The Health Care Blog – Page 709 – Everything you always wanted to know about the Health Care system. But were afraid to ask.

Above the Fold

The Awful Dichotomy Between Health Care Politics and Policy

Jul 6, 2011• 28

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI

Amy Goldstein has an important article in today’s Washington Post detailing the place Don Berwick, the Medicare and Medicaid administrator finds himself in.

It is all but certain he will have to leave his post at year’s end, when his recess appointment expires, because the Senate will not confirm him for a lack of Republican support.

Berwick is one of the most respected health care experts in the country—his career has been dedicated to improving quality first and with that the cost of care. With the new law giving his agency more opportunities to experiment with new approaches and the ability to more quickly implement the things that work, he was the ideal choice.

But with the Democrats ramming the law through without a political consensus to support it, Berwick also became the political whipping boy for opponents to pile on. That he has been willing to point to the things that work in places like Britain only gave the political opportunists plenty of red meat to throw into an already red hot ideological debate.

Process Centered Medical Home

Jul 6, 2011

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

A new study on Patient Centered Medical Homes has been published in Health Affairs and we have a new, but predictable, indictment against small independent primary care practice. The study authored by Rittenhouse, Casalino, Shortell et all, is descriptively titled“Small And Medium-Size Physician Practices Use Few Patient-Centered Medical Home Processes”, and follows an earlier 2008 studythat surveyed large medical groups. The study is surveying practices with 1 to 19 physicians, and in a nutshell, small practices, particularly those owned by physicians, are less likely to have medical home processes incorporated in their workflows. On average, the bigger the practice, the more likely it is that medical home processes are used, and the likelihood increases if the practice is owned by a hospital or an HMO. Hardly surprising, but the enlightenment is, as usual, in the details.

The patient centered medical home model is based on the seven joint principles stated by the various primary care associations as follows: personal physician, whole person orientation, physician led care team, coordinated care, quality and safety focus, increased access and payment reform. Both studies quoted above were restricted to measurement of processes indicative of only four out of the seven principles. Personal physician for each patient and whole person orientation were left out, and so was the payment reform principle, although some measures of external incentives in support of medical home processes were considered.

The existence of physician led care teams was ascertained based on the existence of “a group of physicians and other staff who meet with each other regularly to discuss the care of a defined group of patients and who share responsibility for their care”. Not sure why, but solo and 2 doc practices were not even asked this particular question.

Myths About Medical Malpractice

Jul 5, 2011• 118

By MAGGIE MAHAR

A few days ago, I found myself involved in a debate over malpractice suits on The Heath Care Blog. One reader on the thread explained why, in his view, we need some type of tort reform: “What drives physicians to practice defensive medicine is the total lack of objectivity, fairness and consistency both across jurisdictions and even within a jurisdiction as to how medical disputes are decided. Juries of lay people who cannot understand the often conflicting scientific claims in these cases can be easily swayed by emotion and sympathy for injured plaintiffs.

“The inclination to practice defensively is especially prevalent in ER’s when the doctor and the patient often don’t know each other and there is time pressure to determine a diagnosis and send the patient on his or her way,” he added. “I’ve heard from plenty of doctors who work in inner city ER’s that even poor people are not shy about suing when there is a bad outcome if they can find a lawyer to take their case which they often can.”

This comment pretty well sums up the conventional wisdom about medical malpractice cases: Juries are not objective, don’t understand the evidence, and tend to sympathize with the patient. Meanwhile, doctors should be wary of those low-income patients in ERs. Americans are litigious by nature and if patients are not entirely happy with the outcome, they’ll jump at an opportunity to turn misfortune into a payday. Poor people, who need the money, are even more likely to try to “score.”

Those are the fictions.Continue reading…

Is Medicare A Good Deal?

Jul 5, 2011• 51

By JOHN GOODMAN

Think about everything you will pay to support Medicare: the payroll taxes while you are working, the premiums during retirement, and your share of the income taxes that subsidize the system. Then compare that to the benefits of Medicare insurance, say, from age 65 until the day you die.

Are you likely to come out ahead? That depends in part on how old you are. If you are a typical 85-year-old, for example, you can expect about $55,000 of insurance benefits over and above everything you have been paying into the system. If you’re a typical 25-year-old, however, you will pay an extra $111,000 into the system, over and above any benefits you can expect to receive.

By the way, this is not the sort of calculations you want to try at home on a pocket calculator. It’s too complicated. Fortunately the heavy lifting has already been done by Andrew Rettenmaier and Courtney Collins in a report for the National Center for Policy Analysis and summarized in this chart.

In terms of dollars in and dollars out, Medicare breaks down this way:

A typical 85-year-old is going to get back $2.69 in benefits for every dollar paid into the system in the form of premiums and taxes—a good deal by any measure.
People turning 65 today don’t do nearly as well — they get back $1.25 for every dollar they pay in.
The average worker under age 50 loses under the system — with a 45-year-old getting back only 95 cents on the dollar.
That’s better than the deal 25-year-olds get, however; they can expect to get back 75 cents for every dollar they contribute.Continue reading…

Real Reform For Medicare Advantage

Jul 5, 2011

By AL LEWIS

Medicare Advantage (MA) is stuck in a cycle in which the government wants to micromanage MA plans and cut their reimbursement to satisfy deficit hawks, while the health plan industry lobbies for exactly the opposite. The result is a negative-sum game, a stalemate that benefits nobody.

