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7.1 Million. Will the Obama Administration Regret Today’s Announcement?

• 22

By Robert Laszewski

Politics is about expectations.

The Obama administration blew the doors off Obamacare’s enrollment expectations this week and scored big political points.

But in doing so, they may have set Obamacare’s expectations going forward at a level that can only undermine their credibility and that of the new health law.

What happens when the real number––the number of people who actually completed their enrollment––comes in far below the seven million?

What happens when the hard data shows that most of these seven million were people who had coverage before?

What happens when it becomes clear that the Obamacare insurance exchanges are making hardly a dent in the number of those uninsured?

Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the non-profit Rand Corporation estimated that two-thirds of the first six million people to enroll in Obamacare were previously insured––only two million were previously uninsured.

If all of the one million people who signed up in the last week were previously uninsured, that would mean that only three million previously uninsured people have purchased coverage in the government-run exchanges.

Rand also estimated that about nine million people have enrolled directly with the insurance companies, bypassing the government-run exchanges. But Rand also reported that the vast majority of those were previously insured.

If 20% do not pay, as has been the case since Obamacare launched, then the real Obamacare exchange enrollment number is about 5.7 million.

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The Rest of the Story on Health Exchange Enrollment

• 3

By Paul Keckley

This morning, the tally of enrollees in health exchanges is between 6 and 7 million.

Many of these will not finalize their paperwork until April 15, and many more might not pay their premiums.

Nonetheless, given the underwhelming rollout of Healthcare.gov, and well-funded campaigns in some states to discourage enrollment, the number is impressive. But the rest of the story is more important.

In coming weeks, these questions will be answered:

How many of these new enrollees will actually pay their premiums next month and be insured?

Are the new enrollees healthy or sick and in need of medical attention? How will the delivery system respond to these needs?

Did the penalty induce enrollment, or were other factors more important to individuals? Was it the attractiveness of subsidies or something else?

How will employers that provide health coverage assess the viability of health exchanges in their benefits strategies? Can these exchanges serve as a viable marketplace for employee insurance purchases (and allow employers to shift purchasing responsibility to their employees)?

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Health 2.0 is now mHealth & Associates

• 2

By Matthew Holt

After years of speculation about a possible name change, Health 2.0 has become mHealth & Associates. My partner Co-Chairman and CEO Indu Subaiya and I didn’t take this move lightly. We were though concerned that the tired “2.0” moniker is now thoroughly discredited by the emergence of the fully interoperable semantic Web, particularly as it’s been demonstrated in the healthcare sector in the US in recent years. In addition leading luminaries such as Chris Schroeder have finally realized the importance of the brand new smart phone devices that we’ve been ignoring for most of the last decade. And after some prompting, we were convinced by the intellectual rigor of the wider mHealth movement with its clear definition of mobile health, including the incorporation of highly portable technologies such as televisions bolted to the walls of hospital rooms.

Admittedly, while mHealth Intelligence and the mHealth Challenge roll off the tongue, we were a little stuck by what to call our main Fall conference–our organization’s best known event. But while mHealth Summit, mHealth Conference and most other variants are already in use, we think that clear market visibility will surround out new name. So instead of the 8th Annual Health 2.0 Fall Conference, this September we’ll welcome you to the First mHealth Confabulation.

Finally we wanted to acknowledge the role of  our wider movement, our team and our 75 chapters across the globe, so we have added the “*& Associates” moniker to the name. In recognition of their contributions all mHealth colleagues will now be known as Mobile Health Associates or in its shortened version, as an “mHealth Ass.” Indu has suggested that I adopt the title of “Biggest mHealth Ass.”

More Evidence That Patient Centered Medical Homes Don’t Work

• 18

By Al Lewis

A state the size of Vermont claiming savings of $120,000,000 through a patient-centered medical home (PCMH) program should raise eyebrows.

North Carolina made similar claims about its PCMH model, only to have the results so thoroughly debunked that consulting firm, Milliman, was forced to retract its key assertion.

I expect more from Vermont, if only because I’m a Democrat and Vermont has turned so “blue” that in 2008 John McCain received only 10,000 more votes than Calvin Coolidge garnered in 1924.  However, it turns out red states don’t have a monopoly on invalid PCMH data.

A brief summary of the Vermont Blueprint for Health, as described in the enabling legislation, would be: “a program for integrating a system of healthcare for patients, improving the health of the overall population…by promotion health maintenance, prevention, and care coordination and management.”

