The public discourse is reaching new levels of ugliness, as illustrated by an audience at a GOP campaign event cheering the idea that that those without health insurance should just be left to die. (Krugman, P. Free to die. Op-Ed. New York Times, September 16, 2011: A23). GOP presidential hopefuls have no solutions to offer except the “freedom to choose” (your own fate!) and the private marketplace (which increasingly excludes those who cannot pay its rapidly increasing costs). In fact, they exacerbate the problem, under the guise of fiscal responsibility and austerity, by cutting government safety net programs while at the same time trying to exploit Medicare and Medicaid by further privatization.

These are some markers that show some of the impacts of this war:

• According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2010 49.9 million Americans were uninsured (which understates the problem since anyone with insurance for even a small part of the year was considered insured), the median household income was $49,445 (a drop of 2.3 percent from 2009), and 46.2 million people (including 22 percent of the nation’s children) were in poverty (the highest number in the 52 years for which estimates have been tracked). (U.S. Census Bureau. Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States, 2010)

• In his recent editorial in The Progressive, Matthew Rothschild notes that, over the last 40 years, the top 0.1 percent of the population (152,000 people making more than $5.6 million a year) skyrocketed by 385 percent while the income of the bottom 90 percent (about 137 million people) dropped by 1 percent.(Washington Post) In the last ten years, the median income of working-age households has dropped by more than 10 percent (Economic Policy Institute). (Rothschild, M. Enlist for class warfare. The Progressive, September 20, 2011)

• According to a Gallup poll, 18.2 percent of Americans state they did not have money to buy food at all times in 2010. (Gallup, Washington, D.C.)

• The median household wealth of white families has fallen by 16 percent since 2005; Hispanic families dropped by 66 percent. (Pew Research Center Social & Demographic Trends project. Washington, D.C.)

• Three-quarters of the increase in U.S. corporate profit margins over the last ten years have come from depressed wages. (J. P. Morgan, New York City) (Harper’s Index 323 (1937): 15, 68, October, 20ll).

• U.S. corporations pay only 10.5 percent of their profits in taxes today (vs. 40 percent in 1961, with some paying no taxes. (Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, D.C.)

• Based on a definition of the middle class of those between the 30th and 70th percentiles of the income distribution, one-third of Americans dropped out of the middle class over the last 30 years. (Acs, G. Downward Mobility from the Middle Class: Waking Up from the American Dream. Economic Mobility Project. Pew Charitable Trusts, September, 2011).

• The average annual premium for health insurance for a family of four reached $15,073 in 2011, 9 percent higher than 2010 (Abelson, R, Bernstein, N. Health insurers push premiums sharply higher. New York Times, September 28, 2011: A1) (an unaffordable level about 30 percent of the median family income, or twice the proportion of income that seniors paid for health care when Medicare was enacted in 1965!).

• In the most recent study of mortality amenable to health care in 16 high-income nations, the U.S. ‘led’ the field with the most preventable deaths, and with the least improvement over a ten-year period; the authors concluded this poor
showing is likely due to “the lack of universal coverage and the high costs of care.” (Nolte, E, McKee, M. Variations in amenable mortality—Trends in 16 high-income nations. The Commonwealth Fund, September 23, 2011)

• The consumer confidence level is now only 45 percent. (Vital signs. Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2011: A1) Despite all this pain and suffering, the political process continues to ignore this national catastrophe in the name of austerity as the debate continues over the budget deficit, targeting federal spending for education, health care and other important public programs (but avoiding bigger issues, such as major defense cutbacks, real financial reform, campaign finance reform, and tax increases for the wealthy). The extreme right-wing of the Republican Party, activated and hobbled by the Tea Party, continues to hold Congress and the Obama Administration hostage as it pursues its nihilistic agenda, focused on winning further power in 2012 despite its lack of a plan to address these kinds of problems.

The present situation in health care boils down to a human and moral crisis that seems beyond the reach or concern of our current political leaders, conflicted as they are by enormous amounts of corporate cash that perpetuates our present, increasingly cruel market-based system. In our next post, we will explore whether we still can draw on a long-standing self-image that we as Americans care about each other.

John Geyman, M.D.
Professor emeritus of Family Medicine, University of Washington School of Medicine and author of Hijacked! The Road to Single Payer in the Aftermath of Stolen Health Care Reform (Common Courage Press, 2010)

To purchase a book by John Geyman, visit copernicus-healthcare.org

But as I discussed in a lengthy article four years ago, this theory has been fully discredited over the years as a cost-containment tool in U.S. health care. (1) (Geyman, JP. Moral hazard and consumer-driven health care: A fundamentally flawed concept. Intl J Health Services 37 (2): 333-51, 2007) Instead of cutting health care spending, cost-sharing leads many patients to delay or forego necessary health care, resulting in later diagnosis of illness and higher costs down the road, together with decreased quality and outcomes of care.

Overall health care costs are not reduced. Cost-sharing just shifts more costs to patients and families at a time when these costs are already unbearable for many. Meanwhile, the real drivers of health care costs continue unimpeded— perverse incentives within the medical marketplace that encourage physicians, other providers, hospitals and other facilities to deliver more services, whether appropriate or necessary or not; lack of price controls; blatant profiteering by Big PhRMA, investor-owned hospitals and medical supply companies; introduction of new technologies with lax requirements to document their effectiveness; and excess bureaucracy of our 1,300 private insurers.

Although it is now clear that cost-sharing will not fix our cost problems, and will just make patients sicker and increase the numbers of preventable hospitalizations and deaths, the policy-making community continues to bark up this tree. In fact, all the present trends indicate that increased cost-sharing, promoted especially by the GOP and many willing Democrats, will be imposed across the board in both private and public programs.

