PNHP

Reform languishes

Reform languishes

Editorial
Times Argus (Barre-Montpelier, VT)
February 2, 2006

One of the leading advocates of health care reform has given members of the Legislature, Democrats and Republicans, a failing grade for addressing reform in a meaningful way.

Dr. Deborah Richter told a labor gathering in Barre on Sunday that plans proposed by Gov. James Douglas and by Democrats in the Legislature fail to take on the health care system as a system. Instead they are tinkering around the margins.

Richter is the co-author, along with former Human Services Secretary Cornelius Hogan, of a book called “At the Crossroads: The Future of Health Care in Vermont.” She and Hogan are leading advocates of an integrated, publicly financed health care system, and their thinking helped shape the health care debate as it got under way last year.

In her recent speech she was critical of Democratic legislators for accepting Douglas’ “reality” regarding health care. That reality is characterized mainly by a fear of new taxes. Democrats have backed away from plans for the use of broad-based taxes to pay for health care, knowing that Douglas would veto such a scheme.

Richter describes a different reality. She says that Vermonters presently pay a variety of taxes for health care — some visible, some invisible. We pay through property taxes, taxes for worker’s compensation, premiums paid by employees and employers, a higher cost of doing business, bankruptcies, and taxes that already go to government programs.

This system remains enormously costly and out of control because care remains separate from financing. Health care providers at present have little incentive for keeping people well. Insurance companies have little incentive for paying out money. Because providers and payers are separate, they work at cross-purposes.

Richter makes the point that most of what is paid out for health care is fixed costs — nurses’ salaries, hospital expenses, dialysis units. The nurse’s salary does not disappear if no one shows up at the emergency room on a given night. We pay her salary because we want her in the emergency room in case our spouse has a heart attack.

These fixed costs can be budgeted, Richter says, and doing so is the best way of containing costs. No other sector of the economy — certainly, no major business — operates without a budget. But the health care sector does.

Douglas opposes a broad-based tax, saying it would hurt the economy. Richter counters that Douglas portrays a broad-based tax for health care as a new tax. Instead, she views it as a replacement tax. It would replace a host of visible and invisible taxes that we are already paying but over which we have no control.

She says the Democrats in the Legislature have failed to come through with the studies that they promised on the financing of health care reform and its effect on the economy. She urges the Democrats to pursue these studies in order to provide a base line for discussion of meaningful reform.

The Legislature and governor have talked about a variety of constructive measures, such as improvements to the care of chronic illnesses and more sophisticated information technology. We are still waiting for information about whether broader reform would be possible. There are many questions about whether it would be, but there is no hope for progress until we have some answers.

Catching the health-reform bug

By Lance Dickie
The Seattle Times
February 10, 2006

The nation’s health-care system has not gotten bad enough yet for real change to occur. Just wait.

An increasingly anxious middle class is seeing skimpy insurance coverage, higher costs, diminished quality, fragmented service and the choking feeling no one is in charge. Those frustrations eventually will build enough pressure for change.

Seemingly ages ago, President Clinton banged a drum for a national health-care overhaul, and the state Legislature passed a bold package of reforms. The efforts went nowhere. Hillary Clinton was pilloried and local changes were repealed in a stampede. A smug, comfortable swath of citizens did not believe they had a stake in the debate.

In 2006, people are paying attention as their health insurance erodes with higher premiums, growing copayments, soaring deductibles and unstoppable medical costs. Health-savings accounts and tax sheltering cash for medical coverage? They sound like a cruel joke.

Big corporations bitterly complain about the legacy expense of health care for retired workers. They are potential allies with the middle class for national changes. Yet, other employers watch to see if the brazen parsimony of retail giant Wal-Mart becomes the new operating model.

A frightened middle class makes things happen.

Legislators in Olympia, disgusted by Wal-Mart’s cynical willingness to point its employees toward tax-supported health coverage, want a bill that sets a “fair share” minimum health-care contribution for large employers. If employers do not spend a required percentage on health care, they would pay into the state’s health-service account.

“In a sense, they’ve figured out that they can outsource their benefits (at no cost) to government and the taxpayer,” Craig W. Cole told legislators last month. “And, by so doing, they have created a very low competitive cost structure that punishes ‘good’ employers.”

Who is this troublemaker? His Bellingham-area supermarket chain was founded in 1909 and has 1,500 employees. He is also a University of Washington regent.

But even solid citizens such as Cole sound too radical for skittish legislators who recall the health-care upheavals of a dozen years ago. Fair share is not likely to get a fair shake this session. Even state Senate legislation to study access to insurance and health costs and develop a five-year plan has been pulled in favor of an under-the-radar budget proviso to accomplish the same thing. A list of recommendations would be due back by December before the next session.

Health-care reform is not going away in Olympia.

Pressure builds from another direction. King County Executive Ron Sims heads the Puget Sound Health Alliance, which has attracted national attention with efforts to improve health-care quality and lower costs.

