Chapter – Page 496

Universal health care advocacy group readying for local rally

By Rachel Roubein
Carroll County Times, April 29, 2013

What started as the formation of an about eight-person book club spiraled into the creation of a local grassroots effort to advocate for universal health care in Maryland.

The club members read one book: “The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care” by T.R. Reid. Afterward, they readied themselves to take on the cause, which they accomplished by contacting Healthcare is a Human Right Maryland.

At Birdie’s Cafe in Westminster Friday, three members of Carroll County’s chapter of Healthcare is a Human Right Maryland and statewide organizer Sergio España told of the formation of the grassroots campaign locally. They told of their excitement for the state’s first speakout — a rally to share health-care stories — which will be held in Carroll County on Saturday.

They spoke passionately about making health care a public good.

“No one should not have health care,” group member Frank Reitemeyer said. “For me, that’s the biggest thing, and it’s getting to the point where it’s unaffordable for everybody, and we’re all suffering because of it.”

So it’s time to take action, to take care of family, friends and neighbors who might be uninsured, he said.

From 2010 to 2011, about 771,500 people were uninsured in Maryland, which is 13 percent of the state’s population, according to www.statehealthfacts.org, a product of the Kaiser Family Foundation that analyzes Census Bureau data.

Nearly 7 percent of Carroll adults were uninsured in 2011, according to The Partnership for a Healthier Carroll County community dashboard. Additionally, more than 2 percent of children were without insurance that same year.

This wouldn’t be the case with a universal health-care system. It works like this: Health care would be publicly funded and treated like a public good, such as education. No one would have to pay when they go see a doctor, as it would be funded through taxpayer dollars, according to the group.

The campaign is looking to Vermont as an example, which became the first state to pass a publicly funded health-care system in 2011. Under the law, the state will set up a universal health-care system for all residents, likely by 2017, according to www.vermont.gov. Through banding together, Healthcare is a Human Right Maryland — which has chapters in Howard, Montgomery, Baltimore and Frederick counties — strives to set up a similar system, according to España.

“Everybody quietly knows that something’s wrong with our health-care system,” he said, “but how do we connect with each other?”

The Carroll chapter hopes to make those connections locally — and to put a face on the uninsured and others burdened by the cost of medical bills, group member Sandy Wright said.

It’s an expense that can be a struggle, she said. She’s not only read about it but watched the frustration firsthand. Wright and her husband pay for her daughter and grandson’s insurance to help them out.

“We’re not going to live forever,” Wright said, “so we need to get [universal health care] set up so she can get insured.”

The campaign officially kicked off statewide in December, and members are in the midst of collecting surveys from state residents. Questions include asking an individual if they’ve had to forgo medical care because of costs and if they’ve ever had an issue receiving the care they need.

The group also aims to foster dialogue on the issue throughout the state this year, according to España.

Rep. Justin Ready, R-District 5A, said he’d be willing to engage in conversation on the topic but thinks making health care a public good isn’t the right way to address the system’s affordability.

“It’s important to look at it from the cost side — what can we do both in government and the community to bring down the cost of care?” said Ready, who sits on the state House’s Health and Government Operations Committee. “I think that should be the most important focus.”

The transition to universal health care in the state won’t be immediate, group member Becky Powel said, but it’s a cause she’s willing to fight for.

For Reitemeyer, it comes down to morality.

“Just because you’re rich doesn’t mean that you are allowed to be healthy,” he said, “and that the guy who’s busting his butt with two or three jobs or the woman who’s doing that can’t afford to have their children raised with good health care. It’s just — it’s immoral. That’s the whole point of the campaign.”

If You Go

What: Local residents will share health care stories at this event, called a Speakout, hosted by the Carroll County chapter of Healthcare is a Human Right Maryland

When: 2 to 5 p.m., May 4
Where: St. Paul’s United Church of Christ, 17 Bond St., Westminster

For more information, contact CarrollCountyHCHR@gmail.com, www.facebook.com/HealthcareIsAHumanRightMaryland or 240-478-8193.

http://www.carrollcountytimes.com/news/local/universal-health-care-advocacy-group-readying-for-local-rally/article_cbecc8c2-e561-5dbb-8b86-4d795afe0f08.html

Relegating Medicaid patients to lower-tier care

Hammurabi’s Code and U.S. Health Care

By Uwe E. Reinhardt
The New York Times, April 6, 2013

I recall addressing a group of New Jersey State legislators on this point a few years ago as follows:

“I teach my students that the price a buyer is willing to pay for a thing signals to suppliers of that thing the monetary value the prospective buyer puts on it. It is a basic tenet of economics. Leaning on that tenet, I conclude that the value you in your role as state legislators put upon the professional work of, say, a pediatrician, if applied to a poor child on Medicaid, is less than a quarter of the value you put upon that same professional work it applied to your own commercially insured children.”

