PNHP

Would single payer fix this physician’s problems?

Would single payer fix this physician’s problems?

Trapped in the System: A Sick Doctor’s Story

By Aaron E. Carroll
The Upshot, The New York Times, September 21, 2015

It’s true that the number of people with no insurance has gone down significantly since the Affordable Care Act was passed. But that’s only one measure of access. In many other ways, access is still surprisingly bad. I rarely use anecdotes to make my point, but in this column I’ll make an exception.

I have ulcerative colitis, and have had it for many years. When it was poorly controlled, I lived in constant fear of not being near a bathroom. The half-hour commute to my job often necessitated a stop on the way to work because I feared I would lose control of my bowels.

But a number of years ago, after I found that drug after drug didn’t work, my gastroenterologist suggested an older immunosuppressant. I’m a doctor, and I recognized it as a drug often used to treat cancer. It carried with it some significant side effects, most notably a small chance of myelosuppression, in which your bone marrow shuts down and produces too few blood cells.

That horrified my wife. But she didn’t appreciate that this was, to me, a small price to pay for the opportunity not to be constantly worried about my proximity to a toilet. I weighed the benefits versus the harms. I decided to give it a go.

The medicine changed my life. I have few, if any, symptoms anymore.

The medicine is old and it’s generic. It costs about $80 for three months even though I haven’t met my deductible. But this story isn’t about money. This is about the nightmare of how hard it is for me to get the drug.

Every three months, I run out of my medication. In order to get more, I need a new prescription. In order to get the prescription, I need to have lab testing to prove to my doctor that I don’t have anemia. This all sounds simple, and it’s the same process every three months. But it’s never the same, and it’s never easy.

Let’s start with the lab testing. At various times, my insurance plan (which is excellent, by the way) changes which laboratory facilities it will cover fully. Often, these are not labs that are housed in the huge health care system for which I work. I often have to go elsewhere to have my blood drawn. If I change facilities, I have to get a new prescription for the labs, since they can’t share with one another.

Further, even though my lab orders are good for a year — and I need to have them drawn basically forever — the labs recognize them for only six months. So sometimes I have to get in touch with my doctor and get a new lab order. Often, they send over the old order, because they think it’s good for a year, in which case I have to go back to them and ask for a newly written one, because the lab won’t recognize the really-still-valid old one. Worse, they often just fax the order to the lab itself, thinking they’re helping me, so that I don’t realize they sent over an old one until I’m already there, and it’s too late.

After I get that sorted out, I have my blood drawn and analyzed. But because the laboratory and my doctor are in completely different health care systems, the lab results won’t show up in my doctor’s electronic database. I have to beg the lab to remember to fax over the results — using paper — which it often fails to do.

My next step is to check if the pharmacy I use is still under contract with my insurance plan. The medication I use needs to be ordered at a mail-order pharmacy, because my insurance won’t cover it at a local facility. My insurance plan has changed its mail-order pharmacy of choice more than once in the last few years, which necessitates that I inform my physician about the change.

I also have to open a new account with the new pharmacy and give it my payment information so that it can process everything once it has the order from the doctor. I do this before getting the prescription called in because I don’t want anything to get slowed down. This is a good time to explain that I can’t do much else ahead of time because the pharmacy and the insurance plan both know I have a three-month supply of the drug and won’t authorize me to get more too much in advance.

It’s at this point that I try to get in touch with my doctor, previously through a phone message, and more recently through an online site. If I’m lucky, which usually isn’t the case, the doctor will already have the lab results. If not, I have to go back to the lab and beg it again to fax over the results. If the doctor has the lab results, and they’re normal (they always are), a nurse will then call in the prescription. This usually takes a few days.

Then the pharmacy will finally start to move. Even that is painful. Once my drug was on “back order,” and since it was the only pharmacy I was permitted to go to, I just had to wait. It always takes at least a few days for me to get the drug, though, because processing takes time. I always, no matter how hard I try, run out of medicine before I get the new bottle, during which I hold my breath and hope nothing goes wrong.

I do this four times a year. It’s always a stressful time for me, and stress isn’t a good thing for a person with my disease.

This could be so much simpler. Why do I have to get a new prescription for the lab testing every six months? Why can’t I get this simple blood test more conveniently? Why can’t the electronic systems of the labs and the clinical offices talk to each other? Why do I need a new prescription for this medication every three months? Why can I use only one pharmacy when the medication is generic and so inexpensive?

