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Not Colon Cancer

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By DAVIS LIU, MD  Davis Liu

My mother’s oncologist ordered the blood test, carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), to check for the recurrence of colon cancer. The good news was that there was no evidence of recurrence. The bad news was that she didn’t have colon cancer.

She had breast cancer.

Though she was feeling better, the chemotherapy and radiation had taken its toll. For the past couple of months, she had experienced constant nausea and vomiting. During and after treatment, her hands and feet felt like they were on fire. Many times she wanted to give up and quit. Yet she persevered and felt emotionally stronger after the ordeal. She started to feel like herself again. Life began to have some normalcy. Until an insurance bill appeared asking for hundreds of dollars.

Apparently over the past year, her oncologist had routinely ordered the CEA test multiple times as part of her cancer follow-up. When she called to contest the charge, the insurer told her to talk to her doctor. She didn’t know this test was unnecessary until the bill. And until she called me, her son, a primary care doctor.

She asked her oncologist about the repeated blood tests. He simply shrugged. No apologies. No explanation. No acknowledgment of the error. Didn’t he get the lab results of the CEA? Shouldn’t he have been aware that the test was not relevant for her care?

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Job Post: THCB Editorial

THCB is looking for talented interns to assist with editorial, research and web production tasks as our web site undergoes a major expansion. Perfect for a grad or med student with an interest in journalism, public policy, and/or the business of health care. 

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Centrists Back Health Care Reform

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By MERRILL GOOZNER

The tone on Capitol Hill during Tuesday’s debate was more civil, the partisan rhetoric less harsh than previous exchanges on the House floor. But there’s little doubt that the Republican-led House will vote later today to repeal President Obama’s signature health care reform law.

That largely symbolic vote – there’s almost no likelihood the Democratic Senate will follow, nor would the president sign the bill – signals the start of a two-year campaign by newly empowered Republicans in the House to undermine the new law. Proponents of “repeal and replace” will next turn to eliminating the most unpopular elements of the law—including the individual mandate – and to cutting off funding for implementation.

But the administration won a powerful set of centrist allies on Tuesday as it scrambled to set in motion reforms that it believes will be popular with the American people once its key provisions go into effect. The new law, signed by Obama last March,  is designed to provide about 32 million previously-uninsured Americans with coverage either through Medicaid or subsidized private insurance sold through state-based insurance exchanges. The total cost of the program of about $900 billion will be paid for by a combination of tax increases and slower growth in Medicare spending.  The law also places consumer-friendly restrictions on insurance carriers, funds Medicare pilot models in alternative care delivery, and creates a government-run long-term care insurance program.

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Insurance Exchange Budgets: How Much is Needed?

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By ROGER COLLIER

Picture 12 It’s coming up to four months since the Department of Health and Human Services awarded more than $50 million in grants to states and US possessions for health insurance exchange planning and development, and the money is now starting to be spent. $50 million seems like a fair amount of cash, but it’s generally understood that this is just a down payment on the cost of exchanges. So how much might a state expect to spend?

Although neither complies exactly with the requirements of PPACA, the exchanges in Massachusetts and Utah provide some clues as to how much a state might have to spend in order to have a successful functioning exchange.

The Massachusetts Connector meets the PPACA requirements quite closely (not surprisingly given that PPACA drafters used it as a model), and has been operational for four years. It offers on-line enrollment to small groups and to both subsidized and unsubsidized individuals. There are now approximately 155,000 subsidized CommCare enrollees and close to 40,000 unsubsidized enrollees.

The Connector has been quite generously funded. An initial state appropriation provided $25 million in planning and development funds, while operations costs are funded through per-enrollee levies on participating health plans. Current levy rates are 4-4.5 percent (comparable to insurance broker renewal rates), giving the Connector an operations and ongoing enhancement budget of more than $40 million a year to pay for some 45 staff, consultants, and IT and other contractors.

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Health Care Georgians Deserve

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By GAYATHRI SURESH KUMAR, MD Gayathri_Suresh_Kumar

As a physician who works at Grady Memorial Hospital, I am regularly reminded of the implications of poor access to health care.

One of my regular patients had been suffering from diabetes and hypertension for five years. She was a single, dedicated mother who had been working long hours at a local grocery store to provide for her 15-year-old daughter. She understood that good health meant that she could perform better at work, and the earnings she received from her work would help her provide a stable home for her daughter. Therefore, she did whatever it took to keep herself healthy — monitored her diet, took her medicines diligently and visited the physician regularly.

Things changed one day when during one of her visits to my clinic she said, “Doc, I just lost my job. I don’t have insurance anymore. Medicaid denied me coverage even though they said it was OK for my daughter to have insurance. I can’t pay my co-pays to see you anymore. I may not see you next time.” I was horrified.

