Mirror, Mirror 2021: Reflecting Poorly; Health Care in the U.S. Compared to Other High-Income Countries, The Commonwealth Fund, August 4, 2021, by Eric C. Schneider et al.

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Issue: No two countries are alike when it comes to organizing and delivering health care for their people, creating an opportunity to learn about alternative approaches.

Goal: To compare the performance of health care systems of 11 high-income countries.

Methods: Analysis of 71 performance measures across five domains — access to care, care process, administrative efficiency, equity, and health care outcomes — drawn from Commonwealth Fund international surveys conducted in each country and administrative data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Health Organization.

Key Findings: The top-performing countries overall are Norway, the Netherlands, and Australia. The United States ranks last overall, despite spending far more of its gross domestic product on health care. The U.S. ranks last on access to care, administrative efficiency, equity, and health care outcomes, but second on measures of care process.

Conclusion: Four features distinguish top performing countries from the United States: 1) they provide for universal coverage and remove cost barriers; 2) they invest in primary care systems to ensure that high-value services are equitably available in all communities to all people; 3) they reduce administrative burdens that divert time, efforts, and spending from health improvement efforts; and 4) they invest in social services, especially for children and working-age adults.

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Comment:

By Isabel Ostrer, M.D.

The Commonwealth Fund compared health systems in 11 high-income countries to identify what policies and practices are associated with better performance. The countries were Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The overall health care system ranking is striking: the U.S. ranks last in every domain except care process. (This includes preventive care, e.g., rates of mammography and influenza vaccination.)

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In access to care, which includes affordability and timeliness, we’re last because individuals here are most likely to experience insurance denials, high out of pocket costs, difficulty paying medical bills, and delays in seeing a provider.

To add insult to injury, health care spending in the U.S is uniquely high. In 2019, the U.S. spent 16.8% of its GDP on health care. The next highest spender, Germany, clocked in at 11.7% .

What do we get for all this spending? The U.S. is dead last in health care outcomes. We have the highest infant mortality rate, the highest rate of maternal mortality, and the highest rate of preventable mortality.

So what can we learn from our peer countries? For starters, they all have universal health coverage and no cost barriers. The U.S. has 30 million uninsured … and 40 million underinsured.

The evidence speaks loudly. Sinking more money into a multi-payer health care system serves only to inflate U.S. health care costs without improving access or outcomes. A truly patient-centered system is one that provides universal coverage and shields patients from unnecessary cost-sharing.

http://healthjusticemonitor.org…

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Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy, The White House, July 9, 2021

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Stop Playing Health Care Antitrust Whack-A-Mole, Bill of Health, May 17, 2021, by Jaime S. King

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The Sleeper Health Cost Policy, KFF, July 22, 2021, by Drew Altman

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Comment:

By Allison K. Hoffman, J.D. and Hannah Leibson

In early July, the Biden Administration issued this high-level executive order focused on promoting competition in the American economy. The order urged the FTC and DOJ to significantly ramp up antitrust enforcement to prohibit future mergers and divest existing anti-competitive arrangements.

The order states in part, “whereas decades of industry consolidation have often led to excessive market concentration, this order reaffirms that the United States retains the authority to challenge transactions” in violation of the antitrust laws.

The problem is that it’s likely too little too late for health care.  For the past few decades, health care consolidation has been on the rise.

Jaime S. King points out that the rate of consolidation has increased so dramatically that up to 95 percent of metropolitan areas have highly concentrated hospital markets. Private equity investment has driven much of this trend.

As Drew Altman explains, consolidation is negatively impacting quality of care and significantly driving up health care costs for consumers—as much as 50 percent in some hospital systems. When one or two large hospital systems are running the show in a city or region, insurers don’t have any leverage to negotiate lower prices. Consumers have no choice but to pay the higher prices or travel far distances to seek care.

Things like choices of insurance plans or transparency, both mentioned in the Biden Executive Order, will not solve these structural problems on their own. In the months ahead, the impact of COVID-19 will likely accelerate consolidation in many economically disadvantaged regions where hospitals are already deep in the red.

Amped up antitrust enforcement will only go so far in health care, especially considering thin government resources. It could prevent further consolidation. More aggressively, the administration could review merged entities and unravel those that have proven anticompetitive.

All of these measures could be beneficial, but ultimately, comprehensive price regulation is the only way to control the rising health care costs associated with provider consolidation. As Altman highlights, drugs comprise just 10% of health care spending while hospitals represent a whopping 34%. More and more, physician groups are also merging or are affiliating with hospitals and will benefit from their hefty negotiating power to command higher prices.

One option is a federal all-payer system to set price caps or limits on total hospital spending. It could eliminate the large gap between Medicare rates and those commercial insurers are forced to accept in highly consolidated hospital markets. Medicare for All is another means to set rates federally, in one fell swoop, and it would also eliminate the administrative costs associated with having many different payors.