This is to be achieved by emphasizing the usual suspects — patient-centered medical homes and various support mechanisms for them.   The idea is to achieve “a reduction in avoidable acute care (emergency visits and inpatient admissions).”

Growth in participation has been phenomenal. In 2009, only a few practices and a dozen employees were involved, so we can call that the baseline year.  The report’s findings take us through 2012, by the end of which two-thirds of the state’s primary care practices (104) and population (423,000) were involved, along with 114 full-time employees.

The State’s Analysis

Through the end of 2012, the state — by using the classic fallacy (also embraced by the wellness industry) of comparing participants to non-participants — was able to show savings of $120,000,000 and a double-digit ROI.

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Where the ACOs Are

By Peter Ubel, MD

The Affordable Care Act established several programs to promote the formation of Accountable Care Organizations.

These ACOs are a relatively new way of organizing healthcare delivery, in which healthcare providers join together – perhaps across physician groups and hospitals – to care for a population of patients, and are then held accountable both for the cost and quality of the care they deliver to those patients.

This accountability cuts both ways – if they spend too much money on such patients and provide low quality of care, they might face financial repercussions, but if they offer high quality at a lower than expected cost, they might be rewarded with part of those cost savings.

A recent study gives us a glimpse of where the ACOs are forming in the United States. You will see they are not being formed everywhere, but instead are heavily concentrated in the southern and eastern United States:

The study also shows that these organizations are disproportionately made up of large, nonprofit healthcare systems, but not ones classified as public hospitals.

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Taking Stock of the ACA

• 5

By DAVID DRANOVE and CRAIG GARTHWAITE

With the ACA exchange enrollment deadline almost behind us, this is a good time to take a look at the big picture.

Three years after the first baby steps of implementation, what has the ACA accomplished?

When we consider the ACA, we can think of two broad goals. The “easy” goal was expanding coverage to the uninsured. We say “easy” because regulators should be able to succeed by simply throwing money at the problem, and that is a task our elected officials seem particularly adept at accomplishing.

The “hard” goal was bringing down the rate of growth in health care spending.

This has proven to be a difficult task for policy makers, who have been trying (and failing) for decades and have often done more harm than good.

We first consider the goal of expanding coverage to the uninsured. From its onset, the ACA chalked up a small victory by requiring plans to continue coverage for dependents under age 26.

This provided coverage to as many as three million uninsured, albeit the healthiest members of the population. The lion’s share of the reduction in the numbers of uninsured was supposed to come from Medicaid expansions and private exchanges.

And here is where the problems emerge.

Medicaid ranks have swelled in the 27 states (including DC) that have chosen to expand the program. Republican leadership in other states continue to assert they will not expand Medicaid, but given the exceptionally generous federal funding for this expansion, we find it hard to believe that most of these states won’t soon join the expansion.

After all, even Louisiana eventually raised its drinking age to 21 to get its share of federal highway funding. Similarly, we can’t imagine that the red states will turn down billions of dollars in federal funds.

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Death Panels: Can We Handle The Truth?

• 6

By THADDEUS MASON POPE, JD PhD

In December, I defended the term death panel.  Specifically, I demonstrated that we already have, and for over 50 years have had, quite a number of tribunals that act as death panels.

For example, at least daily, UNOS denies potentially life-saving organ transplant requests. While the term “death panel” has a pejorative connotation, the essential concept and function is necessary. Particularly in situations of strict scarcity, life and death decisions must be made. They are made. And they will continue to be made.

So, the relevant question is not whether to “have” death panels. Instead, the relevant question is whether we want to openly “acknowledge” our death panels. I am reminded of a famous scene from the 1992 film, A Few Good Men. You will recall that the story revolves around the court martial of two Marines charged with the murder of a fellow Marine. The defendants had administered a “Code Red,” an unofficial punishment, against a fellow member of their unit who was not sufficiently squared away to meet the Corps’ standards.

In the film’s most famous scene, Lt. Kaffee (Tom Cruise) cross examines Col. Jessup (Jack Nicholson) about the Code Red. Lt. Kaffee says, “I want the truth!” Jessup responds:

You can’t handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. . . . I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom.

You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives!

You don’t want the truth, because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall.

Col. Jessup’s point is that Code Reds are an invaluable part of close infantry training. But since they are “grotesque,” they are officially discouraged (even prohibited).