These examples illustrate the extent of this continuing trend:
• High-deductible plans with increased co-payments for visits and drug prescriptions and greater restrictions on network providers.
• Efforts to increase cost-sharing in private Medicare plans, including Medigap and Medicare Advantage programs.
• The Obama Administration’s “surrender in advance” proposal to introduce new co-payments for home health services for new Medicare beneficiaries (4) (Office of Management and Budget. Living Within Our Means and Investing in the Future. The President’s Plan for Economic Growth and Deficit Reduction. September 2011).
• Draconian Medicaid cutting services and increasing cost-sharing (e.g. Arizonans below the federal poverty level must make co-payments to gain access to care, causing many to forego care, a practice recently rejected by a the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. (5) (Reinhart, MK. Copays break law. The Arizona Republic, August 25, 2011) But conservatives and many Democrats conveniently ignore these inconvenient facts about cost-sharing as a failed mechanism to cut health care costs:
• Despite the widespread and increasing use of cost-sharing over many years, health care inflation remains completely out of control.
• Physicians push the buttons for health care services much more than patients.
• The enormous costs of the multi-payer financing system are wasteful and unsustainable, and could readily be controlled by shifting to a single-payer financing system. The hypocrisy of the right on this issue boggles the mind. Consider these contradictory policies and assertions on the right:
• Blind ideological support of “market competition” as the answer to our cost problems when that is the main part of the cost problem, since real competition does not exist in health care markets (e.g. more consolidation all the time, wide latitude to set prices, little transparency, etc).
• Intent to dismantle Medicare and convert it into a voucher-based welfare program while at the same time opposing cost controls of private Medicare programs and negotiated drug prices that are so effective in the VA.
• Forcing increasing cuts of an already underfunded Medicaid program while promoting for-profit privatized Medicaid programs that offer worse medical care (6) (McCue, MJ, Bailit, MH. Assessing the financial health of managed Medicaid managed care plans and the quality of patient care they provide. The Commonwealth Fund, June 15, 2011) and further gouge the most vulnerable among us.
• Opposition to reforms of Wall Street abuses, where moral hazard of high-risk and exploitive investment practices continue unchecked. (7) (Browning, ES. Fed faces old foe as hazard returns. Wall Street Journal, August 29,2011: C1)
• Failure to even consider a single-payer, not-for-profit Medicare for all program that would assure universal coverage for our whole population with increased choice, more efficiency, fewer disparities and improved quality of care, all at less cost than employers, patients and families are now paying.
• Calling for a more limited role of government until big banks and other privateinstitutions face bankruptcy, then begging for bailouts and minimal follow-up regulation.
• Calling the Obama Administration’s recent proposal for minimal tax rules for those making more than $1 million a year “class warfare” as if the GOP hasn’t been waging such a war for many years. (8) (Knowlton, B. Republican lawmakers equate Obama tax plan with ‘class warfare’. New York Times, September 19, 2011: A 19)

Adding up all these examples of GOP duplicity and hypocrisy (to which many Democrats unfortunately yield), we have to ask when logic, common sense, evidence and fairness will take center stage for health policy makers and legislators? The way things are going could well be called legislative malpractice.

These are some of the major ways by which Americans are hurt by the growing deficit of generalist physicians:

1. Can’t get a primary care physician.
It is getting harder and harder to find a generalist primary care physician still open to accepting new patients. In Massachusetts, for example, the passage of legislation in 2006 expanding insurance coverage for many people exposed a critical shortage of primary care physicians. (Fitzgerald, J. State medical group sees severe shortages in 10 specialties. Boston Herald, October 20, 2010) Patients on Medicare and Medicaid have particular problems finding a physician willing to take them on due to low reimbursement through those programs. Under the banner of fiscal austerity, many states are cutting Medicaid to the bone. In California, for example, where Medicaid (Medi-Cal) covers one in five Californians, Medi-Cal payment rates for physicians and other providers have been cut by 10 percent to just $11 a patient visit (Corcoran D. Doctors say Medi-Cal reimbursement is too low. San Francisco Chronicle, August 4, 2011) Even if one has a primary care physician today, the likelihood of a continued relationship in the future is becoming increasingly clouded due to physician retirements, mobility among physicians, and changes of providers in insurer networks that often force changes of physicians.

2. No access to breadth of primary care.
People without a primary care physician don’t get access to the breadth of primary care anywhere else in our “system”. Specialists are not trained or equipped to provide preventive services across the board, care for acute and chronic problems for patients of all ages, continuity of comprehensive care for all medical problems for years, with knowledge and understanding of their patients’ family and community setting. Emergency rooms and urgent care centers can focus only on the most acute problem at the time, with little follow-up, while so-called “retail clinics” for walk-in care are limited to non-emergency and low-acuity problems. As a result, many of the potential advantages of primary care are not available to a growing part of our population.