Physicians clearly understand this relative valuation being signaled to them. According to a recent estimate, almost a third of American physicians are unwilling to accept any new patients covered by Medicaid.

Naturally, New Jersey’s legislators were not well pleased by my comment. To be fair, I doubt they had ever thought of their Medicaid budgets in that way. More probably, they tacitly assume that our health care system will give patients covered by Medicaid the same health care for a given medical condition that would be given a commercially insured patient, regardless how much legislators are willing to pay for that care.

Perhaps these legislators believe that the Hippocratic Oath, sworn to by all physicians at the onset of their careers, compels that egalitarian approach. In fact, neither the ancient nor modern version of the oath imposes on healers an obligation to treat patients at a monetary loss.

Americans today have a more, shall we say, “nuanced” view of the matter. One the one hand, we signal to our health care professionals vastly different valuations of their work. On the other, we expect them to be punctiliously egalitarian on their job.

In conclusion, I note that under the Affordable Care Act of 2010, the federal government is willing to pick up the added cost of raising physician fees paid by Medicaid for primary services to equality with the usually higher fees paid by Medicare for those services.

Alas, for the states, the federal government will pick up the bill for this policy only during 2013 and 2014. It is anybody’s guess, therefore, how many states will retain the more generous and to them costly payment policy after 2014.

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Soon the nation be spending $3 trillion for health care. That is certainly more than enough to provide everyone with all essential health care services; that is, we can easily afford an egalitarian system.

Having spent a career attempting to provide care on an egalitarian basis, there is no doubt in my mind that it is impossible in our fragmented, dysfunctional system of financing care.

This is precisely why so many of us have become passionate in our advocacy for a single payer system. Yes, it would make life easier for dedicated health care professionals, but, far more important, it would ensure that all of us would have the health care that we need. The Affordable Care Act falls woefully short.

No system is perfect, but some are a whole lot more humanitarian than others.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/hammurabis-code-and-u-s-health-care/?ref=healthcarereform

Will Obamacare end medical bankruptcies? Probably not.

By Sarah Kliff
Washington Post, April 26, 2013

Welcome to Health Reform Watch, Sarah Kliff’s regular look at how the Affordable Care Act is changing the American health-care system — and being changed by it. You can reach Sarah with questions, comments and suggestions here. Check back every Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon for the latest edition, and read previous columns here.

There’s pretty widespread agreement, on both sides of the aisle, that the health-care law will expand insurance coverage. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that 30 million more Americans will have health insurance by the end of a decade.

What’s become more of a debate though, is how good that health insurance coverage will be. Two new academic studies raise the possibility that many Americans will still face big financial burdens after they gain insurance coverage.

“The Affordable Care Act will reduce the number of uninsured by a little more than half, which is a good thing,” says Stephanie Woolhandler, a professor at the CUNY School of Public Health. “But it’s going to increase the problem of underinsurance: People who have insurance but still can’t afford care.”

The whole point of buying health insurance coverage is to make care affordable. Millions of Americans pay monthly premiums with the expectation that, should a horrible illness or accident occur, the insurance company will cover the majority of some pretty expensive hospital bills.

Some experts and health advocates have begun to question whether the health-care law can deliver on that promise. Woolhandler wrote an editorial earlier this week, in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, contending that “the new private coverage offered to the near-poor and middle income individuals through insurance exchanges will also leave many underinsured.”

Much of this has to do with the type of plans that insurers will sell on the health insurance exchange. Health insurers will offer consumers a “bronze” plan that will, on average, cover 60 percent of an enrollee’s costs. This, in health insurance-speak, is known as “actuarial value.” Using actuarial values can make it easier to compare plans, and understand what part of the bill the insurer will likely cover — and how much the enrollee can expect to be on the hook to pay.

The exchange will also have other plans with different actuarial values: Silver plans will cover 70 percent of an average enrollee’s costs, and gold plans would be expected to foot 80 percent of the bill. The bronze plans are expected to attract a high number of enrollees, since they will likely have smaller premiums — because consumers are buying less robust financial coverage.

Woolhandler, who is the co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, has previously conducted research on rates of medical bankruptcy in Massachusetts, before and after the state expanded health insurance access. She found that in 2009, two years after the insurance expansion took effect, just about half the debtors (52 percent) attributed their bankruptcy at least in part to medical bills. In 2007, before the expansion, the number stood at 59 percent.

Allison Gailbrath, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, has also looked at the Massachusetts’s insurance expansion to better understand how access to health insurance affects the financial burden of medical costs.

