Crisis looms as Australians look to ditch private health insurance

By Adam Gartrell
The Sydney Morning Herald, September 17, 2016

Almost 70 per cent of Australians with private health insurance have considered ditching or downgrading their cover in the last year in the face of relentless price rises and diminishing value for money, polling has found.

Close to 80 per cent of people believe health insurance companies put profits before patients and more than 90 per cent are concerned they’re trying to “Americanise” the health system to boost their bottom line.

Asked for their opinion on the statement “private health insurers put profits before patients”, 53.5 strongly agreed and 24.4 per cent agreed. Fewer than 10 per cent of people disagreed with the statement.

A whopping 73 per cent said they were “very concerned” about the creeping Americanisation of the Australian health care system and a further 18.6 per cent said they were “somewhat concerned”.

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/crisis-looms-as-australians-look-to-ditch-private-health-insurance-20160916-grichb.html

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Under their conservative government, Australia seems to be creeping toward American-style privatization of their health insurance. Over 90 percent of Australians are concerned about this “Americanization” of their system. Can’t we learn something from them?

Senators Introduce Resolution Calling for Health Care Public Option

U.S. Senate, Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions
September 15, 2016

Today, Oregon’s Senator Jeff Merkley and Senators Charles E. Schumer (D-NY), Patty Murray (D-WA), Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), along with 22 of their colleagues, introduced a Senate resolution calling for a public option in the health insurance market.

Senate Resolution

Supporting efforts to increase competition and accountability in the health insurance marketplace, and extend accessible, quality, affordable health care coverage to every American through the choice of a public insurance plan.

After nine whereases:

Resolved, that the Senate supports efforts —

to build on the Affordable Care Act by ensuring that, in addition to the coverage options provided by private insurers, every American has access to a public health insurance option which, when established, will strengthen competition, improve affordability for families by reducing premiums and increasing choices, and save American taxpayers billions of dollars.

http://www.help.senate.gov/ranking/newsroom/press/senators-introduce-resolution-calling-for-health-care-public-option

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

This week an intensive campaign is being initiated in support of a “public option” – offering the choice of a public, nonprofit insurance plan which competes with private health plans. Our enthusiasm should be tempered.

Following are a couple of points to keep in mind, especially when you hear promises that the public option is a giant step towards single payer:

* A public option will be only one more player in our costly, fragmented system of funding health care. It alone will bring us none of the important features of a single payer system such as efficiency, equity, systemic cost savings, and universality. The profoundly wasteful administrative complexity will remain.

* Previous efforts by Congress, heavily influenced by the insurance industry, to design a public option led to a highly flawed model that would prevent the “unfair” competitive advantage that a government program would otherwise have over the private insurance industry. This same insurance industry influence is precisely why the co-op models authorized by ACA are now failing. And there is absolutely no reason to believe that the insurance industry might change its tune now.

* The public option has been characterized as a Medicare buy-in. But Medicare is an equitably funded social insurance program covering everyone who is eligible, whereas the public option would be just another individual plan in a market of private plans, likely with higher premiums because of adverse selection.

* If a public option were to be enacted some believe that it would be only a matter of time before everyone would want in once it demonstrates its superiority, and then we would have a de facto single payer system. You need look only at the experience with the conspiracy between Congress and the private insurance industry in the establishment of the private Medicare Advantage plans that compete with traditional Medicare. Congress has given the private plans an unfair advantage so Medicare beneficiaries are moving from the public program to the private plans in ever greater numbers – the exact opposite of what the public option supporters visualize.

* The Affordable Care Act drew support of much of the progressive community as it seemed to them to be the only politically feasible approach at the time. Thus the clamor for comprehensive reform died down. We are hearing again that single payer is not feasible, but the public option is. When the public option is enacted, it will be mislabeled as single payer, and then it will be exposed for the miserable failure that it will be because it was designed by the private insurance industry to fail (like the co-ops). The single payer concept will have been tarnished, and it could be decades before our nation would recover and be ready for reform that really works. In the meantime, millions would have gone broke, suffered, and died merely because we didn’t think single payer was feasible.