A mother who wanted nothing more than to be as healthy as possible for her child should be able to receive care. The health care system in our country that should be serving patients exactly like this one is preventing patients from receiving the care they need and deserve.

In many cases, access to health care coverage is not within the control of patients nor their physicians, resulting in significant consequences. That is, if they don’t obtain coverage, many of our patients will succumb to their (many preventable) illnesses if they don’t have access to their physicians or cannot pay for their medications. My patient’s future could be a testimony to this.

What further confounded me was that Medicaid denied my patient.

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Minimum Essential Benefits

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By MICHAEL TURPIN Michael Turpin cropped

The Affordable Care Act is officially under construction.  The framework for the minimum mandatory levels of benefits offered through state exchanges is now being researched and will soon be ready for prime time debate.

The Institute of Medicine, a non-partisan research group, has been retained by Health and Human Services to conduct public and private planning sessions to help shape final recommendations on what standard levels of benefits should be required as a “floor” for all health plans.

The queue of industry and special interest groups increases daily as stakeholders wade in to offer personal perspectives on why certain levels of benefits should be considered as “essential”. The stories will be heart wrenching as individuals plead for broader coverage terms and looser definitions of medical necessity to cover a range of therapies treating orphaned or difficult conditions that do not neatly fit into today’s definitions of coverage.  The unfortunate fact also remains that the average consumer expects “essential coverage” to be synonymous with open access, comprehensive coverage, minimal out-of-pocket cost sharing and an affordable price tag.  In effect, everyone wants a Cadillac when the nation can barely afford a Corolla.Continue reading…

HPHC Goes Its Way, Thoughtfully

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By PAUL LEVY Paul Levy 1

Lots of people are thinking about the form of payments between insurance companies and providers for health care services, but it is also important to think about how each such approach would be marketed as an insurance product to the population.

The payment model that gets the most attention is capitated, or global payments, combined with accountable care organizations. In this environment, an average annual budget is established for each person served by an integrated health care delivery system (ACO), and that budget is shared among the providers according to some mutually agreed upon arrangement.

But the insurance product that would accompany this kind of payment scheme is often left without much of a description. As I have talked with insurance executives, they often fail to explain how they would offer consumers a desirable choice for a product based on this payment plan. Instead the main focus seems to be on shifting risk from the insurer to the providers, reducing the amount of unnecessary expenses, and sharing the benefits of those changes between the insurance company and the providers. Over time, the theory goes, the cost curve is slowed and premiums go up less quickly. But, it remains unclear what the role is for consumer in this scheme.

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What Most Needs Repealing and Replacing

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By JOHN GOODMAN, PhD John Goodman

Tomorrow night the House of Representatives will debate the repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), what many call “ObamaCare.” Some critics complain that this is a futile exercise because there is little chance of short-term success. But that’s the wrong way to look at it.

At the time of its passage, most members of Congress had no idea what was in the ACA. Nancy Pelosi was more correct than she realized when she said, “We have to pass it to see what’s in it.” Even now, we don’t know half of “what’s in it,” but we know enough to have an intelligent debate. Ideally, tomorrow night’s proceedings will be educational — in a way that the debate last spring was not.

In anticipation of the event, representatives from the National Center for Policy Analysis, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute and the American Action Forum will conduct a briefing on Capitol Hill tomorrow at noon. Our goal: to discuss ten structural flaws in the Affordable Care Act. We believe each of these is so potentially damaging, Congress will have to resort to major corrective action even if the critics of the ACA are not involved. Further, each must be addressed in any new attempt to create workable health care reform.

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Putting the Patient First, Literally

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By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD Adrian Gropper

Interoperability is front and center, again. Stage 1 of HITECH was about health records for doctors. Stage 2 is about interoperability. The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) report is all about interoperability. At a recent state medical society meeting, the most animated questions by physicians to Dr. Blumenthal were about the lack of interoperability in electronic health records.

While HITECH is designed to regulate the behavior of technology vendors, it is struggling to encourage doctors to accept the result. Growing interest in ACOs may, at last, drive doctors to demand effective interoperability, and using the patient as a principal or intermediary can jump-start the clinical integration they seek.

For more than 5 years, interoperability has been approached from the perspective of doctors and hospitals. The results speak for themselves. As we process the innovations proposed by PCAST and consider the specifics of Stage 2 regulations, it’s time to put patients first and technology second by giving patients (and their designated agents) convenient access to their health records in their choice of electronic formats including Blue Button, CCR and CDA. Market forces will take care of the rest. Experience with Blue Button and the Direct Project shows that patient-centered and secure, directed exchange avoid the privacy and policy issues that delay technological approaches to interoperability.

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