She published a paper this month in the journal Health Affairs, which looked at which costs were faced by families who had gained insurance through the Connector, Massachusetts’s version of a health-care exchange. She found that 38 percent reported a financial burden (defined as having difficulty paying medical bills) and 45 percent said costs were higher than they had expected.

Numbers were slightly higher for those earning less than 400 percent of the poverty line and for those with children.

It’s worth noting that the Massachusetts bronze plans had a lower actuarial value than those that will be sold on the exchanges. They covered, on average, 40 to 50 percent of enrollees’ costs. That means, to Gailbraith, that underinsurance is still a concern in the federal exchanges—but perhaps not as much as it has been in the Massachusetts experience.

“The exchanges will provide coverage and that will help the uninsured but there’s still an underinsured problem,” Galbraith says. “People will have plans, but they will still have cost issues involved.”

Galbraith contends that this creates an impetus for better consumer education — that there’s space for better education about how much health insurance will cover, and what consumers might be expected to pay. Some employers, for example, will provide cost calculators where enrollees can input some data on what type of health-care spending they expect and get a sense of which plan might provide the best deal.

That can move consumers away from just comparing premiums, and towards thinking about all the other costs they could incur from various co-payments and cost-sharing. That could lead consumers to pick different plans, which might come with higher premiums — but also lower cost-sharing down the line.

KLIFF NOTES: Top health policy reads from around the Web.

Senate Democrats are concerned about Obamacare’s roll out. “Democrats in both houses of Congress said some members of their party were getting nervous that they could pay a political price if the rollout of the law was messy or if premiums went up significantly. President Obama’s new chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough, fielded questions on the issue for more than an hour at a lunch with Democratic senators.” Robert Pear in The New York Times.

As time runs out, Florida’s Medicaid expansion hangs in limbo. “House Republicans rejected a bipartisan Senate proposal to accept $51 billion in federal health care money on Thursday, diminishing hopes that lawmakers will reach a health care compromise before the legislative session ends next week.” Tia Mitchell in the Miami Herald.

Mid-level health care jobs are disappearing. ”Positions such as licensed practical nurses and medical-records clerks are being eliminated or pushed out of hospitals into lower-paying corners of the field such as nursing homes. Meanwhile, positions that were once an accessible first rung on the career ladder, such as registered nursing, increasingly require at least a bachelor’s degree.” Ben Casselman in The Wall Street Journal.

Correction: This story originally misstated the actuarial value of the bronze plans in the Massachusetts Connector. It is between 40 to 50 percent.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/26/will-obamacare-end-medical-bankruptcies-probably-not/

A Near Miss

By Andrew D. Coates, M.D.
WAMC Northeast Public Radio, April 26, 2013

Many years back during my residency training, on my first overnight as the senior admitting resident, I got a call from an emergency physician at a tiny rural hospital. Her patient had pulmonary emboli — blood clots to arteries of the lungs. She proposed to transfer the patient to our hospital, where closer monitoring would be available.

When the patient arrived I hurried to the her bedside, for pulmonary emboli kill as many as 100,000 people each year in the United States.

She asked if she might die. It occurred to me that she might. But I sought to reassure her, explaining that she was not only stabilizing but already receiving treatment.

As I gestured to the “treatment” she was getting, I looked at the bag of heparin hanging at her bedside. I was thinking that I should recheck the rate of the drip, to make sure the emergency physician had chosen the correct dose of the anticoagulant.

But there was no pump attached to the IV. In fact the bag of heparin was empty. With horror I recognized a life-threatening medical error.

A bag of intravenous heparin had been hung earlier, at the rural hospital, before the patient’s transfer. The doctor who ordered the heparin meant for the contents to infuse slowly, by a pump to control the drip rate, over about 28 hours. Instead the entire bag had been infused into the patient all at once, by gravity, over a few minutes.

The ambulance crew had transported the patient with an IV pump. At the first hospital, to avoid the need to return, the ambulance crew had substituted a pump that belonged to their company. When they got to us, they simply unhooked their pump and took it with them, without taking time for our nurses to switch to a different pump.

Our patient who had just suffered blood clots to the lungs suddenly faced a profound risk of bleeding. I asked the patient not to get out of bed, to eliminate her risk of falling, and informed her nurses.

I then rushed to order the antidote, a medication called protamine.

That we might need it some day had been drilled into us as medical students but I had never seen it used. Quickly I phoned the pharmacist for help. The pharmacist that night was just like me, recently out of school. Just like me, it was her first overnight and she too had never seen protamine used.