3. Higher costs and unaffordability of care.
Specialty care costs more than primary care—a lot more, for a number of reasons. For new medical problems, specialty physicians have to start “cold”, without context or knowledge of the patient, often ending up repeating tests and procedures that have been done previously, charging more than primary care physicians, and in the case of multiple medical problems, typically having to call upon other specialists for care. Since primary care physicians know their patients better, they order fewer tests than specialists, and help to protect their patients from inappropriate and unnecessary care. (Schoen, C, Osborn, R, Doty, M, Bishop, M, Peugh, J et al. Toward higher-performing health systems: adults’ health care experiences in seven countries. Health Affairs (Millwood) 26: w 717-34, 2007)

4. Foregone necessary medical care.
Foregone care is widespread and increasing. These markers document this growing trend:

• In the last year, one in three Americans skipped care, did not fill a prescription, or get other care because of cost. (Parashar, A. Compared to other countries, U.S. patients have more access to specialists, less to primary care. Kaiser Health News, November 18, 2010)
• One-third of uninsured adults have a chronic disease for which they
don’t get needed care. (Wilper, A, Woolhandler, S, Lasser, KE, McCormick, D, Bor, DH et al. A national study of chronic disease prevalence and access to care in uninsured U.S. adults. Ann Intern Med 1249 (3): 170-6, 2008)
• Two million cancer patients are now foregoing necessary care each year due to unaffordable costs. (Weaver, KE, Roland, JH, Bellizzi, KM, Ariz, NM. Foregoing medical care because of cost: Assessing disparities in healthcare access among cancer survivors living in the United States. Cancer online, June 14, 2010)
•. The number of annual patient visits to physicians has declined sharply since the onset of the Great Recession in 2008. (Johnson, A, Rockoff, JD, Mathews, AW. Americans cut back on visits to doctor. Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2010: A1)

5. Decreased coordination and integration of care.
Coordinated and integration is a huge problem, especially for patients with multiple medical problems, the norm for older patients. The electronic medical record does not substitute for close communication between specialists for such patients. According to the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, 80 percent of serious medical errors are associated with lack of communication or teamwork among specialists in hospitals. (Health blog. Joint Commission-Hospital Collaboration targets hand-offs. Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2010)

6. Decreased quality of care with worse outcomes.
Compared to those without primary care, patients with primary care receive earlier diagnosis and treatment of illness and better outcomes of care (Ferrante, JE, Gonzales, E, Pal, N, Roetzheim, RG. Effects of physician supply on early detection of breast cancer. J Am Board Fam Pract 13: 408-14, 2000), including lower mortality rates (Baicker, K, Chandra, A Medicare spending, the physician workforce, and beneficiaries’ quality of care. Health Affairs (Millwood) 23: w 184-97, 2004)`

Unfortunately, the essential role of primary care in any health care system is not widely understood. In the next post we will consider some of the many misperceptions about it, and how they represent barriers to building a better health care system in this country.

Adapted in part from my recently released book Breaking Point: How the Primary Care Crisis Endangers the Lives of Americans. Copernicus Healthcare, 2011, soon to be available as an Ebook on Amazon.

John Geyman, M.D.
Professor emeritus of Family Medicine, University of Washington
Past President, Physicians for a National Health Program

Here are just three of their unfounded claims, together with references from the health policy literature and recent publications that rebut their assertions:

• Re the alleged advantages of privatized Medicare, see my 2006 book (Geyman, JP. Shredding the Social Contract: The Privatization of Medicare. Monroe, ME. Common Courage Press, 2006), my extensive article in The International Journal of Health Services (Geyman, JP. Privatization of Medicare: Toward dis-entitlement and betrayal of a social contract. Intl J Health Services 34 (4): 573-94, 2004), a 2009 report by the Committee on Energy and Commerce (Committee on Energy and Commerce. New report highlights Medicare Advantage insurers’ higher administrative spending. Washington, D.C., December 9, 2009), a 2010 article in the Wall Street Journal on retrenchment of private Medicare plans (Johnson, A. Private Medicare plans are retrenching. Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2010: B1), and a recent article in The New England Journal of Medicine describing the failures of regulated competition among private insurance companies in the Netherlands and calling into question managed competition as a model for private Medicare plans in the this country. (Okma, KGH, Marmor, TR, Oberlander, J. Managed competition for Medicare? Sobering lessons from the Netherlands. N Engl J Med, June 15, 2011)

• Re the alleged advantages of private health insurance over single-payer national health insurance, see my 2008 book on the private health insurance industry (Geyman, JP. Do Not Resuscitate: Why the Health Insurance Industry is Dying, and How We Must Replace It. Monroe, ME. Common Courage Press, 2008), my extensive article in The International Journal of Health Services (Geyman, JP. Myths and memes about single-payer health insurance in the United States: A rebuttal to conservative claims. Intl J Health Services 35 (1): 63-90, 2005), and a 2009 report by the Congressional Research Service, The Market Structure of the Health Insurance Industry (Austin, DA, Hungerford, TL. The Market Structure of the Health Insurance Industry. Washington, D.C, Congressional Research Service, November 17, 2009).

• Re the claimed efficiencies of competition in health care, see a multi-year study by the Community Tracking Study showing the failures of markets to be more efficient or to enhance the quality of health care (Nichols, LM et al. Are market forces strong enough to deliver efficient health care systems? Confidence is waning. Health Affairs (Millwood) 23 (2): 8-21, 2004) and a recent article by Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Washington, D.C-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (Weisbrot, M. Problems of U.S health care are rooted in the private sector, despite right-wing claims. McClatchy-Tribune Information Services, July 20, 2011).

Health policy is too important to leave to the biased, well-funded propaganda
machine of these “research” organizations that keep promulgating policies that have long since been discredited, either by their failing track record or legitimate research studies.

John P. Geyman, M.D.
Professor emeritus of Family Medicine, University of Washington
www.copernicus-healthcare.org

This is the first in a series of four posts that will describe this crisis, how it has progressed over the last 50 years despite all attempts to deal with it, together with why it matters to all Americans and what can be done about it. These posts are drawn in part from my latest book Breaking Point: How the Primary Care Crisis Endangers the Lives of Americans, just released by Copernicus-Healthcare and soon to appear as an ebook on Amazon.