Sims leads a five-county, independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan effort to identify the best medical practices in five initial priority areas: diabetes, heart disease, low back pain, depression and pharmacy issues. This ambitious consortium of providers, consumers and insurers wants to learn how to get medical care done right the first time.

More pressure for change. U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Seattle, has steadfastly introduced legislation in Congress to create a single-payer health system financed with a broad national tax. Health care stays private and local, but Uncle Sam does the paperwork and pays the bills.

The tenacity and ideas of this lawmaker and physician stirred a rousing ovation from doctors and medical students at a standing-room-only inaugural meeting of the Seattle chapter of Chicago-based Physicians for a National Health Program. Hundreds braved a Sunday-night downpour to hear McDermott and a panel discuss reforms.

Physicians across the country see the system not serving their patients. Health-care providers are driven to distraction by the time and expense of working with 1,200 insurance companies.

Good people with a commitment to the local delivery of health care are leading efforts to find solutions very close to home.

Put it all together. Legislative stirrings. Nation-leading explorations of evidence-based medical savings. Leadership for a national single-payer insurance plan. Pressure builds as middle-class confidence and coverage erode.

Lance Dickie’s column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is ldickie@seattletimes.com

Change health care for uninsured

By Kay Lapp James
Portage Daily Register
November 9, 2005

Monday’s e-mail contained a surprising press release from Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager. She announced that her office was taking actions against two Milwaukee-area hospitals for unfair trade practices.

The complaints, which are to be filed with the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, say the hospitals charged uninsured patients higher prices than they charged the vast majority of patients who have either Medicare or private insurance. The complaints, according to the press release, seek orders prohibiting hospitals from continuing to charge excessive prices to uninsured patients.

One complaint involves a man who had a stent implanted in his heart and stayed less than 24 hours in the hospital. He supposedly received a 20 percent discount because he did not have insurance. His bill was $33,646. Medicare would pay $15,000 for the same procedure.

In the other case, a woman had emergency gallbladder surgery and was billed $31,614. Medicare would have paid $5,000 for the operation, and the hospital would give an insurance company an average discount of 37 percent.

The difference in prices, or that uninsured people pay the highest prices for medical care, did not surprise me. I heard similar figures when I covered a talk by Drs. Linda and Gene Farley. The Farleys spoke of the need for a national single-payer health plan and discussed the costs and inequities in the current system.

The Farleys spoke at a meeting of the Dells Progressive Voices and their talk was greeted enthusiastically. Most politicians, businesses and the health care establishment have not greeted talk of a single payer or national health care system enthusiastically.

The plight of the uninsured has been ignored since the Clinton administration’s national health care plan got a decidedly chilly reception and defeat. People, corporations and even unions complain of health care’s increasing costs, but like the weather, nobody does anything.

The Farleys said a bill establishing a single payer system in Wisconsin had been introduced, but I doubt it will pass. It has been introduced several times in the past.

My surprise at the press release stems from seeing a politician taking aim at the healthcare establishment. I also learned 22 states have initiated similar moves.

Whether or not Lautenschlager is successful with the complaints, I wonder what the effect will be. Will this bring attention to the problem of not having insurance? Will it focus attention on the mishmash that constitutes the healthcare payment system?

I know people who live without health insurance who fear being sick or having an accident. The Farleys said people die because they don’t have insurance. I know at least one person who declared bankruptcy because of medical bills — common for the uninsured.

The uninsured are not the only ones concerned with the cost of healthcare. Wal-Mart announced new insurance plans for its employees and then an internal memo surfaced. The memo suggests the company hire only healthy, young people and get rid of workers who have health problems. This is from a company that has a large percentage of workers receiving Badger Care.

Wal-Mart is not unique. Other companies may have plans for cutting health care costs. They don’t put them in writing. Because of healthcare costs, I may live in an environment in which those who are not being perfectly healthy won’t be able to work.

Insurance, or the lack there of, concerns more than the uninsured. Employed people do not dare change jobs because a spouse or child has a chronic health concern. I wonder how many people don’t start a business because they cannot start one and afford insurance.

Health care in this country is a mess, and we need changes. Maybe our state can be a leader and start changing the system before it consumes us.

Kay Lapp James is editor of the Dells Events. She can be reached at kjames@capitalnewspapers.com or (608) 745-3567.

Bush's Rx for insurance: Buy your own

By John McCarron
Chicago Tribune
February 10, 2006
Additional material published Feb. 11, 2006

CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS
In his Commentary column Friday, John McCarron stated that General Motors recently announced it will cap spending on health insurance premiums for salaried employees at 2006 levels. In fact, the announced cap applies only to retired salaried employees.

Say good-bye to your group health insurance.

OK, maybe not right away. Your employer may stick with your plan for a few more years. Don’t toss out that health-care card just yet.

But if you’ve been following the business news lately, and if you paid close attention–very close attention–to President Bush’s State of the Union address, you may hear a distant knell for the way most Americans get their health insurance.