It turns out that this stalemate would be remarkably easy to overcome, in a way that makes money for the government, gives seniors a visibly better deal, reinvigorates the Medicare ACO, and entices many more members into MA. Since MA plans are held to quality standards far beyond what Medicare fee-for-service requires (remember, straight Medicare is a payment system, not an insurance plan), I am going to assert that the increasingly popular MA plan option – especially plans with high Star ratings – provides better care coordination for seniors than fee-for-service (FFS). The government recognizes this implicitly by initiating Medicare ACOs. ACOs are supposed to close that care coordination gap in FFS but it does not look like that is going to happen on a broad scale in the near future.

If one accepts the premise that more care coordination is a worthy goal, here’s a better way of addressing that care coordination gap by getting more seniors into MA, rather than by setting up a parallel universe of ACOs…and do it in a way that clearly saves money for the government and seniors.

Start with the recognition that most 64-year-olds are already in an HMO or PPO. Today’s sign-up procedure for Medicare acts as though neither innovation exists. A senior becomes eligible for Medicare and then (in competitive markets) gets deluged with offers to join one or another MA plan, which requires switching out of FFS — a model that, while called “traditional,” is totally unfamiliar to patients coming out of commercial HMOs. These enticements to seniors are quite costly for the health plans, involving brokers, salespeople, advertising etc.

How about a system in which MA becomes an opt-out instead of an opt-in for 65-year-olds, meaning people would automatically start receiving their Medicare benefit through a health plan instead of FFS? As you read what follows, assume that MA would still be totally voluntary and that people who want the old-fashioned FFS can simply opt into it.Continue reading…

Hidden Medication Costs

Jul 5, 2011• 19

By ANONYMOUS

Always covered by an employer health plan, I had never given a thought to prescription costs – my medications had been covered by moderate copays. This changed when I retired and enrolled in Medicare (and a Medicare Part D plan).

Just prior to retirement, my eyes suddenly began tear and swell so much that it impacted my vision. The eye doctor diagnosed an allergic reaction and prescribed prednisone drops to reduce the swelling and antihistamine drops to combat the reaction. The antihistamine drops required pre-approval by my employer’s PBM, which was granted. Per my employer plan I paid a relatively small copay for each prescription.

Three weeks later, on a follow-up visit, the doctor recommended that I continue the antihistamine drops for the duration of the allergy season. But I was running out and had to refill the prescription. Now I was on Medicare so I checked the cost of the drops on the website of my Part D provider. It was $279. Could this be?? Oh indeed it could — and I had a high deductible and would have to pay all of it!! Of course, if I continued to need the drops, the plan would eventually assume more of the expense – but even then the cost would be high – to the plan, even though not as much would come from my own pocket.Continue reading…

Bishops lack dignity

Jul 4, 2011

By Harris Meyer

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ policy on physician-assisted suicide approved June 16 is the latest move by Roman Catholic leaders to intervene in Americans’ personal health care decisions.

The eight-page policy, which the bishops passed 191-1 at their annual spring meeting in Bellevue, Wa., is full of inaccurate and misleading statements about the Death with Dignity laws in Washington and Oregon and the policy positions of the laws’ supporters. It ignores 14 years of experience in Oregon and two years in Washington. The head of Compassion & Choices, the main group supporting those laws, rightly criticized the policy statement as “full of reckless, unsubstantiated accusations.”

The bishops’ statement warns that the voter-approved Death with Dignity laws — which allow terminally ill, mentally competent adult patients to receive medications from their doctor to end their lives – essentially legalize murder. And it makes the stunning claim that U.S. leaders of the Death with Dignity movement advocate ending the lives of people who have not sought help in dying.

“A society that devalues some people’s lives, by hastening and facilitating their deaths, will ultimately lose respect for their other rights and freedoms,” the bishops said. “Taking life in the name of compassion also invites a slippery slope toward ending the lives of people with non-terminal conditions.”

The new policy, “To Live Each Day with Dignity,” is the U.S. church’s first official policy on aid-in-dying, which also is legal in Montana under a 2009 Montana Supreme Court ruling. The policy follows increasingly aggressive efforts by the bishops to require Catholic health care facilities and providers to insert and maintain feeding and hydration tubes in terminally ill patients — even those who have written advance directives stating they don’t want them.

The bishops also have cracked down on Catholic hospitals that performed tube-tying operations for women who are not going to have more babies. Last year, a bishop expelled St. Charles Medical Center in Bend, Ore., a century-old hospital founded by nuns, from his diocese for refusing to stop performing tubal ligations. These policies matter because the bishops oversee more than 600 Catholic hospitals and the hundreds of Catholic nursing homes, assisted living centers, and hospices.Continue reading…

The HIT Hit: PPACA’s Health Insurance Tax

Jul 3, 2011• 3

By ROBERT F. GRABOYES

The 2010 health care law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), hits small business with a barrage of inequities. Among the most egregious is the health insurance tax (HIT) launched by the law’s Section 9010. Ostensibly a tax on insurers, its real effect will be hundreds of billions of dollars of taxation on people who purchase coverage in the fully-insured market – mostly small business employers and employees and the self-employed. These are the people who usually generate around two-thirds of America’s new jobs.