Primary care is a term that many are unfamiliar with, often even including within the health professions. We’re talking here about generalist physicians and other health professionals working with them, in the ongoing care of unselected (not referred) patients of all ages for whatever problems they need to seek care. This is in the front lines of health care, for individuals and families, in their own community setting. General practitioners in earlier years represented this kind of physician. Since the 1960s, four other kinds of generalist physicians have evolved as various kinds of medical education programs have been developed—family practice (now family medicine), general internal medicine (for adults), general pediatrics (for children), and osteopathic physicians (with training that includes manipulative therapies).

Most advanced countries have at least 50 percent of their physicians as generalists at the foundation of their health care systems. While the U.S. had such a base until World War II, that number has declined over the last 60 years to less than 30 percent. And that number is dropping fast. Less than one in five U.S. medical graduates are now entering a primary care specialty, while most opt for better-paying, more attractive lifestyles of other specialties. (Pear, R. Doctor shortage proves obstacle to Obama goals. New York Times, April 27, 2010: A1) We now have a specialist-dominated system without anywhere near the number of generalists needed, as shown by Figure 1 in 2025. (Colwill, JM, Cultice, JM, Kruse, RI. Will generalist physician supply meet demands of an increasing and aging population? Health Affairs Web Exclusive, April 29, 2008, w 232-41)

In his recent article in The New Yorker, Dr. Atul Gawande, general and endocrine surgeon at Harvard Medical School, described the importance of the generalist in these compelling terms:

“Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coordination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later? Getting the country’s best electrician on the job (he trained at Harvard, somebody tells you) isn’t going to solve this problem. Nor will changing the person who writes him the check.” (2) (Gawande, A. The cost conundrum: What a Texas town can teach us about healthcare. The New Yorker, June 9, 2009: 34-44.)

Advanced countries around the world with higher-performing health care systems than the U.S. have all build their systems on a solid base of primary, generalist care, readily available to patients for common health care problems where they live. Secondary care includes more specialized care for less common problems, while tertiary care deals with rare or unusual medical problems in university medical centers or other large urban hospitals. In most of those countries, specialists serve as consultants for particular medical problems, while primary care physicians provide ongoing continuity of care for all of their patients’ problems.

This is how a 2008 report of the General Accounting Office sums up the primary care crisis in this country:

“Health professional workforce projections that are mostly silent on the future supply of and demand for primary care services are symptomatic of an ongoing decline in the nation’s financial support for primary care medicine. Ample research in recent years concludes that the nation’s over reliance on specialty services at the expense of primary care leads to a health care system that is less efficient. At the same time, research shows that preventive care, care coordination for the chronically ill, and continuity of care—all hallmarks of primary care medicine—can achieve better health outcomes and cost savings. Despite these findings, the nation’s current financing mechanisms result in an atomized and uncoordinated system of care that rewards expensive procedure-based services while undervaluing primary care services.” (GAO. Primary Care Professionals: Recent Supply Trends, Projections and Valuation of Services. Washington, D.C. GAO-08-4721. Government Accounting Office, February 2008, p 15)

In our next post, we will see how our upside-down system does not work, and how it is responsible in large part for most of our system problems, whether at the level of individual health care or population-based care.

On the positive side of the ledger, the PPACA brings some welcome changes:

• Will extend health insurance to 32 million more people by 2019.
• Provides subsidies to help many lower-income Americans afford health insurance.
• Starting in 2014, expands Medicaid to cover 16 million more lower-income people.
• Provides new funding for community health centers that could enable them to double their current capacity.
• Eliminates cost-sharing for many preventive services.
• Phases out the “doughnut hole” coverage gap for the Medicare prescription drug benefit.
• Will create a new national insurance plan for long-term services: Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) program.
• Will establish a nonprofit Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to assess the relative outcomes, effectiveness and appropriateness of different treatments.
• Initiates some limited reforms of the insurance industry, such as prohibiting exclusions based on pre-existing conditions and banning of annual and lifetime limits.
• Contains some provisions to improve reimbursement for primary care physicians and expand the primary care workforce.

On the negative side of the ledger, however, these are some of the reasons that the PPACA will fall so far short of needed health care reform that it is not much better than nothing:

• Surging health care costs will not be contained as cost-sharing increases for patients and their families.
• Uncontrolled costs of health care and insurance will make them unaffordable for a large and growing part of the population.
• At least 23 million Americans will still be uninsured in 2019, with tens of millions more underinsured.
• Quality of care for the U. S. population is not likely to improve.
• Insurance “reforms” are so incomplete that the industry can easily continue to game the system.
• New layers of waste and bureaucracy, without added value, will further fragment the system.
• With its lack of price controls, the PPACA will prove to be a bonanza for corporate stakeholders in the medical-industrial complex.
• Perverse incentives within a minimally-regulated market-based system will still lead to overtreatment with inappropriate and unnecessary care even as millions of Americans forego necessary care because of cost.
• The “reformed” system is not sustainable and will require more fundamental reform sooner than later to rein in the excesses of the market.

How did this latest reform effort get so far off track? Here are three of the major reasons:

• The issues and policy options were framed as the political process was hijacked by the very interests that are largely responsible for today’s cost, access and quality problems in health care. As examples, the drug industry lobbied successfully to avoid any price controls of drugs, as the VA does so well; the insurance industry avoided real rate controls over their premiums and ended up with other loopholes to game the new system; and all of the corporate stakeholders will gain subsidized new markets without significant regulation of the market.
• The quest for bipartisanship was futile as reform got run over in the middle of the road. The big questions cannot be answered in the political center, such as whether health care should be a right or a privilege, or whether health care resources should be allocated based on ability to pay or medical need.
• Market failure was not recognized as the wellspring of our system problems. When it was agreed to “build on the strengths of the present system” instead of more fundamental reform, corporate stakeholders and their lobbyists found willing legislators to craft centrist “remedies” which could be sold to the public as  reform. But the various incremental tweaks of our existing system, such as employer and individual mandates, have failed over the last 20 or 30 years to remedy cost, access and quality problems.  In the absence of real health care reform, we can now expect these kinds of unfavorable outcomes in coming years:

• soaring costs without effective price controls throughout the system.
• managed care fails to control costs or improve quality.
• persistent financial and other access barriers for many millions of Americans.
• growing backlash by physicians and consumers.
• gaming of private plans and adverse selection in public plans.
• consolidation among hospitals sustaining high prices.
• increased cost-sharing for employees as employers cut back benefits.
• continued high levels of inappropriate and unnecessary care.
• added bureaucracy and waste in an even more fragmented and dysfunctional system.

