PNHP immediate past president Dr. Adam Gaffney testified before the U.S. Senate Budget Committee on May 12, 2022. The topic of the hearing was “Medicare for All: Protecting Health, Saving Lives, Saving Money,” and it was held on the same day that Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced the Medicare for All Act of 2022.
Dr. Gaffney’s opening remarks are excerpted below, and the full committee hearing can be viewed here.
By Bob Herman
STAT, May 12, 2022
The CEOs of America’s seven largest publicly traded health insurance and services companies cumulatively earned more than $283 million in 2021 — by far the most of any year in the past decade.
Soaring stock prices overwhelmingly fueled executives’ fortunes, according to a STAT analysis of annual proxy disclosures from UnitedHealth Group, CVS Health, Anthem, Cigna, Humana, Centene, and Molina Healthcare dating back to 2012.
Higher profits drove those companies’ stocks. The coronavirus pandemic has led to people delaying care, resulting in insurers retaining premiums that otherwise would have been paid out as medical claims. Years of large acquisitions also started paying off, as health insurance companies have morphed into conglomerates that also encompass lucrative drug benefits middlemen, physician groups, pharmacies, and a host of other services and providers.
Experts argue the pandemic should have spurred insurers to do more to keep the country’s health care prices in check. But instead, taxpayers, employers, and workers have continued to stomach higher health care premiums.
“If that group of seven individuals were delivering what they should be delivering to the American people, I would have no problem paying them $283 million,” said Ted Doolittle, Connecticut’s health care ombudsman and a former federal health care official. “What they should be delivering to Americans is no increases to their health care expenses. They should be focused on the prices they are paying to pharma and hospitals, in particular, but they’re not. So they’re being rewarded for the wrong thing.”
Roughly 87% of insurance executives’ pay last year came from exercised and vested stock, the analysis shows. Cigna CEO David Cordani took home more than $91 million in 2021, the most of any insurance executive. He’s registered $366 million since 2012. Cigna did not respond to requests for comment.
Longtime UnitedHealth executive Dave Wichmann technically earned the most last year, with $142 million, nearly all of which came from exercising his stock options. But STAT did not count Wichmann’s total toward the analysis because he abruptly left as UnitedHealth’s CEO in early 2021. UnitedHealth declined to comment and referred to its proxy document for all questions.
A CVS spokesperson said in a statement that “the vast majority of executive compensation is performance-based. In other words, our leaders benefit when shareholders and a broader set of employees benefit.” The other insurers did not respond to a request for comment.
The figures were calculated by using the actual realized gains of stock options and awards, instead of the estimated fair value of those options and awards that is more commonly reported. The large paydays line up with how stocks’ values increase over time, Alex Edmans, a finance professor at the London Business School, told STAT in an email. If executives stay at a company for a long time, as many within the health insurance industry have done, and if stock prices march upward, windfalls follow.
Every insurer except Cigna and Humana outperformed the Dow Jones and S&P 500 last year. CVS is the only company that has lagged behind the market since 2012.
The insurance CEO payouts are among the highest in health care, but executive pay is a relative drop in the bucket for a country that spent an estimated $4.3 trillion on health care in 2021.
“There’s a tendency to scold ‘greedy’ insurance companies,” said Cynthia Cox, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation who studies health insurance markets. “I don’t think that’s without merit, but the problem with how much we spend on health care goes well beyond how much insurance company CEOs are paid.”
The insurance industry, broadly, is built on relatively perverse incentives. Hospitals, doctors, drug companies, medical device firms, and other providers have consolidated and bulked up their bargaining muscle to charge higher prices to the 155 million people who get health insurance through a job, but insurers have been lousy negotiators, experts say.
Some market dynamics are out of insurers’ control, such as when hospitals control the market and must be included in networks. But insurers will make more money if prices and costs don’t slow down.
For example, federal law says health insurers can only retain 15-20% of premiums for profit and overhead. That sounds good in theory, but it could actually encourage insurers to let spending and premiums grow, because they’ll be able to keep a slice of a larger pie. Many employers also use insurers simply as third-party administrators, paying them flat fees, which could make insurers indifferent to the prices that providers charge employers.
All of this means it’s not in insurers’ interest to haggle for the best deals and puts them directly at odds with the employers that hire them.
“Employers in general are not well-served by the carriers,” said Sabrina Corlette, a health insurance researcher and professor at Georgetown University. “The incentive structure is messed up. At a certain point, when is the employer community going to start storming state capitals and Congress with pitchforks?”
There’s some hope federally mandated price transparency among hospitals and insurers will peel back more of the secrecy behind negotiations for those in commercial plans. Corlette said there is a growing “cottage industry of vendors” that are crunching the data and informing companies of the raw deals they are getting. For example, price transparency startup Turquoise Health just raised another $20 million to help with more health care contracting that’s based on transparent prices.
But transparent prices won’t solve imbalances in market power, nor will they solve whether some insurance companies roll over at the negotiating table when their pay packages encourage them to do so.
“There’s no ability on the insurance company side to get internationally normal prices, and they’re not being held to account for that failure,” Doolittle said.
Summary: A JAMA viewpoint published in December advocated Medicare Advantage for All, ignoring the sordid record of Medicare Advantage plans. Those plans extract tens of billions in profits, avoid and eject unprofitable patients, decrease funds available for medical care, have a worrisome quality record, and constrain patient choice of providers. Inserting private insurers into Medicare for All would fatally undermine such reform.