General Motors, which spends more on health care for its workers than on steel, announced that it will cap spending on health insurance for salaried employees. Any future cost increases–and costs have been rising by double digits–will be borne by paying higher premiums, deductibles and co-pays.

That’s not so drastic, really, when you consider big outfits like GM, where labor contracts set a high standard, have offered employees some of the nation’s best benefits. But it does signal that the cost-sharing arrangement between employers and employees–you pay half, we pay half (or some such split)–is going the way of the defined-benefit pension. Remember the defined-benefit pension?

Then again, GM had little choice but to unhook from the great medical money machine here in Viagra Nation. The company must compete globally, as must all U.S. manufacturers. Compete for investors, too, in a world where you can buy the stock of Honda or Toyota as easily as Ford or GM.

So the race is on to limit corporate exposure to runaway health insurance costs. And sure enough, President Bush has a plan.

In his address, the president said government has a responsibility to “help people afford the insurance coverage they need.” The way to do that, his aides later explained, is to “level the playing field” so folks who buy their own insurance get as good a deal as folks who join their company’s plan.

Sounds reasonable. But details of the proposal, released by the Treasury Department, are causing quite a stir among the fraternity of insurance wonks who understand the implications.

Bush proposes a supercharged version of the health savings accounts, or HSAs, that Congress first authorized in 2003. Think of HSAs as an individual retirement account for health-care expenses. The way it works now, workers who choose “high-deductible” plans–plans that require patients to pay the first $1,500 or more out-of-pocket–are eligible to make tax-deductible contributions–up to $5,450 a year in a family plan–to an HSA and later use that money to pay uncovered medical expenses.

Bush would let that family sock away $10,500 per year tax-free. Moreover, they could claim a tax credit equal to 15.3 percent of the amount they deposited. But it gets sweeter. If the worker buys his own high-deductible insurance policy, rather than one offered at work, the premiums he pays would be fully tax-deductible and eligible for the 15.3 percent tax credit.

It’s all very complicated, but the bottom line is that relatively healthy people who can afford to set aside 10 grand a year would come out ahead by opening an HSA and buying their own insurance. After all, most employees cannot deduct the premiums they pay for their group plans, much less claim a refundable credit.

So what’s wrong with this picture? What’s wrong with encouraging workers, and their employers, to opt out of group insurance and go it alone … with large amounts of help from Uncle Sam?

Plenty, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington-based think tank. You can read its analysis online (www.cbpp.org), but an abbreviated list of horribles goes like this:

– If, as expected, the healthiest and wealthiest leave the group insurance pool, premiums will shoot up for the not-so-healthy and not-so-wealthy. That’s if they can find a plan that will take them. What insurance company is going to want your diabetic wife or disabled child?

– If, as expected, small-business owners, many of whom earn too much to qualify for a tax-deductible IRA, opt for the Bush HSA, which has no income limits, won’t many owners simply do away with their company’s group plan altogether? What’s good for the boss must be good for the workers, right?

– If, as the free-market theorists predict, people with high deductibles “shop around” for bargain health care and forgo “unnecessary” care, how are folks to decide what and when care is necessary, much less where they’ll get the most for their money? Surf the Internet? Thumb the Yellow Pages? So much for your primary-care physician and his or her trusted referral network of specialists.

No, what we have here is another Texas “two-fer,” a combo better than $3 gasoline and lower taxes on capital gains. What we have here is the fig leaf behind which corporate America will walk away from group health insurance, along with the sweetest tax shelter ever invented for the fortunate few with six-figure incomes.

RIP, group health insurance.

John McCarron writes, teaches and consults on urban affairs.

Former NEJM editor Relman supports single-payer in New York Times

New York Times
February 11, 2006

To the Editor:

Your Feb. 3 editorial “The Lopsided Bush Health Plan” nicely summarizes all the reasons why health savings accounts are a very bad idea and will not help solve the nation’s health crisis. But it disappoints at the end by failing to suggest what kinds of reforms might really work.

The evidence seems clear: Market-based policies cannot produce the system we need. Isn’t it time to consider a unified “single payer” insurance arrangement (“Medicare for all”) coupled with thoroughgoing reform of the delivery side as well?

Arnold S. Relman, M.D.
Boston, Feb. 3, 2006

The writer, professor emeritus of medicine and social medicine at Harvard Medical School, was editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, 1977-91.

Ownership Society Redux: New Name, Same Policy

By Sebastian Mallaby
Washington Post
February 13, 2006

The president likes to be consistent. Loves Laura; sticks to Laura. Kicks drink; keeps kicking it. First inaugural address: blue tie, white shirt. Second inaugural address: blue tie, white shirt. Weight in 2001: 190 pounds. Weight in 2005: 192 pounds. Hair length: same. Mood: same. No Clintonian gyrations.

Same deal when it comes to politics. Fights terrorists; keeps fighting them. Cuts taxes; keeps cutting them. Trusted Karl in Texas; still trusts him. Simple man. Straightforward man. How many policy moods and political gurus did Bill Clinton go through?