We have yet to learn that an unfettered health care marketplace can only perpetuate our problems, not fix them. Most industrialized nations have learned this many years ago, and are able to achieve better quality of care with improved outcomes for their populations even as they spend much less on health care than we do. We have to conclude that a larger role of government will be required to assure real and sustainable health care reform.

There is a fix in plain sight for our problems — single-payer financing coupled with a private delivery system. The private insurance industry has outlived its usefulness, and is only being kept alive by government subsidies, whether by overpayments of private Medicare plans or this latest provision in the PPACA to pay out nearly half of a trillion dollars in subsidized premiums for their inadequate coverage.

When will we have the political will to face up to our real problems in health care and show that the democratic process can still work?

Adapted from “Hijacked: The Road to Single Payer in the Aftermath of Stolen Health Care Reform,” 2010, with permission of the publisher Common Courage Press. http://commoncouragepress.com/index.cfm?action=book&bookid=402

For starters, quality of care in the U.S. is highly variable, and is unsatisfactory for many millions of Americans, as these cross-national comparisons against other nations with one or another form of universal access clearly show:

• The U.S. ranks last among 19 industrialized countries in “amenable mortality rates,” deaths that could have been prevented by timely and effective health care; that translates to about 101,000 excessive deaths per year in this country. (Nolte, E, McKee, CM. U.S. has most preventable deaths among 19 nations. Health Affairs 27 (1):58-71, 2008)

• The U.S. ranks last among 23 industrialized nations on infant mortality, with rates double those of Iceland, Japan and France. (Schoen, C, Davis, K, How, SKH, Schoenbaum SC. U.S. health system performance: A national scorecard. Health Affairs Web Exclusive, W457-475, 2006) http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Content/Publications/In-the-Literature/2006/Sep/U-S–Health-System-Performance–A-National-Scorecard.aspx

• Lower-income people in this country receive worse care than their higher- income counterparts on 21 of 30 primary care quality measures, four to five times higher rates of disparity compared to Australia and Canada. (Huynh, P, et al. The U.S. health care divide. Commonwealth Fund, April 2006)

On the plus side, the PPACA does make some attempts to improve the quality of care through such provisions as these: expanded access to care; elimination of cost-sharing for preventive services; establishing a comparative effectiveness research initiative; expansion of health information technology (HIT); and modification of payment mechanisms (e.g. accountable care organizations, or ACOs, and “value modifiers” for physician reimbursement).

But these are important ways that will largely cancel out the impact of these efforts to improve the quality of care:

• We can expect an increase in cost-sharing (with reduced affordability) as employers downgrade the actuarial value of their coverage and as insurers market their underinsurance products in the individual market and through exchanges. A recent study of Medicare Advantage plans found that increased co-payments resulted in fewer outpatient visits, more hospital admissions and longer hospital stays for patients with hypertension, diabetes and a history of acute myocardial infarction. (Trivedi, AN, Moloo, H, Mor, V. Increased ambulatory care copayments and hospitalizations among the elderly. N Engl J Med 363 (4):320-8, 2010)

• The critical shortage of primary care physicians and an underfunded primary care infrastructure persist as our specialist-dominated workforce continues to provide more care than is appropriate or necessary, with less coordination and worse outcomes. For optimal quality of care, patients need both primary care and appropriate specialist care. (Parchman, M, Culter, S. Primary care physicians and avoidable hospitalization. J Fam Pract 39: 123-6, 1994) (Beal, AC, Doty, MM, Hernandez, SE, Shea, KK, Davis, K. Closing the divide: How medical homes promote equality in health care: results from the Commonwealth Fund 2006 Health Care Quality Survey)

• The new Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute lacks the authority to mandate or even endorse coverage and reimbursement rules for any particular test or treatment. (Kaiser Health News staff. True or false: Seven concerns about the new health care law. March 31, 2010)

• Perverse incentives will still permeate the system because of largely unchanged reimbursement policies (mostly fee-for-service) and coverage decisions influenced more by politics and lobbying by industry than hard scientific evidence of efficacy and cost-effectiveness. Procedures will continue to be over-reimbursed, primary and cognitive care services will remain under-reimbursed, and there will be little restraint over excess volume of services in most practice settings. These are examples of how big this problem is:

• One-third of U.S. births today are by Caesarian section (compared to a national average of just 5 percent in the 1960s). (Neergaard, L. Overtreated: More medical care isn’t always better. Associated Press, June 7, 2010)

• About one-third of tests and treatments are inappropriate or unnecessary and often harmful. (Wennberg, JB, Fisher, ES, Skinner, JS. Geography and the debate over Medicare reform. Health Affairs Web Exclusive W-103, February 13, 2001)

• Investor-owned hospitals, HMOs, nursing homes and mental health centers provide more expensive care of lower quality than not-for-profit facilities. (Geyman, JP. The Corrosion of Medicine: Can the Profession Reclaim its Moral Legacy? Monroe, ME. Common Courage Press, 2008, p 37)