Letter to the Editor, JAMA, April 26, 2022, by Drs. Adam Gaffney, David Himmelstein, and Steffie Woolhandler
[A recent JAMA viewpoint by Zahner et al advocates] Medicare Advantage (MA) for all over single payer reform. Zahner acknowledges that Medicare Advantage plans raise Medicare’s costs but offers no estimate of the excess expense (and waste) entailed in subcontracting universal coverage to private insurers. The 2020 national health expenditure estimates, coincidentally released the day before this Viewpoint, offer insight into this waste.
In 2020, private insurers’ overhead totaled $301.4 billion, vs. $236.6 billion in 2019. Privately administered Medicare plans accounted for $63.4 billion of the total (up 41.2% from 2019); $55.5 billion (up 64.9%) went for overhead of privately administered Medicaid plans. Overhead consumed 15% of Medicare Advantage premiums in 2020, eight-fold higher than traditional-Medicare’s 1.9% overhead, implying that subcontracting to private plans raised Medicare’s overhead by $55 billion.
Medicare Advantage plans’ high overhead explains the paradox that they cost 4% more, yet pay-out less to doctors and hospitals than traditional Medicare. While profits per se account for some excess overhead, much reflects the bureaucracy erected to garner profits – e.g. network management, utilization review and referral restrictions – bureaucracy that cuts both high- and low-value services. Additional billions go for upcoding and other schemes that Medicare Advantage plans have used to outmaneuver CMS’ risk adjustment efforts for decades, belying Zahner’s prediction that tweaks to risk adjustment will eliminate overpayments.
Zahner asserts that Medicare Advantage plans offer better quality, citing an exploratory study encompassing mainly lower-cost services and patients, a profitable group that Medicare Advantage plans structure their benefits to attract. Yet MedPAC cautions that the lack of data precludes definitive quality comparisons. Moreover, the exodus from Medicare Advantage of patients needing high-cost services like dialysis, skilled-nursing or home care, offers “revealed-preference” evidence that Medicare Advantage poorly serves unprofitably-ill patients.
Patients want good coverage and unrestricted choice of doctors and hospitals, not – as Zahner suggests – choice of which insurance plan processes the bill. Traditional Medicare offers virtually unrestricted choice, but its coverage, which leaves many with large uncovered bills, needs improvement. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that an expanded and upgraded version of traditional Medicare could provide universal, first-dollar coverage, while achieving administrative savings that would reduce overall costs, even while expanding clinical spending and patients’ choices. In contrast, Medicare Advantage for all would perpetuate the upward spiral of healthcare spending, divert more medical resources to insurers and restrict choice.
Far from looking to Medicare Advantage as a model for reform, we should question whether it should play any role at all.
By David Himmelstein, M.D. and Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., M.P.H.
Private insurers now get the majority of their total premium revenues from Medicare Advantage (MA) and Medicaid managed care. And their overhead from those programs is enormous; in 2020, MA overhead averaged $2,256 per enrollee. Because that overhead is pushing the 15% limit mandated by the Affordable Care Act, MA insurers have been shifting profits to the provider groups and prescription management firms they own, whose profit/overhead is not capped; UnitedHealthcare, the biggest MA insurers, also controls more than 60,000 clinicians and paid $90 billion to its non-insurance subsidiaries in 2021. They are further boosting income and profits through diagnostic upcoding.
So expect to hear a rising chorus of calls (orchestrated by the private insurance industry) to expand Medicare Advantage and similar programs. CMS has is already implementing one such program, Direct Contracting Entities, although protests by patients and providers forced it to rebrand that program as “REACH”. REACH would auto-assign (without their knowledge or consent) most remaining traditional Medicare enrollees to managed care plans, many of them owned by the same firms that dominate MA. HJM has critiqued REACH, most recently here.
Health reform must eject the insurance middlemen who are draining resources from care.
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Summary: Friends around the world watch in disbelief as the US is mired in democratic crisis, hoping we re-normalize soon. The frailties of our political system are on display, challenging its core strengths. This battle is paralleled in the health system, with similar dynamics and perhaps linked futures.
By Jim Kahn, M.D., M.P.H.
A European colleague texted me, in response to the news about Roe v. Wade and the divisive implosion of our politics: “I so don’t get your country. Nor do I understand my constant curiosity about it. It’s like watching a video of a car crash – you can’t look away but you cringe throughout!”
I think I know why: the US embodies the best and worst of political systems. This fraught duality is echoed in our health system. Indeed, health reform has the potential to mitigate our political ills.
Here’s my theory:
The best: The US is a beacon of modern democracy – the first (late 18th century), and the global defender (most notably World War II, and most recently in Ukraine). The US has no other fundamental societal identity – it is comprised almost entirely of immigrants to a land of freedom and opportunity. Meantime global democratic forces are weakening (India, China, Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Brazil, Myanmar, Nicaragua, etc), so the US as the last large democracy takes on special meaning. Observers from around the globe root for the continued success of our inspiring democratic example.
