H.W. Bush.  Having a physician, who can understand the needs of physicians and patients, representing both in health policy decision making at the federal level gives everyone the best chance for meaningful and successful health care reform. 

Dr. Price is a third generation physician and a retired orthopedic surgeon with experience in clinical practice and academia before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.  At his core, he has been a fierce critic of Obamacare.  Dr. Prices’ most frequent objection to the ACA is the fact it hinders the ability of patients and physicians to be in control of medical decision making and puts the government squarely between doctors and patients.  Amen! He understands the subtle distinction that while expanding coverage may provide insurance, it is in no way akin to delivering patients unfettered access to health care. Continue reading…

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.)

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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?

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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.

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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…