By John Goodman
National Center for Policy Analysis, August 17, 2011
An example of an IDN (Integrated Delivery Network) that is already doing what the Obama administration wants to try out with expensive pilot programs is IntegraNet of Houston, an organization with a network of about 1,200 doctors. Every Medicare patient has a medical home. The physicians follow evidence-based practices. Care is integrated and coordinated. Electronic records are being introduced. It appears that quality is higher and costs are lower than in conventional Medicare.
So what’s not to like? If the folks at CMS had any sense, they would camp out in Houston and try to find out how all this works. Instead, they have been spending their time and your tax dollars producing a 427-page book of rules on what Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) have to look like….
In the meantime, there is no doubt in my mind that IntegraNet doesn’t satisfy all the government’s requirements by a long shot. For one thing, it pays its doctors fee-for-service. The Obama folks are convinced fee-for-service payment is the problem, not the solution. For another, IntegraNet intentionally pays doctors more than Medicare’s standard rates. Yet the administration’s Plan B for cost control is squeezing provider payments, not increasing them.
A third problem is that it is producing a medical loss ratio (MLR) of 70% or less for its insurance company clients. As previously reported that is 10 percentage points less than the minimum MLR the Obama administration thinks insurers should have. But that extra 10 percentage point profit (shared by the IDN and the insurer) is the whole reason IntegraNet is in business. No one is going to take risks and try new things if they can only get a regulated-utility rate of return.
(Understandably, John Goodman would prefer that excerpts from his articles not be read out of context. The entire article can be accessed at this link.)
http://healthblog.ncpa.org/health-policy-schizophrenia/
Selected responses:
Don McCanne says:
August 17, 2011 at 3:38 pm
With health care costs for a family now averaging over $18,000, not including insurer administrative costs (Milliman Medical Index), how can one justify adding another 43 percent to those costs (the administration and profit add-on for 70 percent MLR plans)?
The Affordable Care Act isn’t a whole lot better since it allows 18 to 25 percent add-on for qualified private plans.
We now have a new report from the IG of HHS that shows an important difference between private and public health care purchasing. When quality is controlled, government administered pricing is much lower than private sector pricing. Specifically, the government Medicaid program was able to obtain a 45 percent price reduction in brand-name drugs whereas the private Medicare Part D intermediaries were able to negotiate only a 19 percent reduction for those same drugs of identical quality.
Health care costs are now an issue for 80 percent of Americans. We can no longer afford to waste our funds catering to superfluous, intrusive, outrageously expensive, private sector insurance bureaucracies.
Since risk pooling remains an imperative, we do need some form of insurance, but without these wasteful private bureaucracies. It is no wonder that so many conservatives warn that we’ll end up with a single payer system. It seems inevitable.
Larry Wedekind says:
August 18, 2011 at 10:08 am
John, well said..thanks for the recognition of our efforts at IntegraNet.
To Dr. Mittler (the author of another response not reproduced here),
The nature and benefit of competition is that private companies develop unique and better methodologies or products and in our free market they can become proprietary for awhile – this aspect of our society has produced many lasting benefits that would never have existed without the ability to patent or service mark unique ideas and products. I can tell you though that IntegraNet has not been able to keep our proprietary methodologies private very long due to the fact that physicians, Health Plan partners and our patients all experience our methods quickly and so they become public quickly. Its also very difficult to service mark our methods for the same reason.
Note also that insurance companies and IDN’s do not make any extra money in our Shared Risk/Savings Model unless the physicians make a lot of extra money. This is a unique feature of the Medicare Advantage Model that is easily forgotten. Why would you loath insurance company executives receiving more money for their wisdom in promoting the Shared Risk Model when physicians are paid the extra money first for their efforts?
Don McCanne says:
August 18, 2011 at 10:41 am
To Larry Wedekind,
Let’s see. The formula for success at IntegraNet is to use secret methods to reduce spending on actual health care (70% MLR) and keep more of the premiums so that “physicians make a lot of extra money”? With our outrageously expensive health care system, unique to the United States, can we really afford to perpetuate that kind of thinking, celebrating it as free market competition of private companies?
Value is what we should be striving for. In this model, the supposedly free market is being used to destroy value. When free markets fail in providing value for essential needs, it’s time for the government to step in. That might not appeal to those ideologically opposed, but one thing we can say: single payer systems do provide much better value in health care.
Larry Wedekind says:
August 18, 2011 at 11:16 am
To Don: I’m sorry, but you are very confused about the MA (Medicare Advantage) system. The fact that IntegraNet and other IDN’s consistently reduce the MLR to below 70% means that great value has accrued to the Medicare beneficiaries! To suggest otherwise is simply ignorant. Why? When a Health Plan experiences a 70% or less MLR because of the Care Coordination efforts of their IDN partner, this nearly always means that the beneficiaries are healthier and need the hospital less frequently. I submit to you that it is impossible to have a 70% or lower MLR without healthier patients.
This extra profit derived from the low MLR that is shared with the doctors in the IDN empowers the doctors to then spend even more time with their beneficiaries; this empowering the beneficiaries even more.
Remember that, due to the transfer of complete financial risk to the HMO and IDN, we have almost complete freedom to care for our beneficiaries under the MA Program the way we deem best. There is very little interference from CMS in our methods for caring for our beneficiaries under the MA Program.
The MA/IDN Risk Sharing model is actually the best example of free market competition within the healthcare market yet.
http://healthblog.ncpa.org/health-policy-schizophrenia/
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
As John Goodman said in this same article in an entirely different context, “It’s so bizarre that not even J.K. Rowling could make up a story like this.”