Yet: The US is guilty of horrendous systematic oppression of people of color through centuries of enslavement, marginalization, and in recent decades mass incarceration. Women have been subjugated and objectified, by law and culture. Despite formal separation, religious values influence state rhetoric and laws. Beyond our borders, the US has an inexcusable history of abusing its vast global reach. Many of us are deeply embarrassed by these flaws; reversing them is an ongoing struggle.
US history is a cycling battle between two fundamental values: Liberty (free of government control, especially national) vs. Community (government protecting the vulnerable). Since “Community” typically entails spending for the middle and lower classes, “Liberty” is often motivated by protection of wealth. Post-Great Depression and -WWII, “Community” triumphed, with FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, known as the “post-war liberal consensus”. But in 1980 Reagan started decades of deconstruction of social programs and lowering of taxes. Now “Liberty” is ascendent, as in the 1920s and 1850s. Enabling this, our “democracy” is procedurally flawed via the over-representation of small states, such that a minority can wield control. Historic wealth inequality reinforces the “Liberty” trend.
The looming reversal of Roe v. Wade reflects this ascendancy. As previously discussed in HJM, the current conservative Supreme Court reflects how aggressively, undemocratically, and even fraudulently the controlling minority succeeded in creating a court to do its bidding. The vast majority of US adults support retaining a 50-year-old decision protecting the right for women to choose abortion. It doesn’t matter: the packed court represents the minority in power.
Likewise, the dysfunction of our health system – with extravagant costs and excess deaths – represents this ascendancy of a minority. It reflects how aggressively, undemocratically, and even fraudulently the controlling minority – corporate health insurers, providers, and drug manufacturers – succeeded in creating federal legislators and bureaucracy to do its bidding. The vast majority of US adults support having the federal government pay for health care (as long as new taxes are offset by savings in premiums and out-of-pocket costs). It doesn’t matter: the packed federal decision-makers represent the corporate shareholders.
See the parallel?
The US sticks out like a sore thumb on health care. All other wealthy nations and many developing ones implement the principles of solidarity and human rights in health. A universal right to health has been uncontroversial. American exceptionalism in this context is especially mystifying and embarrassing.
There are more similarities: Just like our democracy has core strengths and appalling weaknesses, so does our health system. We excel on research and specialty medical care, but fall far short on financing methods, access, and primary care. We don’t vacillate between competing financing models, instead we combine them in an unwieldy mix that shifts over time.
An appealing link is in the solution: Reforming health care would lay the groundwork for a much-needed political calming and normalization. Single payer is the perfect cross-political policy. The progressives get the “community” they want – caring & equity. The conservatives get the “liberty” they want – shed the morass of divergent public and private insurer requirements we currently endure in favor of a simpler and less burdensome payment system. Estimated daily savings in electronic health record time for doctors: 1-2 hours. Free choice of providers. Straight up competition for patients, based on quality of service. I recognize that selling single payer to conservatives is a heavy lift, because the dreaded government will pay. But dozens of countries demonstrate that for providers and patients, it is loved and taken for granted, even with conservative governments.
Will real health reform treat our democratic malaise? Sharing the joys of universal health care access, with a renewed focus on clinical care instead of financial issues, while controlling costs through stripping away of administrative hassles and corporate profits – that’s bound to lower our democratic hypertension.
It won’t be easy. It’s the change struggle to end our democratic struggle.
To my colleague, I say: “It does look like a car crash, but maybe we’ll regain control just in time.”
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Summary: Medicare’s funder is defending its plan to yield control of the traditional fully public side of Medicare to private investors. The evidence they present is flawed, and the story they tell is misleading. This is abetting a corporate Medicare money grab.
Expanding Accountable Care’s Reach among Medicare Beneficiaries, by Douglas Jacobs, Purva Rawal, Liz Fowler, and Meena Seshamani, New England Journal of Medicine, April 27, 2022
The CMS Medicare ACO [Accountable Care Organization] portfolio consists of the Center for Medicare’s Shared Savings Program and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation’s ACO models. The Shared Savings Program, now 10 years old, includes 483 ACOs serving more than 11 million Medicare beneficiaries and more than 525,000 participating clinicians. Such ACOs have been found to perform better on certain patient-experience and performance measures than physician groups participating in the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (see table). The Innovation Center has tested several ACO models, of which the Pioneer ACO and ACO Investment Models have achieved net savings; others, including the Advance Payment ACO Model and the Next Generation ACO Model, have not. …
The Innovation Center is currently testing the Global and Professional Direct Contracting Model, which has been redesigned as the ACO Realizing Equity, Access, and Community Health (ACO REACH) Model. This model will examine the effects of new risk-sharing arrangements in traditional Medicare, additional flexibility for beneficiaries (such as the ability to receive in-home care management), provisions for advancing health equity, and reduced administrative burdens for providers on quality of care and Medicare’s costs.
By Jim Kahn, M.D., M.P.H.
This is a defense by CMS (the Medicare funder) of the new ACO REACH program, the relabeled “Direct Contracting Entities”. Dr. Fowler runs CMMI, the part of CMS that oversees these programs. HJM has already critiqued REACH. And this new defense is unconvincing. Scrutinize the key assertions:
Assertion 1: ACO programs saved $6 billion for CMS over five years
Sounds like a lot of money, but it’s only 0.3% of relevant Medicare spending in that period.
And, it’s imaginary, for three reasons:
(a) It’s based on a strain-credulity extrapolation from data pre-2016 to after 2018. That is, it’s a structured guess.