Awed, if not frightened, by the responsibility we shared, we independently calculated the dose of the antidote (protamine) and then took a minute to compare our results. Too much and the patient would be back at a risk of more blood clots. Too little and she would remain at a risk of bleeding. The pharmacist quickly delivered the protamine and the nurses immediately gave it. (And we notified our supervisors of the situation.)

By morning we learned that we had chosen just the right dose. The patient remained stable — and also therapeutically anti-coagulated, without risk of further clotting. And remembering that night … so many lessons learned!

But I’d focus for a minute on the question of the medical error as well as how thinking about it shaped my consciousness. Events like this “near miss” deserve careful review. As one of the world’s experts in health care quality, Dr. Gordy Schiff, points out, these experiences should be treated like treasure. Careful study of a problem can allow us to unearth its roots, and in turn build systems that will save lives.

The ambulance crew members were good people with a sincere desire to serve the community. Of course they swore never to make the same mistake again. Yet fixing blame will not, ultimately, fix errors. When we discussed a team-building system fix the Director of Nursing pointed out that in a fundamental way, the ambulance crew was not quite part of our team.

The ambulance was run by for a for-profit company with a corporate headquarters thousands of miles away. Naturally the goal of the company was to get the crew to transport as many patients as possible across our landscape. That night, I later learned, they were racing off to another patient waiting at another rural hospital. The paramedics were amid a “speed-up” like … well, like just about everybody else in our country.

These days just about any aspect of health care delivery can be subcontracted out or made into a business. Local health care businesses are increasingly joined by the tendrils of international conglomerates. In fact the corporation that owned the rural ambulance in this essay was recently bought by a global private equity firm.

But a local ambulance crew should serve the needs of the local community, not private equity investors.

For the sake of patient safety we should work to remove profiteering from the care of the sick. A public single payer system would a giant step in the right direction. Most of all it would be the beginning of a system in which health priorities were set by the people, by patients and their caregivers, something every modern democracy should have.

Dr. Andrew Coates practices internal medicine in upstate New York. He is president of Physicians for a National Health Program.

You can listen to Dr. Coates’ radio broadcast here: http://www.wamc.org/post/andrew-coates-near-miss

ACA's negative impact on employment

Governments may push workers out of employer health care and into health exchange

By Associated Press
The Washington Post, April 24, 2013

In a quest to save money, political leaders in Washington state are exploring a proposal that would shift some government workers out of their current health plans and onto the insurance exchange developed under President Barack Obama’s health care law.

Lawmakers believe the change, which could affect thousands of part-time state employees and education workers, would save the state $120 million over the next two years.

The Washington proposal has been advanced as a way to help deal with a $1.2 billion budget shortfall. Under it, Washington state would make policy changes and secure agreements in which staffers who work between 20 and 30 hours a week would get extra compensation but lose their current health coverage. They would then be eligible to get health care in the federal plan, without any consequence for the state.

“I think it’s a great way to fully take advantage of the Affordable Care Act,” said Republican Sen. Andy Hill, one of the state’s top budget writers.

While few states are following Washington’s path at the moment, there has been concern about how private employers will handle the new health care law and the possibility that some may shed insurance coverage. The owner of Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants, for example, began experimenting last year with putting more workers on part-time status.

Virginia is doing something similar, with Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell directing that all part-time state employees work less than 29 hours weekly. That is creating a financially crippling problem for many of Virginia’s 9,100 adjunct faculty members at the state’s 23 community colleges on 40 campuses statewide.

“I’ve never anticipated getting rich off being a teacher,” said J. Gabriel Scala, an adjunct English professor at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College in Richmond.

“But the rent has to be paid. And I have to eat. And gas has to be put in the car — and $17,000 a year isn’t going to do it,” she added.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/governments-may-push-workers-out-of-employer-health-care-and-into-health-exchange/2013/04/24/fed10f26-acb4-11e2-9493-2ff3bf26c4b4_story.html

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

One of the most important design features of the Affordable Care Act was that the employer-sponsored sector of health care coverage was to be largely left alone since allegedly it was functioning so well – not only covering the largest sector of our population, but also an important source of health care financing that was already in place. What could possible go wrong with this strategy?

What are employers to think when they see that the two primary features of the Affordable Care Act – the expansion of Medicaid and the establishment of exchanges of private insurance plans – were to be partially or completely financed with government funds? If lower-income employees could be shifted into the exchanges, the federal government would provide subsidies that would help fund the health care needs of employees. The only condition is that the employee must be part time, not working more than 30 hours per week.

Private employers have already begun to reduce their employees’ hours to qualify them for the exchange plans, and now we see that state governments are considering the same approach.