In contrast, the HIT bypasses those who have coverage through self-insured plans – mostly big business, labor unions, and governments. Like PPACA’s essential health benefits and longstanding state benefit mandates, the HIT puts an anchor around the neck of small business while leaving larger organizations free to swim unburdened. And the anchor is a heavy one.

Over the first decade, the HIT will hit the fully-insured market with an estimated $87.4 billion tab, but that figure greatly understates the long-run financial impact. The tax is not implemented until the fourth year of the decade (2014) and is only fully implemented in 2018. The tax rises from $8 billion in 2014 to $14.3 billion in 2018 and in later years, even higher according to a complex (and at this point opaque) index, discussed below.

To put this in perspective, that $14.3 billion equals around 15 percent of the total small business expenditures on employee benefits in 2007. According to IRS data, proprietorships, partnerships, and corporations with up to $10 million in annual receipts deducted $96.8 billion that year for Employee Benefit Programs. An extra 15 percent or so constitutes an enormous blow to the ability of small businesses to compete against larger entities.

The HIT’s full magnitude will only become apparent in the second decade (2021-2030), when businesses and consumers experience 10 years of a premium-indexed, fully-implemented HIT. The second-decade cost is difficult to forecast, but may exceed $200 billion or even $300 billion. It all depends on how rapidly the law’s arcane index lifts the HIT beyond its $14.3 billion base in later years. There are two major sources of uncertainty in that index.Continue reading…

Never Say Never (Events)

Jul 2, 2011• 4

By BOB WACHTER

Earlier this month, the National Quality Forum released its revised list of “Serious Reportable Events in Healthcare, 2011,” with four new events added to the list. While the NQF no longer refers to this list as “Never Events,” it doesn’t really matter, since everyone else does. And this shorthand has helped make this list, which will soon mark its tenth anniversary, a dominant force in the patient safety field.

The NQF was founded in 1999 at the recommendation of Al Gore’s Presidential Advisory Commission on healthcare quality. For its founding chair, the organization selected Ken Kizer, a no-nonsense, seasoned physician-administrator who had just done a spectacular job of transforming the VA system from the subject of scathing articles and movies into a model of high-quality healthcare, a veritable star in patient safety galaxy.

Kizer’s original charge at NQF was to develop a Good Housekeeping seal-equivalent for quality measures (“NQF-endorsed measures”). But soon after he arrived, Kizer added another item to the NQF’s wish list: the creation of a list of medical errors and harm that might ultimately be the subject of a nationwide state-based reporting system. As Kizer said at the time,

This is intended to be a list of things that just should not happen in health care today. For example, operating on the wrong body part [or] a mother dying during childbirth. That’s such a rare event today that it’s generally viewed as something that just shouldn’t happen. Now, there’s probably going to be an occasion now and then when it happens and everything was done right, but it’s so infrequent that it means you have to investigate it every time it occurs. So “never” has quotes around it in this case. Now, wrong-site surgery is a different story—that should never happen. There’s no way that you should take off the right leg when you’re supposed to do the left one. So in this case, never really means never.

Unsurprisingly, the items on the list quickly became known as “Never Events.” Twenty-seven of them were announced in 2002, and the list was expanded and revised four years later. (This primer, written by my colleague Sumant Ranji for our patient safety website, AHRQ Patient Safety Network, is the best description of the list and some of its policy implications.)Continue reading…

Health Care Power Tools for Consumers

Jun 30, 2011• 2

By MARKUS FROMHERZ

Most people are getting their health insurance through their employer. That has been changing slowly, but with healthcare reform, many more people will be left to select their own plans without the pre-selection and help from their employer. What used to be a choice among 3-5 plans is soon to become a selection from dozens of health insurance companies each offering a dozen plans to choose from. And selecting an insurance plan is not like getting car insurance; family makeup, prior health issues, future healthcare needs, and affordability – they all matter. In other words, it’s very personal.

As in other insurance industries, there will be a number of options to help consumers, such as agents and brokers. Cost is one of the most important criteria, but the problem of predicting the impact of plan choices on out-of-pocket costs is much harder, since selecting a plan is such a personal choice. Our needs and therefore expenses also change over time, as we go through different life stages.

As in many industries, there is a lot of data one can harness to help with these decisions. One benefit we see emerging is the availability of personal power tools (similar to financial planning tools) that allow for detailed modeling of an individual or family’s situation. These tools predict likely health care needs and allow one to compare the detailed expenses given different insurance plans. Starting a family? Entering your fifties, with its slew of clinically advised exams? Dealing with the ups and downs of a chronic condition? Those factors can all be taken into account to provide detailed plan options and price comparisons to help choose the optimal health plan.