(b) The estimated small savings pre-2016 come from ACOs that remained in the Pioneer program, yet the ACOs that dropped out – and thus were omitted from calculations – had near zero savings (see here, page 74). In medical research, that’s called biased attrition, and violates “intention to treat” analysis standards. It exaggerates the effect, even creates an effect where there isn’t one.
(c) To make matters worse, we have very good evidence that ACOs upcode diagnoses. This is another way to create apparent savings when there aren’t any.
Assertion 2: ACOs improved quality
The table lists some quality improvements. However, note the small (and mostly statistically non-significant) differences between ACOs and the comparison group. More importantly, note that only 10 measures are listed out of at least 40 — cherry-picking the favorable findings.
Assertion 3: REACH builds on this ACO success
Even if ACOs did work (unlikely, see above!), to equate DCEs and ACOs is ridiculous.
ACOs were predominantly medical provider organizations. In contrast DCEs are predominantly investors – private equity. They are flocking to this business opportunity because they see big dollar signs. They can upcode diagnoses to raise payments from Medicare, reduce care, and keep all of the net savings up to 25% (and more after that).
REACH, though packaged more cleverly than DCEs, is also designed for and dominated by investors. REACH highlights equity, but the fundamental profit-taking structure is intact.
CMS is slanting the playing field toward corporate investors, enabling private companies to steal hundreds of billions from Medicare right in front of our eyes.
When will we say, “Medicare is for patients, not profits?” When will we say, “Medical care is for patients, not profits?” When will we say, “Time for single payer?”
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Media contacts:
Clare Fauke, communications specialist at Physicians for a National Health Program, clare@pnhp.org
Mike Andrew, Executive Director at Puget Sound Advocates for Retirement Action (PSARA), organizer@psara.org
Seattle Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, Teresa.Mosqueda@seattle.gov
May 5, 2022: Opposition to the privatization of Medicare through the controversial Direct Contracting program (recently renamed “ACO REACH”) is growing across the nation, as evidenced by two recent resolutions passed by the Arizona Medical Association and the Seattle City Council. Both resolutions call on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and President Biden to immediately end Direct Contracting and “REACH,” and protect Medicare from profiteering.
Arizona Medical Association
The 4,000-member Arizona Medical Association (ArMA) passed the anti-privatization resolution at its annual meeting on April 23. Among concerns cited by the resolution is that “Direct Contracting Entities (DCEs) are allowed to keep as profit and overhead what they don’t pay for in health services, therefore giving them a dangerous financial incentive to restrict seniors’ care.” According to HHS, there are 25 DCEs currently operating in Arizona.
The resolution was introduced by Dr. Michael Hamant and Dr. Eve Shapiro. Dr. Shapiro, a Tuscon-based pediatrician and board member of Physicians for a National Health Program, noted that since most physicians are now employed by large groups or health systems, they may find themselves practicing in DCEs without their knowledge or consent. “Medicare is a lifeline for seniors and those with disabilities, not a cash cow for Wall Street,” said Dr. Shapiro. “Physicians must take a stand against profiteering in Medicare.”
Seattle City Council
In Seattle, the city council unanimously passed a similar anti-DC/REACH resolution on April 26, led by Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda. According to the resolution, “The Trump administration opened the door to the complete privatization of Medicare through a Direct Contracting pilot program allowing private equity firms, insurance companies, and corporate health businesses to directly contract to provide Medicare services.” The resolution then calls for the termination of Direct Contracting and REACH, and “favors closing the door on third party entities in the Medicare system.” There are 12 DCEs currently operating in the state of Washington.
The effort to pass a Seattle resolution was led by the Puget Sound Advocates for Retirement Action (PSARA). “The DC/ACO REACH pilot programs provide Wall Street firms and large insurers the opportunity to profit off of the health care needs of seniors and the disabled in Traditional Medicare,” said PSARA co-presidents Jeff Johnson and Karen Richter. “Skimming profits from Traditional Medicare will result in a diminution of the quality and quantity of services, an extreme draw down in the Medicare Trust Fund, and further cuts in Medicare benefits or increases in Medicare taxes, premiums, and costs for workers and seniors.”
Campaign against Direct Contracting and REACH
Direct Contracting is a pilot program launched during the Trump Administration to change the way that Traditional (fee-for-service) Medicare pays for care. Instead of paying providers directly, DC pays profit-seeking middlemen called Direct Contracting Entities (DCEs) a monthly fee to “coordinate” seniors’ care, allowing the DCEs to keep up to 40% of their Medicare payments as profit and overhead. Seniors are enrolled into DCEs without their understanding or consent, and must change primary care physicians in order to opt out. Today, 99 DCEs have enrolled approximately 1.8 million Medicare beneficiaries.
After more than 250 organizations and Congressional leaders called on HHS to end the Direct Contracting program, HHS announced that in 2023 it would replace DC with “ACO REACH.” The rebranded program would be nearly identical to DC, and allow all of the 99 DCEs — many owned by commercial insurers and private-equity firms — to participate.
In response, a coalition of seniors, community groups and physicians plan to expand the campaign against DC/REACH over the summer. The campaign will hold a national launch event on Monday, May 23. The event is free and open to the public; registration is HERE.