• Well-reimbursed imaging procedures are greatly overused, thereby increasing risk of cancer; as an example, a recent report found that Illinois hospitals are using twice as many double CT scans (one with dye, the other without) than the national average, believed by many experts to be unwarranted. (Graham, J. New government report raised questions about CT scans at Illinois hospitals. Chicago Tribune, July 12, 2010)

• Wider adoption of health information technology has not been demonstrated to improve outcomes of care in most non-integrated parts of our health care “system”; most of the increase in medical computing has been driven by financial and billing reasons, not quality of care. And most quality improvement efforts have been based on process measures, such as use of beta blockers after a heart attack or use of hemoglobin A1C in diabetes, without good correlation with actual outcomes. (Chaudhry, B, Wang, J, Wu, S, Maglione, M, Mojica, W, et al. Systematic review: Impact of health information technology on quality, efficiency and costs of medical care. Ann Int Med 144 (10):742-52, 2006) (Himmelstein, DU, Wright, A, Woolhandler, S. Hospital computing and the costs and quality of care: A national study. Amer J Med 123 (1):40-6, 2010)

• The long-delayed experiments with accountable care organizations and bundled payments are likely to be ineffective in improving quality of care in non-integrated practice settings which involve non-salaried physicians. So despite what we are being asked to believe by supporters of PPACA, we cannot really expect much, if any, improvement in the quality of care for the U.S. population as a result of this legislation.

Adapted from Hijacked: The Road to Single Payer in the Aftermath of Stolen Health Care Reform, 2010, with permission of the publisher Common Courage Press. www.commoncouragepress.com

On the plus side, the PPACA does offer these welcome provisions:

• Extending health insurance to 32 million more people by 2019.

• Allowing parents to keep their children on their policies until age 26.

• Expansion of Medicaid to cover 16 million more lower-income Americans.

• New funding for community health centers that could allow them to double their patient volume.

However, on the other side of the ledger, there are many problems that will render restricted access to care for tens of millions of Americans, an ongoing and even increasing problem. These examples show how far short of the mark the PPACA falls on access to care:

• There will still be 23 million people without any kind of health insurance in 2019.

• Federal support for Medicaid expansion will not kick in until 2014.

• More than 32 million other Americans will be under-insured in 2019, as a result of these kinds of circumstances:

1. Many younger healthier people, the “Young Invincibles,” will opt out of coverage until they have an accident or get sick.
2. Many people will not be able to afford coverage through either exchanges (which won’t be operational until 2014) or high-risk pools.
3. The new federal temporary high-risk pool is already underfunded and plagued with many problems; at best, it will be available for up to 7 million uninsured people, but more likely for only about 200,000 or 3 percent of the target population. (Merlis, M. Health coverage for the high-risk uninsured: Policy options for design of the temporary high-risk pool. National Institute for Health Care Reform. May 27, 2010.)
4. The actuarial value of insurance plans for most of the newly “insured” will be as low as 60 to 70 percent (i.e. insurers leave 30 percent to 40 percent of the bill with patients and their families).
5. Even those fortunate enough to have employer-sponsored (ESI) coverage will find their plans costing more, covering less, and more difficult to afford; the Congressional Budge Office projects that the average family premium in the ESI market in 2016 will cost more than $20,000, not including deductibles and other out-of-pocket expenses. (Congressional Budget Office. An Analysis of Health Insurance Premiums Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Nov. 30, 2009.)
6. Access to care will further deteriorate as a result of 36 billion in Medicare and Medicaid cuts to safety-net hospitals. We can expect closure of some of these critical facilities that provide a wide range of services that other hospitals find too unprofitable to provide, including kidney dialysis, cancer treatment and mental health care.
7. Although the PPACA does call for an increase in reimbursement for primary care physicians, that won’t happen until 2013, and will then last only two years — just a small gesture toward the nation’s growing crisis in primary care.
8. The U.S. is facing a shortage of 35,000 to 44,000 primary care physicians for adults by 2025 (Colwill, J, Cultice, JM, Kruse, RL. Will generalist physician supply meet demands of an increasing and aging population? Health Affairs [Millwood] 27: w232-41, 2008.) An increasing number of people with insurance coverage cannot find a primary care physician to take care of them, especially those on Medicare or Medicaid, due to low reimbursement in those programs.
9. Since the PPACA calls for phased cuts in overpayments to private Medicare Advantage plans over the next few years, enrollees will face cuts in benefits and rising premiums.
10. As they confront deficits of 127 billion over the next two fiscal years, states are making draconian cuts in Medicaid across the country that will only aggravate current barriers to care. State appeals to the federal government for relief of Medicaid costs are now caught in a political crossfire threatening further unraveling of Medicaid funding. (Solomon, D. States face new pinch as stimulus ebbs. Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2010: A5.)
11. A majority of states outsource their Medicaid programs to private insurers that frequently create profits by cutting services. A recent report found that 2.7 million children on Medicaid in nine states were not receiving required screenings and immunizations. In Florida, the insurer WellCare paid 40 million in restitution to the state after it acknowledged that it had set up a subsidiary to make it appear that it was spending more on health care than it actually was. (MacGillis, A. Some states say they’re not receiving the Medicaid services they’re paying for. The Washington Post on line, July 8, 2010.)

Despite the hype we hear about “near-universal” access just down the road with PPACA, the above leads us to believe that access to care will remain inadequate for much of the population. In our next post, we will look at what this year’s health care “reform” legislation means for the quality of care Americans receive.