Same deal with the “ownership society.” First used the term in 2002. Went big with it at the Republican convention in 2004. Pretty much taped the slogan to his head in 2005, when he campaigned for personal Social Security accounts all across the country. You think George Bush would let go of this stuff just because Social Security reform failed? Fuhgedaboutit.

The ownership society is back, though it’s got a new label. Bush may not be pushing individual Social Security accounts these days. But he is pushing things called health savings accounts, which turn out to be similar.

Health savings accounts are ostensibly supposed to fix the health system. Right now, tax rules subsidize company-provided health insurance, but they’re less generous toward out-of-pocket medical payments; as a result, company health plans pay most bills and patients have no incentive to shop around for the best bargain. Health savings accounts end this tax bias. Anyone who buys an insurance policy with a deductible of $1,050 or more can open an account and save $5,250 a year toward out-of-pocket health costs, tax-free. This will shift control of medical spending into the hands of consumers, who will discipline overpriced hospitals and clinics.

Or so goes the theory. In practice, probably less than half of all health spending outside Medicaid and Medicare would be affected by the new consumer-driven discipline. Many hospital stays cost more than any deductible, so consumers would have no incentive to bargain; emergency-room patients aren’t in a fit state to negotiate prices with their doctors. But consider an even more basic question: Is the ostensible reason for health savings accounts the real one?

If the administration’s goal were merely to remove the tax bias against out-of-pocket health payments, it could simply make these tax-deductible. No need for health savings accounts to accomplish that — just tell people to count out-of-pocket payments against taxable income.

Even if the administration were determined to shelter out-of-pocket payments using health savings accounts, why make them so generous? It proposes both a tax deduction and a tax credit when money goes into the accounts; savings would accumulate tax-free and could be withdrawn tax-free also. As Jason Furman points out in a paper for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, no other savings vehicle enjoys so many privileges. And then there’s the size of these accounts. If the aim is to discipline health spending below the deductible, why subsidize savings up to $5,250 a year — five times more than the deductible?

In sum, health savings accounts are not just about ending the tax bias in favor of traditional company health plans. The administration is proposing a new kind of 401(k), and using it as an inducement to quit low-deductible insurance. Rich people, who gain most from the tax breaks on saving, will be first to sign on; healthy people, who subsidize sicker people in company health plans, will be right behind them. Their exit may force traditional health plans into a death spiral. The loss of the subsidy from healthy workers will drive premiums up, which will drive more healthy people into health savings accounts, which will drive premiums up further.

The State of the Union address (blue tie, white shirt) contained barely a mention of health savings accounts, but don’t let that fool you. Because these accounts are being pushed modestly, with no grand Social Security-style talk of remaking the social contract, there’s a chance that they’ll be seen as just one of various bewildering tax tweaks and slip quietly through Congress. But the proposal cries out for a debate very much like last year’s — a debate about personal saving vs. collective insurance.

A rerun of last year’s debate would show that health savings accounts are harder to defend than personal retirement ones. They are shockingly regressive: Furman’s study shows how a poor family might get a subsidy of $150 while a rich one might get more than $4,000. They have not just a transition cost but a real cost: The tax breaks could widen the deficit by at least $132 billion over 10 years and a lot more after that. And health savings accounts pose a more formidable threat to traditional corporate health plans than personal accounts posed to Social Security. Market forces are already dislodging company health plans; an extra shove could cause an avalanche.

The limited consumer discipline that would come from health savings accounts could not justify these disadvantages. But when you talk to administration officials, they express remarkably few doubts. They believed in the ownership society last year; they still believe in it this year. They believe in individual choice; they distrust collective programs. They don’t worry too much about the risks to the budget. Or to distributional justice. Or to existing safety nets.

Simple administration. Straightforward administration. The Clinton team would never have proposed such a clunker of a policy.

mallabys@washpost.com

Make state health insurance plan available to small firms

By Joseph Q. Jarvis
Salt Lake Tribune
February 12, 2006

Two days ago a bill, HB122, intended to provide Utah’s small-business owners with a new option for employee health benefits, was eviscerated by the Utah Health Insurance Association.

HB122, as originally written, authorized Public Employees Health Plan (PEHP) to organize a health benefit plan for employees of Utah’s small businesses. Written into the bill were planning steps which were adequate to identify and solve all problems and concerns related to cost, outreach and risk management.

A survey of more than 200 small-business owners in Utah found that their average employee age is 10 years younger than the average age of PEHP’s current beneficiaries. It is therefore possible that a PEHP small-business plan could be good both for small businesses and for the taxpayers who buy PEHP benefits for state, county and municipal employees.

Now, instead of providing a plausible solution to a critical problem, the bill merely proposes that a health insurance-dominated commission study the issue.

Recently, a Goldman-Sachs financial analyst observed that the Big Three U.S. automakers are “HMOs with wheels” that only happen to make cars. A well-known Princeton health economist added: “It’s insane to think that a company embedded in a fierce global competition can function as an insurance system.”