Developed by the Campaign for NY Health and the Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus, May 4, 2022
This report compiles national and New York State level data to illustrate that health care access is a critical racial equity issue and how systemic solutions like a universal, single-payer health plan will significantly improve health care access and health outcomes for all.
Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) were disproportionately harmed by COVID-19 due to an unequal ability to access quality, affordable health care and long before the start of the pandemic, were more likely than white people to be uninsured and to struggle with medical costs.
Black Americans are 10% less likely to hold employer-sponsored health coverage than their white counterparts. Having high-quality health insurance is directly related to whether patients seek care.
Many BIPOC work and live in environments that impose higher risks of exposure to COVID-19. Only 17% of Latinx workers and 20% of Black American workers have jobs that permit working remotely, while 30% of white workers can do so.
The U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate in the industrialized world. Black women are three times more likely – and in New York City, 12 times more likely – to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women. 63% of these deaths are preventable. Uninsurance and under-insurance are major drivers of the U.S. maternal and child mortality rate.
Public health insurance programs play a major role in providing affordable care and better outcomes, especially for Black Americans.
Insurance coverage increases access to care, but being enrolled in an insurance plan does not guarantee timely care or affordability. Nearly half (46%) of insured adults report difficulty affording their out-of-pocket costs and one in four (27%) report difficulty affording their deductible. About 6 in 10 Black and Hispanic adults (58% each) report delaying or skipping at least one type of medical care in the past year due to cost, compared to half (49%) of white adults. Differences in reimbursement rates between private insurance and public insurance create a disincentive for providers to see lower income patients.
Having health insurance lowers the likelihood of medical debt and the amount owed, but even households with health insurance are at risk of incurring medical debt. 17.4% of households with insurance have medical debt compared to 27.9% of households without insurance. Among those with debt, households with health insurance have an average of $18,827.25, while households without health insurance have an average of $31,947.87.
Black households are more likely to hold medical debt. 27% of Black households hold medical debt compared to 16.8% of non-Black households. Medical debt can appear on a person’s credit reports and lower their credit scores, reducing access to credit and making it harder to find a home or a job.
Communities with majority Black and Latinx residents experience provider shortages more than other communities all over the country. Unequal reimbursement rates lead to disparities in access to hospitals and providers.
Polling consistently shows that voters across race and party lines support systemic change to address shortcomings in the health care system. New York voters overwhelmingly see government as the key stakeholder that should act to address health system problems and support measures to make health care affordable and accessible.
A universal system of publicly-funded, guaranteed health care, often referred to as “single-payer health care,” is the most equitable and affordable way to achieve comprehensive coverage for all. Universal single-payer health care will end the burden of medical debt that disproportionately harms BIPOC communities by eliminating cost-sharing – the out-of-pocket costs such as copays that act as financial barriers to care. Bringing all residents into a single public plan would eliminate the inequity in access that results from a fragmented system. Campaign for New York Health recommends universal single-payer health care as a policy intervention to create a health system that promotes racial equity and quality care for all.
Summary: We hear lots, including from former President Obama, about the serious problem of disinformation stoked by social media algorithms, polarizing our society. What we hear less about is disinformation regarding private health insurance that comes from both Dems and the GOP and that compromises our ability to get care. We must address both.
‘Regulation has to be part of the answer’ to combating online disinformation, Barack Obama said at Stanford event, Stanford News, April 21, 2022, by Melissa De Witte, et al.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama delivered a keynote address about how information is created and consumed, and the threat that disinformation poses to democracy.
Obama told a packed audience of more than 600 people in CEMEX auditorium – as well as more than 250,000 viewers tuning in online – that everyone is part of the solution to make democracy stronger in the digital age and that all of us – from technology companies and their employees to students and ordinary citizens – must work together to adapt old institutions and values to a new era of information. “If we do nothing, I’m convinced the trends that we’re seeing will get worse,” he said.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the American public tuned in to one of three major networks… “When it came to the news, at least, citizens across the political spectrum tended to operate using a shared set of facts – what they saw or what they heard from Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley.”
Fast forward to today, where everyone has access to individualized news feeds that are fed by algorithms that reward the loudest and angriest voices (and which technology companies profit from). “You have the sheer proliferation of content, and the splintering of information and audiences,” Obama observed.
Facts are competing with opinions, conspiracy theories, and fiction.
“Solving the disinformation problem won’t cure all that ails our democracies or tears at the fabric of our world, but it can help tamp down divisions and let us rebuild the trust and solidarity needed to make our democracy stronger,” Obama said.
The responsibility also lies with ordinary citizens, the former president said. “We have to take it upon ourselves to become better consumers of news – looking at sources, thinking before we share, and teaching our kids to become critical thinkers who know how to evaluate sources and separate opinion from fact.”
Republicans Have Stopped Trying to Kill Obamacare. Here’s What They’re Planning Instead, Politico, April 26, 2022, by John E. McDonough
So it doesn’t take a lot of effort to observe an active health policy ecosystem on the right that is busy recycling and developing ideas that would influence the direction of health policy in a future Republican-dominated federal government. Most of their attention focuses on the employer and individual commercial health insurance markets and the federal-state “marketplaces/exchanges” — the ACA-created entities where individuals and small employers can buy health insurance, ironically a model adapted by Democrats from a Heritage Foundation idea pioneered in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The result would be a system with more options and fewer guarantees. Giving employees less money to cover slimmed-down health insurance will lead many workers to forego coverage entirely. Are conservative politicians prepared to look the other way when they develop serious diseases and have no way to pay for care?