Many look to Jacob Hacker for inspiration on enacting and implementing a public option. But he has identified the greatest barrier to moving forward. In a recent Vox article, he wrote, ”Private plans lobbied aggressively against the public option in 2009 on the grounds that it would amount to unfair competition. But insurers don’t want a level playing field; they want the field tilted in their favor.”

Now see if you can find a Congress that doesn’t tilt the field in favor of the private insurers. Not even on the horizon.

The Supplemental Poverty Measure: 2015

By Trudi Renwick and Liana Fox
United Census Bureau, September 2016

This is the sixth report describing the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) released by the U.S. Census Bureau, with support from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The SPM extends the official poverty measure by taking account of many of the government programs designed to assist low-income families and individuals that are not included in the current official poverty measure.

In 2015, 45.7 million people were poor using the SPM definition of poverty, more than the 43.5 million using the official definition of poverty with the adjusted universe.

The SPM and the Effect of Cash and Noncash Transfers, Taxes, and Other Nondiscretionary Expenses

(Excerpt): Without subtracting MOOP (Medical Out-of-Pocket) expenses from income, the SPM rate would have been 3.5 percentage points lower. In numbers, 11.2 million fewer people would have been classified as poor.

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/p60-258.pdf

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Uninsured rate drops, but medical expenses still drag millions into poverty

By Bob Herman
Modern Healthcare, September 13, 2016

However, separate census data showed that medical out-of-pocket expenses dragged 11.2 million people into poverty in 2015, a potential symptom of the shift of moving employees and individuals into health plans that have higher deductibles, copays and coinsurance rates.

http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20160913/NEWS/160919973

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

We read repeatedly about how out-of-pocket health care spending is exposing patients to financial hardship. Yet our policymakers are continuing to expand that exposure under the screwball concept that spending out of pocket makes patients better health care shoppers, which we know is not true. It only makes them forgo beneficial care. Today’s number should be an awakening call: in 2015, out-of-pocket health care expenses shoved 11 million individuals into poverty!

At a time when we need to improve our anti-poverty programs, we are pushing more people into poverty through policies inherent in our dysfunctional health care financing system. With a well-designed single payer system, nobody would be forced into poverty because of medical bills.

Or should we continue with policies that prevent people from getting the care they should have, while forcing millions into poverty? How could anyone think that we really have a choice here?

Studies: Employer Costs Slow As Consumers Use Less Care, Deductibles Soar

By Jay Hancock and Shefali Luthra
Kaiser Health News, September 14, 2016

Employer health insurance expenses continued to rise by relatively low amounts this year, aided by moderate increases in total medical spending but also by workers taking a greater share of the costs, new research shows.

Average premiums for employer-sponsored family coverage rose 3.4 percent for 2016, down from annual increases of nearly twice that much before 2011.

But 3.4 percent is still faster than recent economic growth, which determines the country’s long-run ability to afford health care.

And the tame premium increases obscure out-of-pocket costs that are being loaded on employees in the form of higher deductibles and copayments. Another new study suggests those shifts have prompted workers and their families to use substantially fewer medical services.

Since 2011, the average deductible for single coverage has soared 63 percent, according to the survey, while workers’ earnings have gone up by only 11 percent.

Change from 2011 to 2016 (from graph available at KHN link below):

6% – Overall inflation
11% – Workers earnings
19% – Single coverage premiums
63% – Single coverage deductibles, all workers

Members of high-deductible plans paid nearly a fourth of their total medical costs out of pocket versus only 14 percent for members of conventional plans.

Average annual 2016 premiums for single coverage were $6,435 for single coverage and $18,142 for family coverage, according to the Kaiser report.

http://khn.org/news/studies-employer-costs-slow-as-consumers-use-less-care-deductibles-soar/

KFF 2016 Employer Health Benefits Survey:
http://kff.org/health-costs/report/2016-employer-health-benefits-survey/

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Although most media attention has been directed toward health plans offered by the ACA exchanges, most individuals actually obtain their insurance through their employment, so it is important to observe what is happening there, and the news is not so good.