Yet U.S. health policy continues that insanity: American employers outspend Canadian employers 13-to-1 for the purchase of employee health benefits and 8-to-1 for the internal costs of arranging for and supervising benefits.

Nowhere do those costs hit harder than for small businesses. While 95 percent of the more than 600,000 Utahns working for businesses with 50 or more employees have a health benefit, only approximately half of the 250,000 Utahns working for small businesses do. Approximately 25,000 Utah small-business employees have lost their health insurance since 2000.

The vast majority of the 300,000 uninsured in Utah are small-business employees or their dependents. Unquestionably, the loss of health benefits can be attributed to the rapid rise of health premiums, which have risen five times faster than earnings over the past five years and double the national rate.

Health costs are making it difficult for Utah small businesses to compete either in the market for their goods and services or in attracting skilled workers. Ninety percent of Utah’s small-business owners indicate that health benefit costs negatively impact their profitability and employee retention.

If we care about economic development in Utah, we must find a way to make health benefits sustainably affordable for small-business employees.

High health care costs in the United States are not caused by Americans overutilizing health services, as some claim. International comparisons document that physician visits and hospital bed days by American patients are at or below the per capita average of other nations.

Rather, high American health care costs are caused by the related failures of efficiency and economies of scale. American health financing has a bureaucratic burden five times that of other industrialized nations.

Health insurance companies pay to deny health care. In response, providers of health care hire staff to extract payment from insurers.

Because insurers fail to aggregate people into large risk pools, they fail both to spread and manage risk optimally and to maximize group purchasing power to moderate prices.

It stands to reason that a search for sustainable health financing for small-business employees in Utah should begin by identifying the most efficient health financing system in the state and making that available to small-business owners.

Unquestionably, the Public Employee Health Plan is Utah’s most efficient payer for health services. At 3.8 percent, PEHP administrative costs are about one-fourth of the average similar costs for the state’s commercial carriers.

Unfortunately, by state statute, PEHP is currently unable to offer a small-business health plan, which means that while the state’s commercial carriers are apparently increasingly unable to meet the needs of small business, PEHP is not allowed to even try.

The only opposition to the bill came from commercial insurance carriers. It is apparently not in their interest to allow small businesses to experience sustainably affordable health benefits through the state’s most efficient payer.

If you support the interests of small-business owners, employees and taxpayers over health insurance carriers, call Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and your legislators and tell them to reinstate the original intent of HB122.

Joseph Q. Jarvis is a physician and president of the Utah Health Alliance.

Trusted Rx for Ill Nation

By Dan Carpenter
Indianapolis Star
February 12, 2006

To prescribe health savings accounts for a medical system that’s the most overpriced, overcomplicated, underperforming and unfair in the developed world is an artless dodge that denies the possibility the real cure may already be in hand.

It’s called Medicare. It’s run by the government at an overhead rate of roughly 5 percent, compared to upwards of 25 percent for private insurance companies. It doesn’t waste a lot of resources evading payment of claims or driving undesirably sick people off the rolls. It offers pretty much all the choices anybody else does and boasts a high satisfaction rate. You don’t lose it when you lose your job or your employer loses market share.

Medicare, or single-payer insurance by its generic label, is so good that other capitalist nations offer it to everybody. And no, heart attack victims don’t die waiting for a cot. The industrialized world’s average per-capita spending on health care is less than half ours, and their results are better in category after category, from infant mortality to life expectancy to doctor visits.

Why does it work so well? Because it works differently from health savings accounts. Single-payer insurance operates with the widest possible risk pool, meaning the wealthiest and healthiest chip in to pick up the poorest and potentially sickest.

This means there’s enough money to provide routine/preventive attention to everyone, instead of leaving scores of millions to put off care until they die or seek highly expensive emergency care as welfare cases.

This means no wasting billions on advertising to compete for the least needy customers. This means fewer clerks getting paid to cull out the cancer patients and more funds to hire cancer treatment personnel. Not to mention fewer eight-figure bonuses to executives for raising rates and reducing claims.

It has to happen, says retired Indianapolis surgeon Chris Stack, who works with a single-payer advocacy group called Physicians for a National Health Program. “You have GM, Wal-Mart, plus the average guy making $50,000 working his (deleted) off with two kids — he’s getting screwed. This cuts across ideological lines.”

So why is President Bush proposing not to expand Medicare but to cut it, while offering tax incentives to those who can go out and buy their own health care with high premiums and high deductibles, thus shrinking the risk pool?

Vested interests, of course. That’s why they made a labyrinth of the Medicare drug component with Plan D, an epochal transfer of national wealth to corporations, which waste more than $100 million of our health resources a year in lobbying.

So, you have top-heavy politics abetting a top-heavy health care system. Why isn’t the public pushing back?

“It’s such a puzzle,” says Matthew Gutwein, president of Wishard Memorial Hospital. “There is general skepticism about government as a better alternative to the private market. It’s not true of health care that private is better.”