The two behemoths of federal health policy, Medicare for senior citizens and many disabled, and Medicaid for low-income households of every variety, are far less the reform target of Republicans and conservatives than they used to be. An essential reason for this is that both programs, with little controversy, have become increasingly privatized.
Indeed, a small and growing chorus of voices now suggest that Medicare Advantage could be the foundation for a unitary and reformed national health system, not Sanders’ “Medicare for All” which would eliminate Part C, but “Medicare Advantage for All” that would eliminate Medicare A and B, and make Part C universal.
In sum, conservative and Republican health policy voices, in spite of a full retreat on ACA repeal, are active and ambitious to reengage if and when Republicans retake the Senate and/or the House. This is especially true regarding private commercial health insurance, inside or outside of the ACA’s health marketplace/exchanges. They are ready to confront any and all threats to the growing hegemony of Medicare Advantage and to find new opportunities to expand it. They stand on the sidelines regarding fast-growing interest in health care equity and social determinants of health. They are down for the current moment and will be back with ideas and plans when the political climate changes. If prior history matters, so will their emerging ideas.
By Don McCanne, M.D.
Much of the noise around disinformation today stems from the misuse of online social media technology such as Twitter and Facebook. The massive threat that this disinformation poses led Barack Obama to speak on the issue in a conference at Stanford University. Although the hype has been about the technology, we should also be concerned about the transmission and misapplication of disinformation regardless of dissemination paths.
Look at our health care system. Is it suffering from disinformation propagated by social media, or is its failure due to disinformation spawned by political ideology and transmitted via all sorts of communication channels?
Obamacare is a system established by the Democrats built on a foundation of a Republican concept of federal-state marketplaces/exchanges. The public Medicare program established by Democrats is now well on its way to becoming private Medicare Advantage plans, and Medicaid is also largely taken over by private insurers. These are Republican concepts being implemented by Democrats. It is difficult to see how disinformation has not played a major role – not the disinformation that Obama addresses in this speech, but his administration’s disinformation about health policy. It brought us today’s flawed health care financing.
Obama is right when he says that all of us must work together to adapt old institutions and values to a new era of information. That means out with the old disinformation, and in with valid health policy science. An essential feature of valid health policy science is truth. Out with fiction; in with facts. Those of us at HJM and Physicians for a National Health Program stand ready to help you sort out and discard the rampant disinformation that has permeated our health care system so that we can implement a system of health care justice for all.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 2, 2022
(Boston)—What policy is the best approach for developing health systems in low- and middle-income countries?
Researchers at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and the University of New Mexico report that Universal Health Coverage (UHC) has come to dominate discussions around how best to reform low- and middle-income countries’ (LMIC) health systems.
The researchers believe these findings are important because UHC reforms don’t necessarily entail equal and equitable access to services for the entire population regardless of ability to pay, as is the case in other possible health system reforms such as National Health Services that provide care without insurance companies involved or copayments that block access.
The study examined the history of UHC and found its popularity stemmed from the concerted efforts of multiple institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Health Organization.
“The roots of UHC can be traced to policies enacted by international financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund during the latter half of the twentieth century that caused the debt of low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) to rise precipitously and public sector services to become underfunded,” explains corresponding author Daniel Smithers, a fourth-year medical student at BUSM.
According to Smithers, these same institutions and others such as the World Health Organization (WHO) then advocated for UHC as a method for reforming the health systems of LMICs. Generally, UHC implies a financial reform in which health insurance is expanded in varying degrees to segments of a population and can entail the involvement of private for-profit corporations in the provision of health insurance.
Using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, the researchers found that UHC was mentioned in the health policy literature far more frequently than other health policy options that entail public funding and delivery of health services. When UHC was mentioned in a publication, more than 40 percent of the time the definition used by the authors was sufficiently vague that the definition could be open to misinterpretation or misunderstanding by less informed readers.
The study looked at not only whether UHC was defined in a paper, but also how it was defined. Greater than 40 percent of definitions mentioned finances with respect to UHC, and definitions focused almost entirely on individual-level financial issues. However, these discussions did not suggest that individuals should face no out-of-pocket costs, such as copayments, nor did they touch on other financial aspects of health system reforms such as global budgeting or socialization of health insurance. Over a quarter of definitions also discussed tiering of benefits which could entail differing benefits for the poor and non-poor.
“When a policy such as UHC predominates in the literature to this extent, it’s very important to examine its history critically, how it’s defined, and who’s involved in pursuing it. Policy isn’t crafted in a political, economic or social vacuum,” added Smithers, who in June will start his internal medicine residency in Boston at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School.
“There are many other organizations advocating for equitable health system reforms in LMICs beyond the dominant transnational organizations such as the World Bank and WHO,” said senior author Howard Waitzkin, PhD, MD, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico. “The People’s Health Movement, the Latin American Social Medicine Association (ALAMES), and Physicians for a National Health Program in the United States are organizations that advocate for alternative health system reforms such as Health Care for All, a single national health program in which access and services don’t differ for any groups in a population. It’s imperative that arguments for UHC not detract attention from these more fundamental and equitable ways to assure universal access to care.”