The important point is that employees in this sector that was to be left intact – those with employer-sponsored plans – are not only experiencing changes in their health insurance coverage, they are also experiencing a major loss of income due to the requirement of sharply limiting the hours worked per week. Since many of these individuals already have very low incomes, the cutback will be financially catastrophic.

It is really tragic that a program theoretically designed to expand health care coverage is having such a negative impact on employment itself. This would never have happened had we enacted a single payer system. We still can, you know.

Physician says Affordable Care Act an 'experiment' that will fail

By Lori Kersey
The Charleston Gazette, April 25, 2013

DAWES, W.Va. — The Affordable Care Act is an experiment that will fail, the head of an organization that advocates for a single-payer health system argued Thursday.

“People will not be able to afford the health insurance that they’re being pushed to buy,” Dr. Andrew Coates, president of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), said during a visit to West Virginia on Thursday. “And when they do buy it, it won’t be good enough to cover health-care calamity.”

Under the ACA, health insurance premiums and deductibles will not be affordable, Coates argued.

“I think it’s a big experiment to drive people to [the health insurance] marketplace but the health insurance marketplace hasn’t worked for years now and I don’t see any evidence that’s going to change,” he said.

Coates, an assistant professor of medicine and psychiatry at Albany Medical College, practices at a community hospital in upstate New York. During a visit to the Charleston area Thursday, he spoke to the staff at the Cabin Creek Health Center in Dawes.

Later on Thursday, Coates spoke about the pros and cons of the Affordable Care Act at the University of Charleston, where he shared a platform with Perry Bryant, executive director of West Virginians for Affordable Health Care.

Coates’ visit was sponsored in part by the West Virginia chapter of PNHP.

“People say [a single-payer system] can’t work here,” said Dr. James Binder of the West Virginia chapter. “That’s not true.”

Instead of the Affordable Care Act, which would potentially expand Medicaid to millions of low-income Americans, Coates is campaigning for expanded Medicare for all Americans. That would include an expansion of what Medicare covers. For instance, dental care should be covered, he said.

Research shows that this would actually help provide comprehensive care to everybody and also reduce costs, Coates said.

He argues that by eliminating private insurance and using a single-payer model, the United States could save more than $400 billion a year used for paperwork.

Private insurers, Coates said, do not contribute to the health-care system.

“It’s really not a legitimate or justifiable way to make money,” Coates said. “We’re talking about human illness. Think of the morality.”

The government is already raising and spending enough public money to cover everyone, Coates said.

“Health care is such a necessity of modern life and it’s so unaffordable in many ways for working people,” Coates said. “If everyone could not have to worry about their loved ones getting the care they deserve, it would be liberating for the whole country.”

Coates said the single-payer system differs from socialized medicine because private physicians would care for patients.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, in which the federal government owns the hospitals and pays the medical staff, is a better example of socialized medicine, he said.

“The veterans administration is working very well,” Coates said. “Being under public control is a very good thing. The attention that Congress puts in to improving the quality of care for veterans is completely appropriate.”

The single-payer system is a small step to a socialized health system, not a big one, Coates said.

“Any reform effort in health care — for decades now — someone has shouted ‘socialism,'” Coates said.

He added that in countries like Canada and New Zealand, where single-payer systems have been put in place, it hasn’t been a threat to democracy.

Reach Lori Kersey at lori.ker…@wvgazette.com or 304-348-1240.

http://www.wvgazette.com/News/201304250121

A noted Republican physician executive talks about single payer

I Am A Republican… Can We Talk About A Single Payer System?

By David May
ACC-in-Touch Blog, American College of Cardiology, April 23, 2013

I am a Republican. For those who know me that is not a surprise. I live in a red state. I have never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate. I can field strip, clean and reassemble a Remington 12-gauge pump blindfolded. And on top of it, I think we should talk about having a single payer national health care plan. The reason is quite simple. In my view, we already have one; we just don’t take advantage of it.

Firstly, Medicare and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) are de facto setting all of the rules now. They are a single payer system. When we go to lobby the Hill, we lobby Congress and CMS. Talking to Blue Cross, Aetna, Cigna and United Health care is essentially a waste of time. All the third party payers do is play off the Medicare rules to their advantage and profit. They have higher premiums, pay a somewhat higher benefit and have a significantly higher level of regulation which impedes the care of their customers. This is no longer consumer choice but effectively extortion, a less than hidden shake down in which the “choice” for a family of four is company A at $900 per month or company B at $1100 per month. The payers are simply taking advantage of the system, playing both ends against the middle.