There is no bad guy here. I love the drug company that created this medication. The price is more than reasonable. I love the doctor who prescribed it to me. My insurance company has never refused to cover my care, and has always been honest with me. The laboratory personnel are professional and competent. It’s the system — the way all these things work, or fail to work, together — that’s the issue.

The Affordable Care Act, which seems so complicated to so many, was almost entirely about getting more people in the United States health insurance. That was just a first step, arguably an easy one, and we’re still fighting about it. Reforming the ways in which we actually deliver care and try to improve outcomes? That’s so much more important, and we barely talk about that at all. But that’s what matters to the people who use the system, and it’s why so many of them are frustrated.

Because of my job, I probably know more about the health care system and how it works than most people in the United States. Yet if this is how much trouble I have navigating a simple refilling of my medication, I don’t know how the rest of America does it, especially those with much more complicated issues than mine.

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Answers to your questions about “Trapped in the System: A Sick Doctor’s Story”

By Aaron Carroll
The Incidental Economist, September 23, 2015

I received more than my usual share of feedback from this week’s Upshot column. I thought I might answer some of the most common comments and questions here:

1. If we only had a single payer system. That would fix this, right?

Well, I’m not sure. I understand your impulse, but that would only solve some of the insurance problems. Medicare for all wouldn’t make it so that the lab, pharmacy, and doctor’s office shared an information system, or could even reliably share information. It wouldn’t change the fact that I need to jump through the order hoops, or the authorization hoops. It might make things easier, but it wouldn’t solve all of the problems. Ask people who have Medicare (which is much closer to single payer) if things are seamless. I doubt you’ll get a universally positive response.

Answers to your questions about “Trapped in the System: A Sick Doctor’s Story”

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

Dr. Aaron Carroll’s frank discussion of his chronic medical problem and the nuisances he faces in interacting with our health care system struck a chord with many – both for the empathy engendered because of his medical condition, and especially for the crying shame that this prominent physician has to go through hoops to make our health care system work for him, suggesting that it might not work well for any of us.

Of the over 700 responses that he received, a common theme was that he wouldn’t have these problems if we had a single payer system. He responds that he is not sure. He suggests that people on Medicare, as a proxy for single payer, may find that their care is not so seamless either. Well, he hasn’t experienced Medicare as a patient since he is still on his employer-sponsored plan, and he hasn’t experienced Medicare directly as a physician either since he is a pediatrician.

I think that I can help him on this. I am a family physician, now retired from practice, and I never had the problems with my Medicare patients that I had with my managed care patients – problems similar to those he describes. I also have a few chronic disorders myself that require interaction with the health care system. I am covered under the traditional Medicare program with a Medigap supplement. I have had none of the problems that Dr. Carroll describes, except for nuisance requirements and limitations for my Part D drug coverage – but then Part D, by design, is much more like the managed care coverage that creates barriers to care (restrictive formularies, limited choice of pharmacies, logistical hurdles in filling prescriptions, etc.).

He is correct that interoperability of computer systems remains a problem, but that is a failure of George Bush and David Brailer in insisting that interoperability issues be left to the private sector to address. Players in the private sector strive for dominance and depend on a lack of interoperability to keep competitors out. The government is now encouraging improvements in interoperability, but how do you fix the mess that has been created? At any rate, the prospects for improving interoperability would be much greater under a single payer – improved Medicare for all – than they are under our fragmented, competitive multi-payer system.

Dr. Carroll says there is no bad guy here, but that “It’s the system — the way all these things work, or fail to work, together — that’s the issue.” But that’s the point. Having our entire health care delivery system integrated under a well-designed single payer model would make the system work far better for all of us – patients and physicians alike.

(Aaron Carroll is a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine. He is a highly respected authority in health policy who blogs in The New York Times, The Incidental Economist, and JAMA. He is co-author of a widely-quoted study demonstrating that three-fifths of physicians “support government legislation to establish national health insurance.”)

Future Doctors Rising Up for ‘Medicare for All’

Why med students are taking action for single-payer on October 1

By Vanessa Van Doren
Common Dreams, September 24, 2015

For most of us in medicine, helping people live healthy, happy lives is at the heart of why we chose this career. We expound upon this in application essays, talk about it during interviews, and start medical school with this “calling” fresh in our minds.