These findings appear online in the journal Social Science & Medicine.
Smithers DJ, Waitzkin H. Universal health coverage as hegemonic health policy in low- and middle-income countries: A mixed-methods analysis. Social Science & Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.114961
Universal health coverage (UHC) has become an influential global health policy. This study asked whether and to what extent UHC became a “hegemonic” health policy. The article consists of three parts: a historical timeline of UHC’s rise, a bibliometric analysis of UHC in the literature, and a qualitative thematic analysis of how UHC is defined and the thematic content of those definitions. The roots of UHC can be traced to policies enacted by international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) during the latter half of the twentieth century. These policies caused the debt of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to rise precipitously and led the same IFIs and other institutions like the World Health Organization to become involved in the development and restructuring of health systems. UHC was presented as the leading method for financing development of health systems. As the bibliometric analysis shows, UHC has come to predominate in the literature around health system reforms. The thematic analysis based on a random selection of papers obtained in the bibliometric component of the study shows that often the term is not defined or only poorly defined. There is wide variation in the definitions, with many papers mentioning concepts such as quality, access, and equity without further clarification. Usually, papers define UHC to include tiering of benefits, with discussions of financing that focus on preventing “catastrophic [individual] expenditures” rather than discussing universal budgeting of a national health care system or national health insurance. We conclude that UHC has become hegemonic within global health policy, to the exclusion of discussions about other approaches to the transformation of health systems that are not predominately based on insurance coverage such as Health Care for All system, a system which provides equal services for the entire population.
May 1, 2022
President Biden’s recently proposed “Cancer Moonshot” has gynecologic oncologist and PNHP national board member Dr. Diljeet Singh thinking even bigger.
By passing improved Medicare for All, focusing on preventions and treatments that we know work, and directing research dollars based on medical need, Dr. Singh estimates that we could achieve the moonshot’s 25-year goal of reducing cancer death rates by 50 percent in only 10 years…and go much further in the long-term.
Additional episodes will be uploaded twice monthly. Subscribe in iTunes, or access a complete archive of the podcast, below.
By Reena Agarwal, M.D., M.P.H.
The River (Hudson Valley, N.Y.), April 28, 2022
For two decades as a primary care doctor at health centers in underserved communities around Westchester and New York City, I’ve encountered too many patients facing tragically unfair barriers to good health. Every day I am frustrated, infuriated, and saddened by an immoral system I can’t fix and can’t escape—until we pass legislation that will prioritize health over profits.
One of my patients has asthma, which would be easy to control if she could afford a simple steroid inhaler, but the cheapest such device is $270 per month—way beyond her means as a single-mother who supports two children as a housecleaner. There are no generic versions available here for the 25 million Americans with asthma. Congressional researchers found that US inhalers can cost 10 to 40 times the average price across 11 peer countries, for exactly the same drug manufactured by the same companies. My patient cannot afford an inhaler that costs more than her weekly rent. Instead, we make do with subpar medications that don’t fully control her asthma. So she ends up going to the ER, an extremely expensive resource for taxpayers, which discharges her with meds that control short-term symptoms. But after those pills run out, she comes back to me—still unable to afford what she so badly needs to maintain her health.
Recently, I saw a patient with diabetes. I was the first doctor he had seen in years. A day laborer who cannot afford health insurance, he paid for his visit out of pocket. Unable to afford doctor visits and medications, he’d been treating his diabetes with herbal remedies, as too many of the 30 million Americans (almost 10 percent of our population) with diabetes do. In-office blood tests showed out-of-control glucose levels. My staff and I spent the day calling neighborhood pharmacies, checking prices of insulin and diabetes supplies for him.
This is an absolute waste of his and our time. The cost of insulin has skyrocketed in the past 20 years as corporations have paid competitors not to produce generics. Given the cost to society and taxpayers for uncontrolled diabetes and the ability of modern medicine to help sufferers keep it fully controlled, he should have been able to obtain his medicines at any pharmacy and had the cost fully covered. Failure to do so—the result of how our current system works—makes my patients and their families suffer, and our society less healthy, less productive, and less community-oriented.
And even for those who have insurance, a recent statewide survey of New Yorkers concluded that about half skip taking medications or seeing doctors because of cost.
Thinking about all these inadequately treated patients makes me so angry. Why do we as doctors have to jump through so many hoops to get patients what they need? Most medical offices and hospitals have many more staff dedicated to calling insurance companies about red tape than they have doctors.
This is why I am urging our legislators in Albany to pass the New York Health Act. It will guarantee equitable access to high-quality health care for every New York resident. It would include primary, preventive and specialty care, hospitalizations, mental health, dental, vision, and more. Every New Yorker would pay an affordable amount based on annual income. This legislation, which has majority support in both houses, would finally allow my patients to access needed care with no out-of-pocket barriers. It will also allow the state to negotiate volume discounts on drugs, like the Veterans Administration, which achieves price discounts of 50 percent or more.
As a physician who treats patients in desperate need of care every day, it’s heartbreaking to care for people who struggle to afford ordinary health care. It’s frustrating to spend hours seeking the lowest prices on common medications, without which my patients could die.
The New York Health Act can save taxpayers, patients, and doctors time, money, and suffering—while providing more and better health care, healthier and more productive lives. I will be joining physicians, nurses, students, midwives and more in Albany on May 3, imploring lawmakers to pass this life-saving legislation before the end of this session. We can’t afford to wait any longer.
