By GREG FULTON

Washington, D.C. hardly seems like a town on suicide watch.

As November turned to December, from the venerable Old Ebbitt Grill near the White House, to Charlie Palmer Steak at 101 Constitution and over to The Capital Grille at 601 Pennsylvania, revelers abounded, in both food and drink.

At the Capitol Hyatt on New Jersey Avenue though, some contrasts were evident. While contestants from the Miss World 2016 pageant moved in and out of the upper lobby to awaiting buses, in the lower-level meeting rooms, also from November 30 to December 2, the mood was hopeful optimism meets whistling past the graveyard.

There the Jefferson College of Population Health summit brought forth Andy Slavitt, Michael Leavitt, Farzad Mostashari, NCQA President Peggy O’Kane, former advisors from the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, officials from Johns Hopkins, the Henry Ford Health System, Brookings, Deloitte, AMA, AHA and the American College of Physicians and many more to dissect MACRA and ponder “population health strategy under the new administration.”

The consensus on where value-based care (VBC) is heading?

Wait and see.

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By JONATHAN HALVORSON

We will soon have a Vice President and a head of CMS who hail from the great state of Indiana, and are proud of what they’ve done with Medicaid there through the Healthy Indiana Plan. Seema Verma, the proposed CMS Administrator, is credited with being the architect of Healthy Indiana, and Mike Pence, the Vice President-elect, presents Healthy Indiana as one of the signature achievements of his term as governor of that state.

It is too early to tell if the program will be enough to raise Indiana up the ranks on health and healthcare from the bottom quintile (1, 2). However, since Republicans have run the table with Congress, the White House and soon the Supreme Court, we can reasonably conclude that the future of Medicaid in America is going to look more like Indiana.

That doesn’t mean that income-based Medicaid eligibility will dramatically change. Pence was one of the few Republican governors who took advantage of the opportunity to expand Medicaid eligibility up to 138% of poverty, and President-elect Trump has promised, in his emphatic way, that people will not be denied healthcare coverage in his administration. Some Republicans in Congress have different ideas, however, and the outcome is not at all clear yet.

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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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