Another option is rate setting at the state level, but this approach would be more difficult to enact and less coordinated. The state of Maryland already has such a model in place, and has seen positive outcomes since it was launched by CMS as a pilot program in 2014. From 2014 to 2019, Medicare spending in Maryland fell 2.8 percent and the state has seen a 4.1 percent decrease in total health care costs. Alongside these cost savings, quality benchmarks across several dimensions have surpassed expectations. This model could inform policy design at the federal level, just as Massachusetts’s reform informed the design of the Affordable Care Act.

Antitrust enforcement is but one piece of the puzzle of controlling health care price inflation, and, unless the FTC and DOJ aggressively unwind the consolidation of the past decades, it is only a very small piece.

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Newsletter Opinion, The New York Times, August 3, 2021, by Paul Krugman

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When you’re a wonk trying to be a pundit — or for that matter any kind of technocrat who wants to have real-world influence — it’s usually not helpful to push for policies that you believe would be right in principle but have no political chance of becoming reality.

The prime example for me has been health insurance. If our goal is to make sure that everyone has adequate, affordable health care, why not just pay for everyone’s care? On policy grounds, I’ve never disagreed with the proposition that we should have Medicare for all; there’s even a pretty good case for direct provision of medical care along the lines of Britain’s National Health Service. Why bother with a Rube Goldberg device like Obamacare, which uses regulations and subsidies to nudge private insurers into covering most people?

But the politics are impossible, and not just because of special interests: You’d have to persuade the 170 million Americans with private insurance to accept something completely different. Even though most of them would probably be better off, that’s too heavy a lift. So incremental reform, possibly evolving over time into single-payer, is how it’s going to have to be.

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Virchow at 200 and Lown at 100 — Physicians as Activists, New England Journal of Medicine, July 22, 2021, by Salvatore Mangione, M.D., and Mark L. Tykocinski, M.D.

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Current Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wrote in 2019 about the need for physicians to be guardians of integrity: “People will accuse us of being political, but if people accuse you of being political because you’re standing up for people who can’t stand up for themselves, then you should do it anyway, because that is at the heart of our profession.”

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Anyone who has studied the subject realizes that a well-designed single payer system would provide equitable, high quality health care for everyone at a price that each of us could afford, paid for with progressive taxes. In principle, the concept is the moral imperative, but it does not mesh with the politics.

So what do we do? Like Paul Krugman, who represents the intellectuals who do understand, do we say that it is too heavy a lift? And then do we move on to insufficient and unsatisfactory tinkering? No, that is not right. The only right course is the one that accomplishes our goal of health care justice for all.

If the policy is right and the politics are wrong, you change the politics, not the policy. That would move us into the realm of politics, but, as Vivek Murthy said, since we’ll be standing up for people who can’t stand up for themselves, we should do it anyway. It’s simply the right thing to do.

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Medicare and Dental Coverage, KFF, July 28, 2021, by Meredith Freed, et al.

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Key Findings:

• Nearly half of Medicare beneficiaries (47%), or 24 million people, do not have dental coverage, as of 2019.
•  Almost half of all Medicare beneficiaries did not have a dental visit within the past year (47%), with higher rates among those who are Black (68%) or Hispanic (61%), have low incomes (73%), or who are in fair or poor health (63%), as of 2018.
• Average out-of-pocket spending on dental services among Medicare beneficiaries who had any dental service was $874 in 2018. One in five Medicare beneficiaries (20%) who used dental services spent more than $1,000 out-of-pocket on dental care.

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Comment:

By Isabel Ostrer, M.D.

The Medicare website explicitly reads, “Medicare doesn’t cover most dental care, dental procedures, or supplies, like cleanings, fillings, tooth extractions, dentures, dental plates, or other dental devices,” so it’s no wonder that a recent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) found that 24 million Medicare beneficiaries lacked dental coverage in 2019. These disparities in access to dental care are even greater for non-white and low-income Medicare beneficiaries.

As Dr. Sanjeev Sriram said during a rally on July 30th marking the 56th anniversary of the Medicare program, “Your eyes, your ears, and your teeth are connected to your body… These things are not luxury items. Your teeth are not luxury items.” Why, then, in the richest country in the world, do we separate dental care from health care?

The simple answer boils down to an historical anomaly: dentistry has its roots in the barber profession – until the 1800s barbers routinely pulled painful teeth after they finished trimming a patron’s hair – and was consequently shunned by the medical profession. When the first medical schools were created dentistry was not recognized. Subsequently, when Medicare was enacted in 1965 dental services were not covered.

This history ignores that oral health is intimately tied to overall health and well-being. Dental pain is a leading reason for emergency department visits. Poor oral health is associated with numerous medical conditions, including cardiovascular disease and rheumatoid arthritis.

As Congress works towards passing a trillion dollar infrastructure bill that includes Medicare reform, adding vision, hearing, and dental benefits should be a top priority. But while we’re at it, we should push for sweeping health reform. Medicare for All would ensure that all Americans – not just seniors – have access to comprehensive benefits including dental coverage.

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The Increasing Role of Physician Practices as Bill Collectors Destined for Failure, JAMA, July 30, 2021, by A. Jay Holmgren, et al.