In the past five years, inflation has remained low and wage increases have almost doubled the rate of inflation, and that’s the good news. Medical costs have continued to increase at a rate greater than inflation, and that has contributed to the tripling of insurance premiums. But what is really disturbing is that the rate of increase in plan deductibles is ten times the rate of inflation. Ten times!

Many enrollees in the ACA exchange plans receive government subsidies to help pay for their premiums and deductibles, but those those subsidies are not available for the majority who receive their coverage from their employer (though higher-income employees unfairly benefit from tax expenditures that help pay their premiums).

Fortunately, the majority of workers and their families are quite healthy and have little need for health care. It is those families that have greater medical needs that are now facing these high deductibles. Precisely those individuals who need help paying their medical bills are the ones being punished with financial penalties for being sick (the financial penalties being high deductibles and other cost sharing).

Our geniuses in the policy community came up with the concept of incentivizing enrollment in low actuarial value plans in the ACA exchanges – the ones that require high deductibles to reduce the pressure to increase premiums. Employers have quickly latched onto that concept and are now increasing the deductibles in their plans to levels that will cause financial hardship for too many families.

Did you catch that line above? The one that says that we are assessing financial penalties against those unfortunate enough to have significant medical needs. Isn’t just suffering from medical problems enough punishment for the unfortunate? Or maybe we don’t even want them to be punished. Maybe we would prefer to help them, as other civilized societies do.

Let’s fix this system. A single payer national health program with first dollar coverage would be a great start.

Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2015

By Jessica C. Barnett and Marina Vornovitsky
United States Census Bureau, September 2016

Highlights (excerpts)

*  The uninsured rate decreased between 2014 and 2015 by 1.3 percentage points as measured by the CPS ASEC. In 2015, the percentage of people without health insurance coverage for the entire calendar year was 9.1 percent, or 29.0 million, lower than the rate and number of uninsured in 2014 (10.4 percent or 33.0 million).

*  The percentage of people with health insurance coverage for all or part of 2015 was 90.9 percent, higher than the rate in 2014 (89.6 percent).

*  In 2015, private health insurance coverage continued to be more prevalent than public coverage, at 67.2 percent and 37.1 percent, respectively. Of the subtypes of health insurance, employer-based insurance covered 55.7 percent of the population for some or all of the calendar year, followed by Medicaid (19.6 percent), Medicare (16.3 percent), direct-purchase (16.3 percent), and military cover- age (4.7 percent).

*  In 2015, the percentage of uninsured children under age 19 was 5.3 percent. This was a decrease from 6.2 percent in 2014.

*  In 2015, the uninsured rate for children under age 19 in poverty, 7.5 percent, was higher than the uninsured rate for children not in poverty, 4.8 percent.

*  In 2015, non-Hispanic Whites had the lowest uninsured rate among race and Hispanic origin groups, at 6.7 percent. The uninsured rates for Blacks and Asians were higher than for non-Hispanic Whites, at 11.1 percent and 7.5 percent, respectively. Hispanics had the highest uninsured rate in 2015, at 16.2 percent.

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/p60-257.pdf

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Income and Poverty in the United States: 2015

By Bernadette D. Proctor, Jessica L. Semega, and Melissa A. Kollar
United States Census Bureau, September 2016

Highlights (excerpts)

*  Median household income was $56,516 in 2015, an increase in real terms of 5.2 percent from the 2014 median of $53,718.

*  The 2015 real median earnings of men ($51,212) and women ($40,742) who worked full time, year round increased 1.5 percent and 2.7 percent, respectively, between 2014 and 2015.

*  In 2015 there were 43.1 million people in poverty, 3.5 million less than in 2014.

*  The 2015 poverty rate was 1.0 percentage point higher than in 2007, the year before the most recent recession.

*  The income deficit for families in poverty (the difference in dollars between a family’s income and its poverty threshold) averaged $10,118 in 2015, which was not statistically different from the inflation-adjusted 2014 estimate.