Secondly, in order to move forward with true health care finance we need complete transparency in cost and expense… and we need it now. As was noted in a recent Time magazine piece on the hidden cost of health care, our current system is a vulgar, less than honorable construct more akin to used car sales than medical care, cloaked under the guise of generally accepted accounting principles and hospital cost shifting.

Thirdly, with a single payer system would potentially come real utilization data, real quality metrics and real accountability. The promise of ICD-10 with all of its difficulties is that of a much more granular claims-made data. We could use some granularity in health care data and we will never achieve it in big data quantities without a single payer system.

Lastly, I think that the physicians should be in charge of health care and not the insurance companies and hospital systems. With a single price structure, it becomes all about medical decision making, efficiency, the provision of care to our patients, and shared decision making, all of which we do well.

How, you might say, could a Republican come to such a position? The simple answer is I really think it is quite Republican. Oh, I know there will be many raised eyebrows and many critics. I accept that. I understand the fact that no single payer system is perfect, that it is “socialist,” that it is “un-American.”

I would submit to you, however, that it is un-American to allow many of our citizens to be uninsured, that it is un-American to shunt money away from a strong military in order to support a bloated, inefficient and fraud-laden health care system, that it is un-American not to be open and above board with the cost of what we do, the expense of that service and the profit that we make. Mostly, it is un-American to let this outrageous health care injustice continue.

(David May, MD, PhD, FACC, is chair of the Board of Governors of the American College of Cardiology. He invites responses to his comments at the link below.)

http://blog.cardiosource.org/post/I-Am-A-Republicane280a6-Can-We-Talk-About-A-Single-Payer-System.aspx

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

David May provides an important lesson for those who think that the single payer concept falls on the far left of a linear political spectrum. Society is not linear; it’s four dimensional. If we look at all dimensions, single payer clearly prevails. We can thank Dr. May for shattering the traditional but flawed construct of health care ideology.

Health: 'Medicare for all'

By the Editorial Board
The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette, April 25, 2013

If you think health care should be available to all Americans as a human right, you may be interested in a free public forum tonight at the University of Charleston.

Dr. Andrew Coates from upstate New York, president of Physicians for a National Health Program, is to share the podium with Perry Bryant of West Virginians for Affordable Health Care. The session is at 7 p.m. in the Appalachian Room of the Geary Student Union.

Dr. Coates’ nonprofit organization, which has 18,000 doctor members, wants America to create a Canada-style universal “single-payer” plan covering all U.S. families. It would aid 30,000 “working poor” American who still will lack protection against illness or injury, even after ObamaCare is fully implemented. And it would save billions of dollars by eliminating wasteful administrative costs of commercial insurers.

“Health care costs are continuing to rise,” Dr. Coates says. “At the root of this problem is the private health industry — the big private insurers, drug companies and hospital chains — whose primary allegiance is to their shareholders and executives, not to patients. The insurers make profits by denying claims and raising premiums, co-pays and deductibles. They also drag down our health system with the costly paperwork and bureaucracy they inflict on doctors, hospitals and patients.”

The reform leader adds: “By replacing the private insurers with a streamlined single-payer system, we can save over $400 billion squandered annually on wasteful paperwork. That’s enough money to cover all of the uninsured and to eliminate all co-pays and deductibles.”

We think his mission is exactly on-target. It’s shameful that America is the only modern democracy without a national health system covering everyone. Insurance corporations and medical firms shouldn’t get rich from sickness, with executives pocketing million-dollar salaries. U.S. employers shouldn’t be forced to pay $7,000 per employee yearly for health coverage.

Almost 20 percent of America’s gross domestic product is squandered on health care — twice as much as in most developed countries. This year’s total is expected to be $2.8 trillion. Yet health is no better in the United States than elsewhere.

Expanding Medicare to cover all citizens would be smart. Its bureaucracy is frugal, spending just $3.80 each to process more than 1 billion claims per year — while Aetna insurance spends $30 to process each claim.

For more than a half-century, Democrats in Washington have sought to bring low-cost universal health care to America. President Obama’s landmark 2010 reform was a major step. But more is needed.

Meanwhile, if Gov. Tomblin accepts a Medicaid expansion allowed by ObamaCare, 120,000 more West Virginians will gain coverage, almost entirely at federal expense.

As we said, medical care should be a human right for all.

http://www.wvgazette.com/Opinion/Editorials/201304240271

I Am A Republican … Can We Talk About A Single Payer System?

By David May, M.D.
American College of Cardiology Touch Blog, April 23, 2013

Secondly, in order to move forward with true health care finance we need complete transparency in cost and expense … and we need it now. As was noted in a recent Time magazine piece on the hidden cost of health care, our current system is a vulgar, less than honorable construct more akin to used car sales than medical care, cloaked under the guise of generally accepted accounting principles and hospital cost shifting.