Dr. Reena Agarwal is a primary care physician and board member of Physicians for a National Health Program, New York Metro chapter.
By Ryan Cooper
The American Prospect, April 29, 2022
If you’ve ever watched cable news, where the average viewer is in their late sixties, you’ve probably seen an advertisement for a Medicare Advantage plan. They usually star some washed-up celebrity whose career peaked right around when today’s retirees were young adults (think Jimmy Walker or Joe Namath). And they always make a lot of big promises about how great Medicare Advantage coverage is.
There’s just one problem: The sales pitch is an abject lie. Medicare Advantage is much worse than traditional Medicare for people on the program and costs a great deal more to boot. But unless the Biden administration changes course, private companies will soon devour the rest of the program.
Medicare Advantage plans are typically a combination of “Medigap” plans, which cover services not included in the government plan like vision and dental, plus a privatized version of traditional Medicare. About 28 million American seniors are now on Advantage plans, or about 40 percent of the whole program. As Barbara Caress explains in the Prospect, it was set up back in the late 1990s as a way for those wonderful private insurance companies we all know and love to work their free-market magic on one corner of the system America carved out as publicly run. Once we got business involved, surely the quality of coverage would improve and costs would go down, right?
The problem with this logic, as people realized even back in the glory days of neoliberalism, is that there are a lot of perverse financial incentives in health insurance, particularly when it comes to seniors. Half the reason the government set up Medicare in the first place was that as people reach the end of life, they tend to become sick and require more treatment than they can personally afford. In the pre-Medicare days, private companies did all they could to keep them off the insurance rolls.
Introducing the profit motive into Medicare has led to considerable hoop-jumping just to prevent such cravenness. For instance, if the government were to calculate the average per-person cost of Medicare and pay private companies that much per enrollee, companies would scramble to snap up all the younger, healthier seniors with relatively few problems, and cream off some easy profits. As Matt Bruenig explains, that’s why the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services maintains a gigantic database of every single one of the roughly 64 million Medicare enrollees, and assigns them all a risk score based on their demographic and health characteristics. Advantage companies then get paid, in theory at least, according to how sick their risk pools are.
That is just one of scores of rules and regulations the government puts out to try to make these private companies behave. It’s a hugely expensive and difficult undertaking, and it turns out that it basically doesn’t work. The results have been exactly the opposite of free-market nostrums: worse coverage that costs more.
One rip-off strategy insurers use is improperly denying claims. A recent investigation from the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general found that companies improperly denied 13 percent of prior authorization requests, and refused to pay 18 percent of legitimate claims—or about 85,000 requests and 1.5 million payments, just in 2019. Paying lots of claims adjusters to fake up reasons to deny necessary treatment is a big reason why Advantage companies spend nearly 14 percent of their money on administration, as compared to traditional Medicare’s 2 percent.
Another strategy is rigging the risk pool. Advantage companies are notorious for pushing doctors to “upcode” as many diagnoses onto their patients as possible, thus increasing their risk score and payment, without having to pay for more treatment. That tactic alone cost the government $9 billion in 2019.
All this (plus a bunch of other complicated scams) means that Advantage enrollees receive something like 10 to 25 percent less in health care spending, but the program costs the government about 3 percent more per person than traditional Medicare. This absurd situation is actually getting worse. One recent study found that Advantage plans cost the government $106 billion in overspending from 2010 to 2019, and nearly a third of that came in just the last two years. The price tag is predicted to balloon to $600 billion over the next nine years.
One would think that the Biden administration would be looking to reverse course, but it isn’t. On the contrary, as Caress notes, it has so far proceeded with a Trump-era plan to privatize the remaining shreds of Medicare by letting private companies serve as payment middlemen through something the Trump team called “direct contracting.”
After an outcry from progressives, the administration altered the privatization plan, mainly changing the name (it’s now called ACO REACH), with the supposed goal of achieving “equitable outcomes.” But as Diane Archer explains at Social Security Works, at bottom it’s still the same idea, with a lot of obvious loopholes for quick profits by denying care, pushing more people into Advantage plans, gaming risk scores, and so on. Unless Biden changes his mind, America is going to let a bunch more foxes into the Medicare henhouse, including private equity firms, and half-heartedly try to limit the damage to the taxpayer with a bunch of ultra-complicated regulations of the type that are failing right before our eyes.
Medicare was a decent initial sketch of a health care system when it was set up back in the 1960s, but it had many bad design elements and left much out. Instead of fixing the problems directly, policymakers have attempted to either coax private companies to do it for them over and over, or simply give out corrupt handouts to their business cronies. The result has been worse coverage and skyrocketing spending that inflated up a huge industry of ruthless corporate parasites. Now those same companies have dragon hoards of government cash to spend on advertising to trick trusting retirees and lobby Congress.
In a sense, the free-marketeers of the 1990s were right to be skeptical of the government’s regulatory capacity. As we have seen, it has been consistently defeated by health care interests in its attempts to prevent profiteering. But that is all the more reason not to burden it with the most complicated health care regulations in the world. Big and simple is what the American state does best. An upgraded, streamlined Medicare that kicked out all the private companies, covered every type of medicine, and enrolled all Americans from birth would fit the bill nicely.