While Gutwein doesn’t oppose health savings accounts, he calls them a Band-Aid and sees signs all about that single-payer is inevitable. The United States, he says, can’t compete globally and remain the only nation that ties health care to the workplace and marketplace.

So husband your money and try a hospital-tested home remedy. “We love Medicare,” the Wishard head man says. The question grows ever more pressing: What’s not to love?

Carpenter is Star op-ed columnist. Contact him at (317) 444-6172 or at dan.carpenter@indystar.com.

VA Care Is Rated Superior to That in Private Hospitals

By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 20, 2006; A15

The Department of Veterans Affairs medical system once epitomized poor-quality care. But after a series of changes, the system has been hailed in recent years as a model for health care reform.

Now, survey results released this week indicate that those improvements have translated into a high level of satisfaction among veterans getting treated by the rehabilitated VA.

The telephone survey, conducted in October, found inpatient care received a rating of 83 on a 100-point scale; outpatient care got a rating of 80. In comparison, a similar survey of patients receiving private care found they rated their satisfaction at 73 for inpatient care and 75 for outpatient care. The survey involved more than 200 veterans who received care at one of the VA’s 154 hospitals or 875 clinics.

“We’re very pleased and continue to be very proud of the work that people are doing in this vast health care system,” said Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson. “The real proof in the pudding is in the taste — that is, ‘What do the people we’re taking care of think?’ And they give us very good grades.”

The findings mark the sixth consecutive year the VA health care system has outranked the private sector for customer satisfaction.

Nicholson attributed the high ratings to the changes in the system, such as implementation of electronic records to reduce the risk of errors.

“Our system has become not only much more efficient, but safer,” Nicholson said.

The survey, known as the American Customer Satisfaction Index, has been conducted since 1994 by the National Quality Research Center at the University of Michigan business school and two consultants, the CFI Group and the Federal Consulting Group.

Peter S. Gaytan, director of veterans affairs and rehabilitation for the American Legion, said he was not surprised by the findings because the quality of VA care has been steadily improving.

“The old image of the VA warehousing veterans has changed immensely in the past 20 years,” Gaytan said.

But Gaytan said many veterans have to wait months or travel long distances to get care because tight budgets have forced many facilities to cut back on service.

“The problem that the American Legion has is the accessibility to care. There are veterans waiting in line to receive care,” Gaytan said. “With the veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s our hope that they won’t be turned away.”

Nicholson acknowledged that some veterans do have to wait for care, but he said the waiting time has been improving and continues to improve.

“We absolutely are working on that and are making progress,” he said.

It's the high deductible, not the HSA cash account

Pearlstein Live
washingtonpost.com
February 8, 2006

Steven Pearlstein writes about business and the economy for The Washington Post. This is from a transcript of his online discussion.

Washington, D.C.: I’m hoping you can clarify a key point during your discussion. Nearly every newspaper article I’ve seen recently reports that there are now 3 million HSAs (this is based on a recent survey of health plans conducted by AHIP and has been cited by the White House). This is misleading. AHIP’s study found that 3 million lives were covered by a high-deductible health plan (HDHP) that is COMPATIBLE with an HSA. HSAs must be opened by a bank or other qualified trustee. Based on some early data we’re compiling, it looks like about 1 million HSAs (the actual accounts) have been established as of Jan. 1.

Steve Davis
Managing Editor
Inside Consumer-Directed Care

Steven Pearlstein: Thanks for that clarification.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006/02/07/DI2006020700721.html

Inside Consumer-Directed Care is an industry publication:
http://www.aishealth.com/Products/NewsICD.html

Comment: By Don McCanne, M.D.

CDHC advocates (consumer-directed health care) are using AHIP’s report (America’s Health Insurance Plans) on three million HSA-compatible (health savings account) HDHPs (high-deductible health plans) to “prove”
that they’re not only for the young and wealthy. Their claim is that many older individuals with more modest incomes are turning to HSAs.

Higher-income individuals welcome the tax advantages and the opportunity to expand their pensions through the HSAs. Lower-income individuals are more desperate and are seeking health care coverage with lower premiums.
Higher-income individuals also welcome the HDHPs as smarter insurance when paying up-front costs is no problem, but lower-income individuals lack the discretionary income to fund the HSAs.

We do not yet have the data defining the income levels of the one-third opening HSAs and of the two-thirds selecting only the HDHPs but not the HSAs. But if the studies show any other trend than the blatantly obvious, the news headlines should reflect the view of a nation gone mad.

I checked eHealthInsurance for HSA-compatible plans in my zip code, and the lowest deductible I found for a family of four was $3500 individual/$7000 family, and the lowest premium was $2448. Median household income in 2004 was $44,389. Calculate the cost of housing, food, clothing, transportation, and other essentials, and then add the cost of HDHP premiums and the deductibles required before health care coverage begins, and then see how much you have left to deposit in a health savings account (even if you gave up computers, television cable, cell phones, etc.). It is no wonder that the nation’s savings rate is now a negative.