Income Inequality

Since 1993, the earliest year available for comparable measures of income inequality, the Gini index was up 5.5 percent. Comparing changes in household income at selected percentiles shows that income inequality has increased from 1999 (the year that household income peaked before the 2001 recession) to 2015 (Table A-2). Incomes at the 50th and 10th percentiles declined 2.4 percent and 9.9 percent, respectively, while income at the 90th percentile increased 5.7 percent between 1999 and 2015. Since 1999, the 90th to 10th percentile income ratio (10.42 in 1999 and 12.23 in 2015) has increased 17.4 percent.

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/p60-256.pdf

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PNHP release on Census health insurance report:
https://www.pnhp.org/news/2016/september/stronger-rx-than-obamacare-needed-to-cover-everyone-and-control-costs-physician-

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

The good news is that more people than ever now have health insurance. The bad news is that 29 million people remain uninsured with little hope that this number will decrease significantly because of our flawed model of health care financing. The other bad news, which does not appear in this report, is that costs are up, out-of-pocket spending is less affordable, and patients are losing choice of their health care professionals.

Great news is that median household income is up, and there are 3.5 million fewer people living in poverty. The terrible news is that we still have 43 million people in poverty. Further, the increase in median income was not enough to reverse the trend in income inequality which has prevented low- and middle-income workers from getting ahead.

It must be disappointing for many of those with income gains to have the additional funds consumed by higher insurance premiums, larger deductibles, and costs of unavoidable out-of-network care. It is particularly a shame when we know that we can improve health care equity by simply changing to a single payer national health program.

Providing the 29 million uninsured with health care should be the easy step. Then we can intensify our efforts in addressing the more difficult problem of improving the living standards for the 43 million still living in poverty. But charity alone won’t do it. We need efficacious public policies and a government that will enact and implement them.

Dropout by Dartmouth Raises Questions on Health Law Cost-Savings Effort

By Robert Pear
The New York Times, September 10, 2016

In its quest to remake the nation’s health care system, the Obama administration has urged doctors and hospitals to band together to improve care and cut costs, using a model devised by researchers at Dartmouth College.

But Dartmouth itself, facing mounting financial losses in the federal program, has dropped out, raising questions about the future of the new entities known as accountable care organizations, created under the Affordable Care Act.

The entities are in the vanguard of efforts under the health law to move Medicare away from a disjointed fee-for-service system to a new model that rewards doctors who collaborate and coordinate care.

“There’s little in the way of analysis or data about how A.C.O.s did in 2015,” said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. “The results have not been a home run.”

In addition, he said, “there is little reason to think that A.C.O.s will bend the cost curve in a meaningful way” unless they bear more financial risk, sharing losses as well as savings with the government.

An evaluation for the federal government found that Dartmouth’s accountable care organization had reduced Medicare spending on hospital stays, medical procedures, imaging and tests. And it achieved goals for the quality of care. But it was still subject to financial penalties because it did not meet money-saving benchmarks set by federal officials.

“We were cutting costs and saving money and then paying a penalty on top of that,” said Dr. Robert A. Greene, an executive vice president of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock health system. “We would have loved to stay in the federal program, but it was just not sustainable.”

Dr. Elliott S. Fisher, the director of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, said: “It’s hard to achieve savings if, like Dartmouth, you are a low-cost provider to begin with. I helped design the model of accountable care organizations. So it’s sad that we could not make it work here.”

Dartmouth-Hitchcock is the main teaching hospital for Dartmouth’s medical school, of which the Dartmouth Institute is part.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/us/politics/dropout-by-dartmouth-raises-questions-on-health-law-cost-savings-effort.html

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Creating Accountable Care Organizations: The Extended Hospital Medical Staff

By Elliott S. Fisher, Douglas O. Staiger, Julie P.W. Bynum and Daniel J. Gottlieb
Health Affairs, January 2007 (online December 2006)

Abstract

Many current policies and approaches to performance measurement and payment reform focus on individual providers; they risk reinforcing the fragmented care and lack of coordination experienced by patients with serious illness. In this paper we show that Medicare beneficiaries receive most of their care from relatively coherent local delivery systems comprising physicians and the hospitals where they work or admit their patients. Efforts to create accountable care organizations at this level — the extended hospital medical staff — deserve consideration as a potential means of improving the quality and lowering the cost of care.

http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/26/1/w44.abstract

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How does the Affordable Care Act define ACOs?