David May, M.D., Ph.D., F.A.C.C., began as the chair of the Board of Governors of the American College of Cardiology in March 2013. Dr. May currently works as a managing partner at his private practice, Cardiovascular Specialists, PA (CVS) in Lewisville, Texas.

http://blog.cardiosource.org/post/I-Am-A-Republicane280a6-Can-We-Talk-About-A-Single-Payer-System.aspx

Insured but unable to afford health care

Affordable Care Act will leave tens of millions underinsured, facing choice between ‘life or debt,’ say Journal of General Internal Medicine editorialists

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 25, 2013

Contact: Mark Almberg, PNHP, (312) 782-6006, mark@pnhp.org

In an editorial responding to a new study on skimpy health insurance among low-income, insured Americans, two policy experts review extensive data showing that tens of millions of insured Americans have grossly inadequate coverage, and that the problem of underinsurance is growing.

The editorial in the Journal of General Internal Medicine (JGIM) was approved by the journal’s editors for publication on today’s date and will appear on its website next week. The text of the editorial is available here.

Paradoxically, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) may actually increase underinsurance, say the editorialists, Drs. Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein.

“Obamacare is lowering the bar for health insurance,” said Dr. Himmelstein, a professor of public health at the City University of New York and primary care doctor. “The new coverage sold through the insurance exchanges will leave many families paying 40 percent of their health costs out-of-pocket even after they’ve laid out thousands for premiums. And the administration is allowing states to institute co-payments under Medicaid, even for the poorest of the poor.”

Himmelstein continued: “Under the ACA a 56-year-old making $46,100 will pay a premium of $10,585 for coverage through the exchange and still face up to $6,250 in co-payments and deductibles.”

Dr. Woolhandler, the lead author of the editorial who is also a physician and professor of public health at CUNY, said: “Over the past 25 years the financial protection offered by health insurance has steadily eroded. The consequences are grave, not only financially but also medically. For instance, we know that heart attack patients who face high co-payments delay coming to the ER, threatening their lives.”

Woolhandler and Himmelstein (who also serve as visiting professors at Harvard Medical School) were co-authors with Elizabeth Warren of a widely cited study that showed that illness and medical bills contribute to 62 percent of personal bankruptcies; most of the medically bankrupt were insured. Sen. Warren played no role in the JGIM editorial.

“Obamacare is making underinsurance the new normal,” said Woolhandler. “It will reduce the number of uninsured from 50 million to 30 million, but the new coverage is full of holes. Americans deserve the kind of first-dollar, comprehensive coverage that Canadians already have. But that’s only affordable under a single-payer system that cuts out the private insurance middlemen.”

“Life or Debt: Underinsurance in America,” Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., M.P.H., and David U. Himmelstein, M.D. Journal of General Internal Medicine, approved for publication on April 25, 2013. The text of the article is available here.

The related article:

“Prevalence and Predictors of Underinsurance Among Low-Income Adults,” Hema Magge, M.D., M.S., Howard J. Cabral, M.P.H., Ph.D., Lewis E. Kazis, Sc.D., and Benjamin D. Sommers, M.D., Ph.D. Journal of General Internal Medicine, published online Feb. 1, 2013.

Physicians for a National Health Program (www.pnhp.org) is a nonprofit research and education organization of more than 18,000 doctors who advocate for single-payer national health insurance. PNHP had no role in funding or otherwise supporting the study described above. To speak with a physician/spokesperson in your area, visit www.pnhp.org/stateactions or call (312) 782-6006.

We need single-payer health care

By James Binder, M.D.
The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette, April 24, 2013

Every human being has a right to competent health care. Claiming health care to be a basic human right is a principle derived from 2,000 years of Judeo-Christian tradition (as well as core values of all major world religions). The measure of any society, according to Jesus, is the manner in which the outcasts (the poor, the lepers, the prisoners, the mentally ill) are treated. A humane society is committed to the relief of suffering of all its citizens.

So, how do we in the United States stack up against this standard? We fail. Tens of millions of poor and disadvantaged people are excluded from healthcare altogether. The rest of the poor are treated in an underfunded program (Medicaid). In addition, fewer than half of patients with emotional and mental conditions receive appropriate care. This is in no small part due to efforts of many private insurers to exclude adequate mental health treatment from their health plans.

Placing barriers in the way of reasonable mental health treatment is both shortsighted and dangerous. Each year, 30,000 people in the United States die by suicide. Accessible and effective treatment of depression and other mental health conditions could prevent a number of those deaths.