The CDHP advocates claim that these policies are great for older, lower-income individuals. To be fair, they are not quite countering our argument that they’re for the healthy and wealthy. They avoid using the spin that they also work for the sick and poor, substituting, instead, older and with lower incomes. But ignoring the needs of the sick is the fatal flaw in their proposal.

There is an important consequence of the HDHPs, intended or unintended. Only individuals with health care needs will be contributing to the health-cost-related expansion of the negative national savings rate. The majority of us who remain healthy will not have to share in this particular burden, at least not until the cost-shifting exceeds our discretionary income.

Okay. So young or old, sick or healthy, high-deductible health plans work for you as long as you qualify on the basis of wealth.

Using technology better

Is Technological Change In Medicine Always Worth It? The Case Of Acute Myocardial Infarction
By Jonathan S. Skinner, Douglas O. Staiger, Elliott S. Fisher
Health Affairs
February 7, 2006

Abstract:

We examine Medicare costs and survival gains for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) during 1986-2002. As David Cutler and Mark McClellan did in earlier work, we find that overall gains in post-AMI survival more than justified the increases in costs during this period. Since 1996, however, survival gains have stagnated, while spending has continued to increase. We also consider changes in spending and outcomes at the regional level. Regions experiencing the largest spending gains were not those realizing the greatest improvements in survival. Factors yielding the greatest benefits to health were not the factors that drove up costs, and vice versa.

From the Discussion:

Dramatic progress has been made in the treatment of heart attacks among the elderly during the past two decades. Between 1986 and 2002 the average one-year survival rate following AMI increased by nearly 10 per 100 elderly AMI patients at an estimated cost of less than $25,000 per life year saved. But underlying these numbers is tremendous heterogeneity across time and space: There was little improvement in survival after 1996, despite continued growth in costs, and there was much variation in survival gains across regions and over time, with regional gains that were (if anything) negatively related to costs. These facts and others like them have generated a debate over the value of additional medical care spending. On the one hand, aggregate trends in patient outcomes suggest that the technological innovations were “worth it.” In contrast, the apparent lack of any strong association between costs and patient outcomes or quality of care across regions suggests that aggressive cost-control policies might benefit society by eliminating unnecessary medical care for patients in high-cost regions.

A key assumption is that uneven diffusion of cost-effective innovations is a key factor driving differences in patient costs and outcomes. Support for this view comes from Paul Heidenreich and McClellan, who concluded that the vast majority of the increase in thirty-day survival following AMI between 1975 and 1995 was the consequence of low-cost treatments such as aspirin, beta-blockers, angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, and thrombolytics. Furthermore, both observational and clinical trial evidence suggests that use of these noninvasive treatments reduces the incremental benefit of more-expensive treatments such as invasive surgery.

It is important to note that our new view does not apply solely to “low-tech” effective treatments such as aspirin and beta-blockers, but rather it applies equally to any highly effective treatment, whether high-tech or low-tech.

The benefits of health care technology are often substantial. However, as health care costs continue to rise, squeezing consumers, producers, and the federal budget alike, principles of accountability-that each incremental dollar should provide something of real value to patients-become increasingly important. That some regions could implement technological innovations at remarkably low cost is a reminder that waste and inefficiency are not inevitable by-products of technological growth. Thus, efforts to develop measures of quality and efficiency that can encourage hospitals or provider groups to adopt low-cost, highly effective care, while discouraging incremental spending with no apparent benefits, might allow us to keep the golden goose of technological progress alive and well nourished.

http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/hlthaff.
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And…

To Use Technology Better
By Alan M. Garber

… their findings suggest that we should reexamine our approach to biomedical innovation. In nearly every disease area, we could use better treatments and better diagnostic approaches. For some diseases, like most cancers, dramatic improvements in outcomes are unlikely to occur without major investments in the development of new drugs, devices, and biotechnology products. As much as we would like new tools, though, Skinner and colleagues show that we haven’t mastered the tools that we already possess. The gains from more effective, efficient approaches to heart attack care, without using any medications or procedures that are not already available, would be enormous.

We have much to learn about promoting better medical care, and we should not underestimate the difficulty of the task. But in comparison to the money spent to develop new technologies, we spend a paltry sum on finding ways to improve the use of technologies we already have. According to a widely cited estimate, the average cost of developing a new drug-an average drug, not a breakthrough-was $802 million in 2000, or about $900 million in 2005 dollars. The entire 2005 budget for the only federal agency responsible for research on more effective care delivery, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), was less than $320 million.

Encouraging both innovation and access to new technologies is the central challenge facing the U.S. health care system. If the cost of medical innovations is too high, only the well-insured-such as today’s Medicare beneficiaries-will have access to them. But as health spending rises, fewer and fewer people will have insurance, and swelling out-of-pocket payments will place some new treatments out of the reach of even the insured. A shrinking number of patients will then benefit from advances in care. New technologies can improve health, but unless we learn to use them better, we cannot expect to harness their value.

http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/hlthaff.
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Comment: By Don McCanne, M.D.