Adapted from “Hijacked: The Road to Single Payer in the Aftermath of Stolen Health Care Reform,” 2010, with permission of the publisher Common Courage Press. www.commoncouragepress.com

During the long run-up to this bill, President Obama told us that it would save the average American family $2,500 a year on insurance premiums (a claim that the Congressional Budget Office later dispelled as untrue, instead projecting a $2,300 increase in premium costs for the average family). (1) (Hemingway, M. Obama promised $2,500 health care savings; CBO says plan is $2,300 price increase. Washington Examiner on line, March 10, 2010)

The inconvenient fact is that premiums for families enrolled in employer-sponsored health plans from 2000 to 2008 increased by 97 percent, while those enrolled in individual plans increased by 90 percent; during this period, insurers’ payments to providers rose by 72 percent, medical inflation increased by 39 percent, wages grew by 29 percent and overall inflation went up by 21 percent. (2) (Health Care for America Now! (HCAN). Insurance industry inflates rates while falsely blaming new health care law. June 2010)

According to a recent survey by the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers, more than one-half of smaller employers with 50 or fewer employees will face premium hikes for group policies in the 11 percent to 20 percent range for 2011. (3) (Wojcik, J. Group health insurance rates on the rise: Survey. Business Insurance, June 3, 2010)

So how in the world can we expect the new health care “reform” legislation to actually make health care and health insurance more affordable?

The new law promised not only cost savings but also provided for $476 billion (almost one-half of the total $1 trillion cost of the law in its first 10 years) in new federal subsidies to help lower- and middle-income Americans to pay for health insurance. We need to ask whether the promised cost savings are likely to materialize and whether the subsidies will help that much.

For openers, cost savings are an illusion. Supporters of PPACA assure us that several approaches will contain health care costs – such as an increase in wellness and prevention programs, wider application of health information technology, and experimentation with such initiatives as “accountable care organizations” and tweaks to the fee-for-service reimbursement system. Most are delayed for years into the future and none have yet been demonstrated to save money for patients and their families.

The cost of health care is certain to rise exponentially as far as we can see, since the market controls prices and the volume of services in a deregulated non-system. And insurance premiums are also certain to rise rapidly at rates way above the cost of living and median household income based on various industry-friendly loopholes in the law and gaming by the industry. These examples show how easy it will be for the industry to continue to exploit the public through both private and public programs:

• Under the new law, insurers can raise premiums based on age (by a 3:1 ratio), by geographic area, by the number of family members, and by tobacco use (by a 1.5 to 1 ratio).

• Many insurers are now aggressively marketing “wellness plans” in both private and public plans. One example is the Healthways SilverSneaker’s membership fitness plan for seniors enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans. This is a clever strategy for insurers in two ways – they cherry-pick healthier seniors without infirmities that prevent their participation in such programs and then they charge 20 percent higher premiums to those seniors not enrolled in fitness programs. (4) (Blue Shield of California. Blue Shield of California to offer award-winning fitness program to Medicare beneficiaries in San Bernardino. January 18, 2010) (5) (Britt, R. Experts: Critical loophole in Senate health bill. Market Watch. January 7, 2010)

• Many healthier younger people will gamble with being uninsured until they get sick, in order to avoid paying fines for noncompliance with the individual mandate. This has already happened in Massachusetts over the four years since the “Massachusetts Miracle” was adopted in 2006. Since then, the number of short-term insurance buyers has increased by four-fold, getting insurance only after they have health care problems, then dumping coverage after they get care. This has increased the cost of insurance for other people and costs the state’s program an additional $300 million a year. (6) (Lazar, K. Short-term insurance buyers drive up cost in Mass. The Boston Globe, June 30, 2010) (6) (Lazar, K. Short-term  insurance buyers drive up cost in Mass. The Boston Globe, June 30, 2010)

People with employer-sponsored group coverage will also take hits. As employers confront hikes in the costs of group coverage, they will pass along these costs to their employees in the form of increased co-payments and deductibles, often with other restrictions in coverage. Middle-income families will be especially hard-hit if they have so-called Cadillac plans – those with annual premiums in excess of $8,500 for individuals and $23,000 for families. Employers will be faced with a tax on such plans beginning in 2013, when we can expect them to avoid the tax by limiting coverage and forcing more cost-sharing on their employees. (7) (Herbert, B. Op-Ed. A less than honest policy. New York Times, December 29, 2009)

But won’t the nearly half a trillion dollars in federal subsidies over 10 years make health care affordable for lower- and middle-income Americans? Here too the story is not what we are being led to believe by pundits and supporting politicians. Subsidies will not start until 2014, and then are not available to people already covered by employer-sponsored insurance, those qualifying for Medicaid (incomes less than 133 percent of the federal poverty level, or FPL) and those earning more than 400 percent of FPL. Subsidies can only be obtained by those purchasing coverage on their own on an Exchange.

The Commonwealth Fund has established useful criteria to assess affordability of health care vs. other costs of living. When put up against other basic necessities of life, such as food, housing, and one car to get to work, health care costs above 10 percent of family income become a hardship level, as are medical expenses above 5 percent of family income for lower-income adults below 200 percent of the federal poverty level and those with health plan deductibles above 5 percent of income. (8) (Schoen, C, Doty, M, Collins, SR, Holmgren, AL. Commonwealth Fund. Insured but not protected: How many adults are underinsured, the experiences of adults with inadequate coverage mirror those of their uninsured peers, especially among the chronically ill. Health Affairs Web Exclusive, June 14, 2005)

The Kaiser Family Foundation has developed a useful Health Reform Subsidy Calculator, by which people can readily determine their own health care costs. As an example, a family of four with an income of $60,000 in 2014 will have an insurance premium of $16,858 (for which it will be responsible for $4,937, since the government will provide a subsidy of $11,921). That family will also be responsible for up to $6,250 in out-of-pocket costs, which together would account for 18.6 percent of its household income. And those costs may well be higher due to restricted coverage of their own plan and changes in cost-sharing requirements. By comparison, seniors were paying an average of 15 percent of their annual income on premiums and out-of-pocket health care costs in 1965 when Medicare was enacted. (Blumenthal, D., et al. “Renewing the Promise: Medicare & its Reform.” New York, Oxford University Press, 1988.)