What is so sad about this unnecessary suffering is that we have a simple way to provide equitable health care. With a single-payer national health program, no distinction or judgment would be made between people or between physical and mental conditions. We would all receive the same comprehensive care, whether or not we were employed or unemployed, or had a chronic illness, or were morbidly obese, or were suffering from mental illness. Proponents of a single-payer system hold an unshakable belief that collaboration among human beings works much better to relieve suffering and promote positive health outcomes than a competitive profit-driven approach.

We already spend enough money on health care to include everyone and provide comprehensive care. However, much of that money is wasted on exorbitant CEO salaries, unnecessary bureaucracies that routinely deny medical care, and advertisements for insurance companies and nonessential drugs. Let’s put that money into patient care with single-payer universal insurance. A single-payer system, unlike our current fragmented, multi-insurance system, would allow establishment of global budgeting. Global budgeting, which is how our police and fire departments, public schools and libraries are paid, would allow control of excessive spending on health care.

For a discussion of single payer and how it would work, as well as for better understanding of the Affordable Care Act, please join us at 7 p.m. Thursday at the University of Charleston. Participating in the discussion will be Andy Coates, M.D., president of Physicians for a National Health Program; and Perry Bryant, founder and executive director of West Virginians for Affordable Health Care.

Binder is a pediatrician at Cabin Creek Health Systems.

http://www.wvgazette.com/Opinion/OpEdCommentaries/201304240102

Workers not prepared financially for unexpected health costs

American Workers on an Uphill Road with Consumer-Driven Health Care

Aflac
2013 Aflac WorkForces Report, April 24, 2013

New Aflac survey reveals employees are not prepared for increased costs, may not want control and lack education

The 2013 Aflac WorkForces Report is the 3rd annual Aflac employee benefits study examining benefit trends and attitudes.

Not Prepared Financially

* Only 24 percent of workers completely agree or strongly agree they will be financially prepared in the event of an unexpected emergency or serious illness.

* Further, 46 percent of employees have less than $1,000 to be able to pay for out-of-pocket expenses associated with an unexpected serious illness or accident, and 25 percent of employees have less than $500.

* Four-in-ten (40 percent) workers would have to borrow from their 401(k), friends and family to pay for out-of-pocket expenses associated with an unexpected serious illness or accident; 28 percent would have to use a credit card.

Press release:
http://www.aflac.com/us/en/docs/insights/aflac_prtemplateawr2013.pdf

Fast Facts:
http://www.aflac.com/aflac_workforces_report/2013/fast_facts.aspx

And…

The Center for Consumer Information & Insurance Oversight
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

Section 1402 of the Affordable Care Act requires reductions in the maximum out-of-pocket limits on silver plans for individuals with household incomes between 100 and 400 percent of the FPL. However, the statute also requires the Secretary to ensure that the reductions in the maximum out-of-pocket limits do not cause the AVs (actuarial values) of these silver plan variations to exceed certain levels.

For reasons described in more detail below, we do not plan to reduce the maximum out-of-pocket limits for individuals with income between 250 and 400 percent of FPL.

http://cciio.cms.gov/resources/files/Files2/02242012/Av-csr-bulletin.pdf

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

With a major trend expanding in the direction of employer-sponsored consumer-driven health care, this new Aflac report shows that workers are not ready for the change. If you look only at the financial challenge, workers may never be ready. They cannot afford to pay the out-of-pocket expenses that they would face should they or their families develop significant medical problems.

Although the Aflac study was limited to employer-sponsored benefit programs, most people purchasing plans in the new state insurance exchanges also will be selecting plans that use high-deductibles – the defining characteristic of consumer-driven health plans.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) does require reductions in out-of-pocket expenses for individuals with household incomes between 100 and 400 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL), but another ACA requirement prohibits the covered silver plans from having an actuarial value over 70 percent (the percent the plan pays on average) for individuals with household incomes over 250 percent of FPL ($27,925 for an individual). Since it is impossible to keep the actuarial value down at 70 percent if out-of-pocket expenses are subsidized, it was decided to eliminate out-of-pocket support for individuals above 250 percent of FPL.

Some workers will benefit from employer contributions to health spending accounts (HSAs and HRAs), just as some individuals will benefit from out-of-pocket subsidies in the exchanges. In either instance, it can be anticipated that far too many still will not be prepared financially for unanticipated medical costs, just as the Aflac study reported.

Newer employer-sponsored plans and plans under ACA are moving in the wrong direction. We need a program that removes financial barriers to care, not plans that erect them. All you have to do is read the 16 page CCIIO/CMS bulletin on actuarial value and cost-sharing reductions (link above) to see how ridiculously complicated and irrational we made this system.

We really do need a single payer system. Then everyone would be prepared financially in the event of medical need.

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