Very early in our medical careers – on the wards and in the classroom – we learn that inequality, preventable illness, and death are an inherent part of our current private, for-profit-oriented health insurance system.

We see patients receive preventable amputations due to untreated diabetes. We see people permanently disabled by stroke because they were unable to afford their medications. College funds emptied out to pay for $100,000-a-year cancer treatments. Families bankrupted and lives destroyed.

We learn that, although the United States is one of the wealthiest countries on earth, we are also the only developed nation that does not provide health care to all of its citizens. We learn that we spend over 17 percent of our GDP – more than any country in the world – on this non-universal coverage. We learn that medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States.

We learn that, despite its title, the Affordable Care Act is not truly affordable. Even after the ACA, tens of millions of people are still unable to afford insurance, and tens of thousands die every year because of uninsurance. Millions more who have insurance are under-insured, risking financial distress in the event of serious illness and finding that their health policy’s high deductibles and co-pays prevent them from using it.

All of which leads most reasonable medical students to ask, what can we do about this?

Just as the problem is clearly mapped out, so is the solution.

There is an excellent model for universal health care – one that covers everyone, leads to better health outcomes, and costs taxpayers far less than the current U.S. system – implemented in dozens of countries around the world, including our next door neighbor, Canada. This model is called single-payer health care.

Implementing a single-payer system in the United States would be far from revolutionary. As part of its fragmented, multi-payer system, the U.S. also has a single-payer-like subdivision, which we call Medicare. It is efficient, cost-effective, and has stood the test of time, providing health insurance to all American seniors for the past 50 years.

By improving and expanding Medicare to cover all Americans, we can use this existing infrastructure to achieve universal coverage, better health outcomes, and better physician working conditions.

Medical students across the country have already joined the fight for universal, single-payer health care. Students for a National Health Program (SNaHP) currently has 650 members in over 40 chapters across the country. On Thursday, October 1st, SNaHP will lead over 30 universities across the country in a Medicare-for-All National Day of Action.

SNaHP will join together with members of the American Medical Student Association, WhiteCoats4BlackLives, the Latino Medical Student Association, Universities Allied for Essential Medicine, and the Pre-Health Dreamers in holding teach-ins, rallies, and candlelight vigils to remember the millions of people in our country who remain uninsured, underinsured and underserved by our current health care system.

We will also underscore the need for a more fundamental health reform – a nonprofit, publicly financed, single-payer health system.

We urge all our classmates and friends to join us in this fight. As future medical professionals, and as compassionate people who plan to devote our lives to caring for others, we cannot acquiesce to this unjust, senseless loss of life.

We have to do something about it.

Please join us for the #TenOne Medicare-for-All National Day of Action and help advocate for a more just system in which physicians can uphold our profession with integrity, compassion, and dignity.

Please join the #TenOne Facebook page to commit to this movement and get more information about your local actions.

Vanessa Van Doren is a second-year medical student at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and is the co-founder of the Students for a National Health Program (SNaHP) chapter at her institution.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

http://commondreams.org/views/2015/09/24/future-doctors-rising-medicare-all

Your Wallet or Your Life

A lifesaving drug’s overnight price hike shows why we must fight for a radically different health care system

By A.W. Gaffney, M.D.
Jacobin, Sept. 22, 2015

Two individuals — both infected by the single-celled parasitic protozoa Toxoplasma gondii — â€śshowed prompt, dramatic responses” after being started on a two-drug cocktail.

One of the drugs was pyrimethamine, also known by its brand name, daraprim. A recent dramatic medical advance? Not quite. This report — one of the earliest reported uses of the regimen for toxoplasmosis — appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1957. Daraprim has been a first-line treatment for toxoplasmosis — a serious threat to the immunocompromised and to the newborns of infected women — ever since.

But when Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli saw daraprim, he didn’t see an immutably inexpensive, age-old drug — he saw a gold mine.

As the New York Times reported on Sunday, the former hedge fund manager’s pharmaceutical startup bought the drug last August. It then promptly raised the price fifty-five-fold, from $13.50 to $750 a tablet (in fact, it was a mere $1 a tab prior to an earlier acquisition).

The circumstances of this money grab — an enormous increase in the price of a relatively ancient drug often relied upon by AIDS patients — might seem particularly pernicious. Yet this “gigantic overnight increase,” as the Times called it, should not be viewed as an isolated incident. As a perspective in the New England Journal put it late last year:

It is well known that new brand­ name drugs are often expensive, but US health care is also witnessing a lesser­ known but growing and seemingly paradoxical phenomenon: certain older drugs, many of which are generic and not protected by patents or market exclusivity, are now also extremely expensive.