Is this the path that we should take with death panels? Since we find them grotesque, should we deny both their necessity and their existence? The argument has been compellingly made. In their 1978 book, Tragic Choices, Guido Calabresi and Phillip Bobbitt argued that the difficult but necessary life-and-death choices entailed in rationing can only be made by hiding them from public scrutiny.

In contrast, others call for open acknowledgement of death panels. For example, in a recent interview with Rolling Stones, Bill Gates rightly observed that we must deny even effective and life-saving medical technology to some people. “The idea that there aren’t trade-offs is an outrageous thing. Most countries know that there are trade-offs, but here, we manage to have the notion that there aren’t any. So that’s unfortunate, to not have people think, ‘Hey, there are finite resources here.’”

Gates is right. Calabresi and Bobbitt are wrong. The disadvantages of a “hide and deny” approach are substantial. First, it makes it more difficult to have our death panels operate in an open and transparent manner. This increases the risk of bias and corruption. Second, it means that they may not operate according to sufficiently deliberated principles. Third, a hide and deny approach means that death panels may not operate in a consistent and uniform manner from region to region. In short, hiding and denying death panels forecloses and delays much needed public discourse over how we want out death panels to operate.

Death panels, while tragic, save lives. And their existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to many, saves lives. We don’t want the truth, because deep down in places we don’t talk about at parties, we want death panels.

Unpacking the Doc Fix

• 8

By BILLY WYNNE

If you blinked on Thursday, you might’ve missed the House passing the latest Medicare’doc fix’ (see here for its 30-seconds of deliberation).

After posting the bill in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, House leaders faced opposition over its stop-gap approach and some of the cuts employed to offset the cost of the bill. With some arm-twisting, they managed to suppress objections for the handful of seconds necessary to hammer the gavel and call it done.

The Senate is due to take the bill up Monday evening, and it is highly likely to pass (this time it should actually get a vote). Since it is about to become the law of the land, let’s take a look at what’s inside. There’s a little slice of fun in here for everyone.

First and, theoretically, foremost, the bill blocks the pending cuts to doctors under the long-broken Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR)  formula. It would maintain existing physician pay rates for another twelve months, through March 31, 2015.

Not coincidentally, a vote to raise the debt limit will likely come due again at about that time.

Second, the bill continues, for a comparable period, the package of so-called Medicare extenders: a hodge podge of policies that boost payments in rural areas, suspend caps on certain benefits and other otherwise sunsetting policies that each have their niche constituencies. Many of these items have been reauthorized by Congress for over 15 years.

Third, the bill includes some new policies that put out fires of their own, or effectuate high priority programs for well-placed Members of Congress. These include:

  • An additional six month extension of the Two Midnights Rule, which drew a bright line distinction between presumptive inpatient and outpatient hospital stays but has created significant confusion and objections among many hospitals;
  • A one-year delay of ICD-10 implementation, to October 1, 2015 (this is the second time Congress has acted to delay ICD-10);
  • Elimination of the ACA cap on deductibles for employer-sponsored health plans; and
  • Two provisions aiming to improve mental health services, including the Excellence in Mental Health Act that, among other things, improves funding for community mental health centers.

Woah, some of you are saying. Dial back to that 2nd bullet. While the transition to ICD-10 has been controversial since it was first proposed in 2005, just last month CMS Administrator Tavenner said there would be no more delays (last year, the Administration voluntarily delayed the program from 2013 to 2014).

Healthcare providers have been battening down the hatches and preparing for this colossal transition from ICD-9 and its 14,000 codes to ICD-10 and its 69,000. Word on the street is that the provision was included primarily to earn cred with specialty physician groups, whose support for the bill was in question for concern about other provisions (see the bullet re: misvalued – aka overvalued – codes below).

Turns out, the specialty doc associations by and large opposed the bill anyway, and the healthcare sector is now left grappling with this unexpected turn.

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Hospital Acquired Infections: How Do We Reach Zero?

• 4

By PETER PRONOVOST, MD

This week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued two reports that are simultaneously scary and encouraging.

First, the scary news: A national survey conducted in 2011 found that one in every 25 U.S. hospital patients experienced a healthcare-associated infection. That’s 648,000 patients with a combined 722,000 infections.

About 75,000 of those patients died during their hospitalizations, although it’s unknown how many of those deaths resulted from the infections, the CDC researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.

On the bright side, those numbers are less than half the number of hospital-acquired infections that a national survey estimated in 2007. And a second report issued this week found significant decreases in several infection types that have seen the most focused prevention efforts on a national scale.