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Through increasing deductibles, coinsurance, and co-payments, the privately insured population in the US is responsible for a larger share of health care out-of-pocket costs. Although many studies have examined the effects on patients, the implications for physicians have received less attention. The increase in cost sharing is forcing many physicians and health systems to take on the role of bill collectors. It is a task for which physician practices are unsuited. The result is a system with substantial administrative burden, frustrated patients struggling with confusing bills, and physicians receiving less compensation.

Moving away from deductibles and toward fixed-dollar co-payments as a cost-sharing mechanism could simplify the billing experience for patients and the collection process for physicians while retaining the ability of payers to steer patients to lower-cost care with financial incentives.

Conclusion: The growth of cost sharing and HDHPs has resulted in patients’ taking on more of the cost of their own care and in physicians’ holding the risk and responsibility of collecting large dollar amounts. Physician offices are poorly suited to the task, exacerbating a complex and confusing system for patients and clinicians alike. New private firms have developed products to simplify, consolidate, and improve billing. However, these private-sector solutions may help ameliorate the problem but will not solve it. Only larger shifts in how out-of-pocket costs are envisioned will meaningfully address the burden of high out-of-pocket spending on both patients and physicians.

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

This JAMA Viewpoint article explains the burden of out-of-pocket cost sharing on both the patient and the physician – financial barriers for the patient, and a costly administrative burden for the physician.

Cost sharing can interfere with the delivery of care. High cost sharing may cause individuals to forgo beneficial health care. Even modest cost sharing can cause individuals with limited resources to forgo essential care. Also cost sharing has been a significant contributor to the expansion of medical debt with its associated bankruptcies. Cost sharing is detrimental to the goal of health care justice for all.

The purported reason is that the financial disincentives of cost sharing steer patients to lower-cost care. But do patients really shop cost-sharing prices? And would any modest differences have a significant impact on the total cost of care?

If we are trying to control health care spending, wouldn’t it be much more effective and efficient to institute administered pricing with a public plan? We should be able to get pricing right when the public administrators take into consideration both the legitimate costs and fair compensation for physicians, and the interests of the potential patients subjected to progressive taxes.

The authors acknowledge that physician offices are “poorly suited” to the task of collecting cost sharing payments, but the solution is not more of the same by moving from deductibles to co-payments. The solution is to dispense with patient cost sharing and move to universal, first dollar coverage, which would also eliminate the scourge of medical debt and save lives.

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Medical Debt in the US, 2009-2020, JAMA, July 20, 2021, by Raymond Kluender et al.

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Data … were obtained from a nationally representative 10% panel of consumer credit reports between January 2009 and June 2020 (reflecting care provided prior to the COVID-19 pandemic)…

An estimated 17.8% of individuals had medical debt (13.0% accrued during the prior year), and the mean amount was $429 ($311 accrued during the prior year). The mean medical debt was highest in the South and lowest in the Northeast ($616 vs $167; difference, $448) and higher in poor than in rich zip codes ($677 vs $126). Between 2013 and 2020, states that expanded Medicaid in 2014 experienced a decline in the mean medical debt that was 34.0 percentage points greater (from $330 to $175) than the states that did not expand Medicaid (from $613 to $550).

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Association of Wealth With Longevity in US Adults at Midlife, JAMA Health Forum, July 23, 2021, by Eric D. Finegood et al.

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Higher net worth was associated with lower mortality risk (hazard ratio, 0.95). Among siblings and twin pairs specifically, a similar within-family association was observed between higher net worth and lower mortality (HR, 0.94), suggesting that the sibling or twin with more wealth tended to live longer than their co-sibling or co-twin with less wealth.

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Comment:

By David Himmelstein, M.D. and Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., M.P.H.

In a series of studies dating back 16 years (see: here, here and here), we and our colleagues found that illness and medical bills are a leading cause of bankruptcy. Those findings, based on court records and surveys of debtors, have been derided by scholars funded by the health insurance industry (see our response to them here), and by leading health economists. Those critics have claimed that debtors can’t accurately identify the causes of their financial ruin, and have turned instead to statistical analyses that rest on unwarranted assumptions about who incurs medical debts and when those debts begin to accrue.

Kluender et al document the extraordinary frequency and size of medical debts. Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, more than one out of six Americans with a credit record had a medical bill in collection, with medical debts totaling about $140 billion – more than the total amount of all other debts in collection. As the authors acknowledge, that figure surely understates the magnitude of medical debts, e.g. it excludes medical bills charged to credit cards.

Kluender et al find that states that implemented the ACA’s Medicaid expansion reduced medical debts relative to non-expansion states. Yet even in expansion states Medical debts accounted for the majority of all debts in collection.

Finegood et al’s study suggests that debts have health as well as financial consequences. Even among genetically identical twins, lower net worth (assets minus debts) is a predictor of earlier death.

When journalist TR Reid asked policy leaders in other developed nations about the frequency of medical bankruptcy in their country he was generally met by blank stares; medical bankruptcy was virtually unknown. It’s high time that the US join the civilized world and abolish medical debt by implementing universal, first dollar health coverage.

http://healthjusticemonitor.org…

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