Comment by Don McCanne, M.D.
Quote of the Day, October 28, 2010

Excerpt

So how do ACOs achieve higher quality and lower cost?

The ACOs are not rewarded monetarily for meeting the quality standards. Their motivation to comply is to avoid being suspended from the program.

Costs are reduced by the shared savings program. A benchmark is established for each ACO “using the most recent available 3 years of per-beneficiary expenditures for parts A and B services for Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries assigned to the ACO.” If the ACO can provide care for costs below the benchmark, the ACO then shares those savings with HHS. The benchmark is reset at the beginning of each 3 year agreement.

If the costs are above the benchmark, then the fees are still paid as usual, with no adjustments.

Think about this. The incentives continue to promote greater volume. There is no penalty for running the charges up. Is the reward for reducing the volume and intensity of services enough? Since fixed costs for the ACO are relatively unchanged, the reductions in marginal overhead expenses due to reduced volume must be greater than the amount of savings that HHS shares with the ACO in order to come out ahead. Since this is the opposite of “making it up in volume,” it is more likely that net income will be reduced. Further, since the benchmarks are reset every 3 years based on lower utilization, it is very unlikely that that the ACO could continue to ratchet down services to qualify for shared savings.

(A later iteration included penalties for failure to meet savings targets.)

https://www.pnhp.org/news/2010/october/how-does-the-affordable-care-act-define-acos

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Elliott Fisher questions whether ACOs will work

Comment by Don McCanne, M.D.
Quote of the Day, March 28, 2011

Excerpt

Accountable care organizations (ACOs) began as an abstract concept of integrating health care providers into a not-yet-defined entity that would be rewarded for improving quality and reducing costs. Without knowing what they were, Congress included them in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Dartmouth’s Elliott Fisher, who was one of the first to promote the concept, now says that “there are some really important questions about whether this will work.”

https://www.pnhp.org/news/2011/march/elliott-fisher-questions-whether-acos-will-work

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Elliott Fisher and his colleagues at the Dartmouth Institute are generally credited with introducing in 2006 the concept of the accountable care organization (ACO) – coordinated organizations of hospitals and their extended medical staffs that would improve quality and lower costs (HMO 2.0?). The concept was incorporated into the Affordable Care Act. But by 2011, we should have been concerned when Elliott Fisher said, “there are some really important questions about whether this will work.”

Many doubts have been expressed about this model, and after a decade of fooling around with it, the record can be summed up by Ashish Jha’s understatement, “The results have not been a home run.”

Well it did not work for Dartmouth-Hitchcock in spite of Elliott Fisher’s presence. They dropped out of the program a year ago (though Robert Pear’s article provides much needed transparency on the ACO concept). Fisher said that he helped design the model so it is sad that they couldn’t make it work there. He said that it was hard for Dartmouth-Hitchcock to achieve savings since they were already “a low cost provider.”

But it should not have been a surprise. In a Quote of the Day in 2010 (excerpt above) we explained why, in a “think about this” comment, that the basic concept was fundamentally flawed – the reward for participation being that you would have to give a major portion of your savings to Medicare instead of keeping them as profits (Medicare shared savings).

It’s too bad that Congress didn’t listen to those of us expressing concerns when they included the concept in the Affordable Care Act. Yet acting CMS administrator Andrew Slavitt is moving forward, saying that the current iteration is “like the iPhone 2.” If you read the thousands of pages of rules that CMS is generating, it is clear that this will be a godsend – for those profiting from administrative services, that is.

Abstractions of higher quality and lower costs sound great, but you need proven policy to carry them out. The single payer experiments have already been done, and they work! Even Gail Wilensky says, “Enough demonstrations, already.”