Should we continue with our current fragmented system of funding care that results in ever more costly expansion of both mediocre and valuable high-tech services? Or should we change to a single, integrated system of funding care that would make better use of what we have, while rewarding new technology that truly improves health care value?

With dedicated public stewards, a single payer system would be much more effective in achieving the latter goal.

Where does all the money go?

By Dr. Susanne King
Berkshire Eagle
Tuesday, February 7, 2006

The United States spent $1.9 trillion on health care in 2004, 16 percent of the nation’s economy. Yet 46 million Americans remain uninsured, a 6 million increase since President Bush took office. In his State of the Union address last week, the president failed to mention these statistics, nor did he offer any effective solutions to the health care crisis.

His suggestion for wider use of electronic records could help provide more efficient care, but provides no help toward addressing the glaring inequities and financial costs of our health care system. The health savings accounts he proposes, which would make patients “take ownership” of their health care, are unaffordable for the vast majority of people who don’t have extra money for a savings account, or for the enormous deductible they would have to pay before using the account. Health savings accounts please Wall Street banks, as the New York Times noted last week; that should make us all suspicious.

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When I was in medical school, I spent a few of my clinical clerkships in the Veterans’ Administration (VA) hospital allied with my medical school. The difference between the VA hospital and the private hospitals where I also trained was remarkable. In the VA hospital, laboratory and radiology services were so slow and inept that medical students would wheel patients to the X-ray department and perform blood counts in the laboratory. The elevators never worked. Nor did many of the ancillary staff. I directed my first “code blue” (a cardiac arrest) as a junior medical student on a young veteran with pneumonia. I ran the code until the resident physician arrived from the far reaches of
the hospital.

But all that has changed. Last week I spoke with my nephew, a junior medical student who has just finished a rotation at a VA hospital. He spoke of the high quality of care he observed there, as well as the efficiency of the system. Recent studies have shown that both the quality of care and patient satisfaction are higher in the VA system than in the private sector.

And the VA system has improved health care to veterans, even as it is spending less per patient. Between 1999 and 2003, the number of patients enrolled in the VA system increased by 70 percent, yet funding only increased by 41 percent. Amazingly, the VA system has been able to provide better care, for satisfied patients, with less money. Why hasn’t President Bush looked at a government program that works, to offer a solution to the health care crisis?

My nephew, a future doctor of America, said that the VA system has made him a believer in a national health care system, a “single-payer” insurance system. “Single-payer” means that there would be one administrator of health care funds, the government, which would collect and disperse the $1.9 trillion that are now administered by a huge patchwork of private insurance companies. That is a major reason why health care in the U.S. is so expensive, yet provides too little care to too few people. Too much of the $1.9 trillion goes toward the profiteering of drug and insurance companies. There is no private insurance in the VA system; and an additional source of savings is that drug companies have to negotiate prices with the VA, with resultant discounts for VA drugs, making their prices more commensurate with drug prices in other countries.

While many Americans cannot afford insurance coverage or medications, drug companies made more profits in 2002 than the other 490 companies in the Fortune 500 combined. The new Medicare drug bill, however, does not allow Medicare to negotiate with drug companies; it is yet another gift to the pharmaceutical industry from the Bush administration. While he is handing huge profits to the drug companies, as well as the insurance companies who are anticipating their windfall profits from Medicare, he plans to reduce payments to hospitals, the actual providers of care.

A new study from the University of California supports a 2003 study by Harvard researchers, Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, on the administrative costs that beleaguer our current health care system. Using conservative estimates, they found that only 66 percent of the health care dollar actually goes toward medical care. The rest goes toward billing (every doctor’s nightmare), marketing, insurance company profits, and administration. The Harvard study showed that a single-payer national health insurance, which would eliminate the insurance companies and streamline the healthcare system, would save almost $300 billion, enough to provide comprehensive health care for everyone.

Our veterans have the reformed health care system they deserve, one that provides comprehensive, high quality, efficient health care for their entire lives, including nursing home care. And we all deserve this kind of care.

Unlike the VA, which is restricted to specific public hospitals with salaried doctors, a single-payer national health care system would include private hospitals and doctors’ offices. But like the VA, everyone would be covered for all their health care needs, and, like the VA, this health care system would decrease administrative costs and prescription drug costs.

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And here at home in Massachusetts, where we spend more per person on health care than anywhere in the world, the state Legislature’s health care conference committee still hasn’t been able to negotiate legislation to expand access to affordable health insurance. Ironically, financing is the sticking point, as the legislators look for more money to finance a plan that includes the insurance companies, with their administrative waste, profits and complexity.

It would be so simple if our Legislature would just consider single-payer legislation for our state, the Massachusetts Health Care Trust (Senate Bill 755). No extra funds would be needed; the studies have been done which show a single-payer system is feasible with the money we currently spend on health care. We need to elect the legislators who will make affordable health care reform happen.