So far we have found little evidence that health care “reform” circa 2010 will contain health care costs or make health care more affordable. In our next post we will consider how much we can believe about claims of improved access to care.

Dr. John Geyman is professor emeritus of family medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, a past president of Physicians for a National Health Program and author of “Do Not Resuscitate: Why the Health Insurance Industry Is Dying, and How We Must Replace It.” This posting is partially based on materials in his forthcoming book, “Hijacked: The Road to Single Payer in the Aftermath of Stolen Health Care Reform,” soon to be released by Common Courage Press in both print and e-book format. http://www.commoncouragepress.com

We are being advised by many to “wait and see” how this complex new bill plays out over the next five to ten years, but we can already know what its outcomes will be. More than 30 years of health policy science, including documentation of the repeated failures of incremental changes built into the new law, together with well-entrenched trends in our market-based system, allow us to project its outcomes with confidence. For this legislation has been molded and crafted by the political power and money of corporate stakeholders in the medical-industrial complex.

Five previous posts in 2009 described the uneasy “alliance” of the five biggest players—the insurance industry, the drug industry, the hospital industry, business and organized medicine. They will do just fine with the new law at the expense of patients, families and Main Street.

Health care “reform” this time around was intended to address these four basic system problems: (1) containing health care costs, (2) making health care more affordable, (3) increasing access to care, and (4) improving the quality of care. This post introduces a series of five that will examine how well the PPACA will do on each of these four goals, followed by an overall assessment of the law. These posts will draw in part from my new book Hijacked: The Road to Single Payer in the Aftermath of Stolen Health Care Reform, soon to be released by Common Courage Press in both print and ebook format.

CONTINUED UNRESTRAINED DRIVERS OF HEALTH CARE COSTS
These are some of the many reasons that we can already conclude that health care costs will continue to run out of control at rates far exceeding the costs of living and median household incomes.

•  No price controls. Wall Street has already factored in rapid expansion of markets for drugs, medical devices and other services in a system of expanded access. There is also a long line forming of providers of information technology and administrative services that will exploit the complex implementation of this law.
•  No bulk purchasing. The PPACA has prohibited the government from negotiating the prices of prescription drugs and retains a ban on importation of drugs from Canada and other countries.
•  Lack of control over perverse incentives that drive increased volume of services. These in turn are driven by retention of fee-for-service (FFS) reimbursement that encourages physicians and other providers to offer more services than are medically appropriate or necessary.
•  No effective mechanism to rein in marginal or ineffective technologies. Coverage policies for new drugs and medical devices are still lax and not subject to rigorous evidence-based criteria for either efficacy or cost-effectiveness.
Although the PPACA does call for a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, its role is already neutered by not having the power to mandate or even endorse coverage or reimbursement rules for any particular treatment. (2) (Kaiser Health News staff. True or false: Seven concerns about the new health law, March 31, 2010)
•  The dominant business model of health care prevails, with many facilities and services remaining for-profit and investor-owned and with an ongoing trend for increasing consolidation within industries.
•  The PPACA has grandfathered-in specialty hospitals, typically physician-owned facilities that focus on well-reimbursed procedures in such areas as cardiology and orthopedics, whereby physicians can “triple dip”, earning high incomes as providers, owners and investors.
•  More preventive services will further fuel health care inflation. While the PPACA does provide new coverage for many preventive services, this will lead to increased costs due to additional diagnostic and treatment services engendered. (3) (Russell, L. Preventing chronic disease: An important investment, but don’t count on cost savings. Health Affairs 28 (1): 42-5, 2009)
•  Private insurers can’t contain health care costs, even where they have dominant market power. A 2009 report by the Congressional Research Service, The Market Structure of the Health Insurance Industry, concludes that “The exercise of market power by firms in concentrated markets generally leads to higher prices and reduced output—high premiums and limited access to health
insurance—combined with high profits.” (4) (Austin, DA, Hungerford, TL. The Market Structure of the Health Insurance Industry. Washington, D.C. Congressional Research Service, November 17, 2009)
• There are no controls over premium rate increases by insurers. Despite the outcry by government officials, annual premium rates are escalating at rates up to 56 percent (5) (Johnson, A. Fight over health-care premiums heats up. Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2010: A6), and there is no end in sight for continued exorbitant rate increases. Insurers will continue to game the system by extracting
maximal profits and offering reduced coverage with actuarial values (the amounts insurers actually pay in coverage) as low as 60 or 70 percent.
•  National health care spending will grow unabated despite the passage of PPACA. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) projects that overall national health expenditures (NHE) will increase from its present 17 percent of GDP to 21 percent in 2019, a total of $4.470 trillion. (6) (Foster, RS. Office of the Actuary. Estimated financial effects of the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” as Amended. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, April 22, 2010)

These well-documented trends leave no room to think that health care “reform” will have any chance to contain health care costs. Instead, health care inflation will be exacerbated by all the new incentives and inefficiencies in the new “system”. In our next post we will examine the impact of these trends on affordability of health care.

Dr. John Geyman is professor emeritus of family medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, a past president of Physicians for a National Health Program and author of “Do Not Resuscitate: Why the Health Insurance Industry Is Dying, and How We Must Replace It.” Buy John Geyman’s Books at: http://www.commoncouragepress.com