An article in the Times last year, for instance, described exploding prices for a wide variety of generics, including the aged antibiotic doxycycline, which went from $20 to $1,849 a bottle.

The phenomenon of soaring pharmaceutical price tags is also not limited to the genus of the generics. On the contrary, the big headline-earners in recent years have been for new, extremely high-priced “specialty” drugs, whose patents effectively permit monopolistic pricing.

And this is why the story of galloping prices for decades-old medications is so revealing. Big Pharma apologists have long argued that high drug prices are a reflection of the cost of paying for drug research and development. Government interference will invariably inhibit innovation, the argument goes — and in the end we’ll all suffer.

But $750-a-tablet daraprim disproves this well-honed PR defense: Turing Pharmaceutical didn’t spend a dime on developing the drug or testing it in clinical trials. It is simply pricing the drug, as the saying goes, at “what the market will bear.” The “market” of Toxoplasmosis-sufferers is, of course, a particularly vulnerable one. But this is the essential explanation for rising prices among both generic and patented drugs, drugs for asthma and hepatitis C and cystic fibrosis.

In other words, the massive spike in the cost of daraprim is a result of the political economy of American health care. The profiteering of Turing and like-minded companies aren’t aberrations that can be dealt with by case-by-case shaming (and anyways, Shkreli seems unbothered by such castigation). The fundamental flaw is the system, not one admittedly repugnant CEO.

What, then, would a more just pharmaceutical framework look like?

A good first step would be to get rid of the statute, enshrined in the 2003 Medicare and Modernization Act, that prevents Medicare from bargaining with drug companies over prices, a reform that was left out of the Affordable Care Act to appease Big Pharma. According to a 2013 estimate by Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices down to what Canada or Denmark pays would save hundreds of billions of dollars over a decade.

Of course, we don’t all have Medicare, so this would only go so far. A single-payer national health program â€” with universal coverage and comprehensive benefits including drugs — would directly negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies for everyone in the country, thereby producing much larger savings. Such a program would also eliminate drug copayments, which function as a “tax on sickness” that, as study after study has shown, deters people from taking important medications.

These changes would go a long way towards rationalizing drug prices and unburdening the sick. However, deeper reform — aimed not only at lowering the cost of drugs, but also at improving their overall therapeutic potential — is needed.

Some notable exceptions notwithstanding, pharmaceutical development in recent years has been rather disappointing. In a 2012 article in the British Medical Journal, health policy scholars Donald Light and Joel Lexchin laid out this criticism well, arguing that the pharmaceutical industry’s flawed approach towards drug development produces “mostly minor variations on existing drugs” that are usually “not superior on clinical measures.” The pursuit of truly innovative new molecules, in other words, is discarded in favor of highly lucrative, derivative drugs — a consequence of a “hidden business model,” as they describe it, that spends an estimated $19 on marketing for every $1 on basic research.

One potent fix would be direct public sponsorship of drug development, with therapeutic impact — not profitability — as the overall aim. Drugs would essentially become a public good. Without patent production, they could be cheaply produced throughout the world, increasing their accessibility in even the poorest countries.

The “conquest of disease,” if clichéd, should be a fundamental goal for a just society — one that’s far too important to be left to the likes of Turing Pharmaceuticals.

Above all, we should see the soaring price of daraprim as a symptom of a much deeper malady: a system based on the notion that health is not a social right, but instead a commodity that, in the very process of enriching some, impoverishes others.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/daraprim-turing-pharmaceuticals-martin-shkreli-aca-obamacre-medicaid-medicine-single-payer/

Canada’s NDP supports path to Pharmacare

Tom Mulcair commits $2.6B to support pharmacare plan

CBC News, September 18, 2015

A New Democratic government would use the purchasing power of the federal government to negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs and pass those savings on to the provinces and territories, NDP Leader Tom Mulcair says. 

The NDP plans to spend $2.6 billion over the next four years to “work towards a plan to support universal comprehensive public drug coverage for all Canadians,” if it takes the Oct. 19 vote.

The party is not committing to implement full coverage by the end of its first mandate, but Mulcair said he hopes to achieve average savings of 30 per cent in prescription drug costs through bulk buying.