Noteworthy was a 44 percent decrease in central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI) between 2008 and 2012, as well as a 20 percent reduction in infections related to 10 surgical procedures over the same time period.

These infections were once thought to be inevitable, resulting from patients who were too old, too sick or just plain unlucky. We now know that we can put a significant dent in these events, and even achieve zero infections among the most vulnerable patients.

At Johns Hopkins, we created a program that combated CLABSI in intensive care units through a multi-pronged approach—implementing a simple checklist of evidence-based measures while changing culture and caregivers’ attitudes through an approach called the Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP). The success was replicated on a larger scale across 103 Michigan ICUs and then later across most U.S. states, withimpressive results.

These and similar successes have changed caregivers’ beliefs about what is possible, and inspired more efforts to reach zero infections.

What will it take to attain this goal—or at least get much closer?

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Numbers We’d Rather Be Talking About

• 11

By JOHN IRVINE

You’ll be hearing a lot about the number six point five million over the next few days.

Six point five million — or whatever the exact number turns out to be at the end of the day — being the number of people that the administration say signed up for Obamacare through the exchanges when open enrollment ends March 31st.

How meaningful the official numbers are will be open to debate. The bloviation factor will be in full effect.  The critics will be downplaying the administration’s number, ACA supporters defending it. Data geeks-turned-media stars will explain what it all means.

Here’s a guide to some of the other numbers we should be talking about as we try to make sense of what’s really going on and what really happened during the Obamacare rollout.

FUDs: The number of people who are innocently living their lives thinking they have bought health insurance, but who, for one reason or another,  be it technical glitch, bureaucratic incompetence or technicality – are going to wake up one morning not long from now and discover that they do not have health insurance.

And who one day soon will discover that they do not have health insurance.  This is the group that causes people in Washington to lie awake at night; because they are going to complain – and complain loudly. While the talk from the administration to this point has been all tough, it seems logical to assume it will build an appeal mechanism that will allow FUDs back into the system. The early signs are that this is the case.

404s : The number of people / applications lost in the system,  either as a result of the Healthcare.gov fiasco or because their application is sitting forgotten on somebody’s desk somewhere or on a laptop. Anybody who tried to log into Healthcare.gov at the height of the meltdown or who has gone back and forth with their insurance company over a bill gets it.

It is safe to assume that this is another number that keeps planners up at night. Let’s just say it is safe to assume that there are a lot of 404s.

CANCELS: The number of people who had their insurance plans cancelled by insurers on the grounds that they did not meet the standards set by the Affordable Care Act. In a way, being a cancel can be considered a badge of honor in the gamification of the healthcare system that is Obamacare.

UNCANCELS: The number of people who had their plans cancelled by the health insurers only to have them declared “uncancelled” by the Obama administration or their state.  Nobody really knows how many uncancels there are. Don’t ask. Yes, it will take a really long time to sort out the uncancels from the cancels and the QHPs.

And you will probably want to shoot the person explaining it to you.  In the gamification of the healthcare system, level ups go to people who have been cancelled, uncancelled and bumped.

BUMPS: The number of people who have been “bumped” out of network and are being forced to change doctors.  What’s going on? In gamification terms, bumps make things more exciting. In real life, they suck.  Getting bumped off a flight is annoying, getting bumped in the health care system is potentially life-threatening.

LIVES SAVED: As we speak Nate Silver or a smart person who looks and sounds a lot like Nate Silver is sitting at a computer in a darkened room somewhere trying to come up with a reliable quantification of the number of lives the Affordable Care Act has saved and will save by shielding people from the barbaric US healthcare system.

How would you go about coming up with that number? Would you look at people turned away from emergency rooms? Would you look at the  number of preventable deaths under the old system?  Would you total the number of deaths from cancer, heart attack and stroke?  Compare mortality rates over the decade from 2004-2014 with those from 2014-2024?  It will be long time before we have the data we need to really understand how well we’ve done.

You can forget the nonsense we’ve been hearing about Obamacare costing the lives of thousands of Americans by taking their health coverage away from them.  There is a difference between losing your coverage temporarily because the system is in transition and losing  it and knowing that you’ll never be able to get it back. Ever.

Calculated over decades to come the number of lives saved is likely to total in the thousands, if not the millions. And that will be the true test of the Affordable Care Act as a historical accomplishment for Barak Obama and his administration.

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