Once in place, the plan would save the provinces and territories up to $3 billion annually. 

Health care is a provincial and territorial responsibility, so an NDP government would have to negotiate precise arrangements with the other various governments. It would not have the power to impose a free coverage scheme. Some provinces, however, have been pushing for such a scheme for some time.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-mulcair-seniors-medication-prices-1.3234173

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OECD

In US dollars, adjusted for price differences (PPP)

Total health expenditure, per capita:

$8,713 – United States (Ranks highest of 34 countries listed)
$4,351 – Canada (Ranks tenth of 34 countries listed)
$3,453 – OECD average

Expenditure on pharmaceuticals, per capita:

$1,034 – United States (Ranks highest of 31 countries listed)
$761 – Canada (Ranks second of 31 countries listed)
$517 – OECD average

http://www.compareyourcountry.org/health?cr=oecd&cr1=oecd&lg=en&page=2

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Pharmacare 2020

By Steven G. Morgan, PhD, Danielle Martin, MD, CCFP, MPP, Marc-André Gagnon, PhD, Barbara Mintzes, PhD, Jamie R. Daw, MSc, Joel Lexchin, MD, MSc
Pharmaceutical Policy Research Collaboration, University of British Columbia, July 15, 2015

We are pleased to present this report, Pharmacare 2020, which is the culmination of many years of research and collaboration involving academics, health professionals, policy-makers, and public interest groups.

The vision is of a public drug plan that follows four policy recommendations:

1. Provide universal coverage of selected medicines at little or no direct cost to patients through Pharmacare.

2. Select and finance medically necessary prescription drugs at a population level without needs-based charges — such as deductibles, coinsurance, or risk-rated premiums — on individuals or other plan sponsors (e.g., businesses).

3. Establish a publicly accountable body to manage Pharmacare, one that integrates the best available data and evidence into decisions concerning drug coverage, drug prescribing, and patient follow-up.

4. Establish Pharmacare as a single-payer system with a publicly accountable management agency to secure the best health outcomes for Canadians from a transparent drug budget.

Canada has been waiting for Pharmacare since the 1960s. The vision is now clear. Thus, the task turns to the art and science of program development and implementation. This will be difficult and will require political leadership and inter-jurisdictional collaboration — but it is not impossible, as Canadian Medicare has shown. This led to our fifth policy recommendation:

5. Fully implement Pharmacare — a public drug plan that is universal, comprehensive, evidence-based, and sustainable — by 2020.

http://pharmacare2020.ca/assets/pdf/The_Future_of_Drug_Coverage_in_Canada.pdf

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

The United States and Canada were following the same health care cost trajectory until Canada established single payer systems in each of their provinces. They elected not to cover pharmaceuticals. The OECD data demonstrate that this omission was a mistake.

The total health expenditure trajectories diverted, with the United States continuing to hold first place and Canada declining to tenth place amongst 34 OECD nations. But in pharmaceutical expenditures, Canada is second of 31 OECD nations, with per capita drug expenditures exceeded only by the United States.

Drug costs have become intolerable – now 17.5% of their health care spending (calculation using the OECD numbers). Although there has long been much interest in establishing a universal drug program in Canada, the efforts have intensified – culminating in the Pharmacare 2020 report prepared by some of Canada’s more gifted policy experts. The report makes a compelling case for establishing a Pharmacare program.

The concept has gained traction. Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP), led by Tom Mulcair, has now committed to taking major steps toward making Pharmacare a reality. The three major parties – Conservative, NDP, and Liberal – are very close in the projected results for their election to be held October 19. Whether or not NDP wins, at least Pharmacare is now part of the national political discourse in Canada.

And the United States?

Sanders’ stance on health care is starting to make more sense

By David Rosman
Missourian (Columbia, Mo.), Sept. 23, 2015

I am a fan of presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Not just because of his progressive and sometimes socialist political stance, but that he is promoting a single-payer system of health care in the United States. Unfortunately, Sanders does not say how he is going to get there from the orb known as Obamacare.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, nearly one in six, or 16.2 percent, of Americans were without health insurance in 2010, the year the Affordable Care Act was signed into law. Today that number sits at about 10.4 percent because of Obamacare. That is about 9 million people; significant no matter how one tries to tweak the numbers.

Sanders cites the Scandinavian countries with having the healthiest people on the planet because of their single-payer plans. Even our Canadian friends deal with a single-payer plan that still allows for private insurance. In fact, there are a lot of variations of the “plan” available to the U.S. market.

My family has experienced the single-payer systems twice. While on a trip to Canada a number of years back, I had a tooth abscess erupt, causing great pain. I went to a local dentist in Montreal who agreed to see me as an emergency patient and did some quick surgery to relieve the pain and clear the abscess. When I asked how much the procedure would cost, he told me that the Canadian system would pay for the procedure because it was medically necessary.

My stepmother had a similar experience in Italy. She took a tumble down some stairs and severely bruised her leg. She was taken to the hospital while my dad tried to determine if his insurance plan would cover the expenses. He was told that the costs were covered under the Italian plan and he would not owe one lira or euro.

All in all, the VA system, Medicare and Medicaid are single-payer plans that are working.

Yes, you will read about the problems the VA has had over the years, but these problems seem to be focused on a few incidents. You read about the abuse of a few caretakers and end users of Medicaid and Medicare, but these, again, are few and far between. Like airplane accidents, they would not make the news as often if they were not prominent.

My father received excellent care during his later years from the VA and Medicare. In fact, he could not praise the VA enough and supported a universal single-payer plan despite his otherwise conservative leanings.

It is a shame that Missouri’s legislators will not seek to help the economically challenged in the state by passing an expansion of Medicaid to all uninsured Missourians. But this goes along with the GOP’s continued attacks on the middle- and lower-economics classes in the state.

The problem is that the GOP has raised the “no new taxes” mantra loud and long enough that they believe their own rhetoric. Yet the originator of the phrase, then-presidential candidate George H.W. Bush, could not hold on to his promise and the economy did not suffer. There are some of us that would be willing to pay a bit more in taxes if we were guaranteed health coverage for the rest of our lives.

Most of the “193,000 uninsured adults” (23 percent of the uninsured) in Missouri are part of the “working poor” making between $10 and $16 an hour (for a family of four) who do not qualify for the ACA or MO HealthNet. As I have written before, these are not people who are milking the system but hardworking men and women. In fact, it is a small percentage of “bad apples” that are spoiling the entire barrel.

Am I backing Sanders as a presidential candidate among the plethora of candidates from both sides of the aisle? Not quite yet, but I am getting there. I am still waiting for specifics as to how he will change the health insurance system while fighting the GOP super-conservatives and insurance companies.

David Rosman is an editor, writer and professional speaker. You can read more of his commentaries at InkandVoice.com and New York Journal of Books.com. 

http://www.columbiamissourian.com/opinion/local_columnists/david-rosman-sanders-stance-on-health-care-is-starting-to/article_8b51524a-6152-11e5-8127-cba4d23dc9fb.html

Health Insurance Deductibles Outpacing Wage Increases, Study Finds

By Reed Abelson
The New York Times, Sept. 22, 2015

It may not seem like much — just an extra hundred dollars or so a year.

But the steady upward creep in health insurance deductibles has easily outpaced the average increase in a worker’s wages over the last five years, according to a new analysis released on Tuesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Kaiser, a health policy research group that conducts a yearly survey of employer health benefits, calculates that deductibles have risen more than six times faster than workers’ earnings since 2010.

“It’s a very powerful trend,” said Drew Altman, Kaiser’s chief executive.

Four of five workers who receive their insurance through an employer now pay a deductible, in which they must pay some of their medical bills before their coverage starts, according to Kaiser.

Those workers’ deductibles have climbed from a yearly average of $900 in 2010 for an individual plan to above $1,300 this year, while employees working for small businesses have an even higher average of $1,800 a year. One in five workers has a deductible of $2,000 or more.

Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/business/health-insurance-deductibles-outpacing-wage-increases-study-finds.html

It’s the deductibles, stupid!

Employer Family Health Premiums Rise 4 Percent to $17,545 in 2015, Extending a Decade-Long Trend of Relatively Moderate Increases

Kaiser Family Foundation, September 22, 2015

Single and family premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance rose an average of 4 percent this year, continuing a decade-long period of moderate growth, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET) 2015 Employer Health Benefits Survey released today.

The average annual premium for single coverage is $6,251, of which workers on average pay $1,071.  The average family premium is $17,545, with workers on average contributing $4,955.

The survey also finds that 81 percent of covered workers are in plans with a general annual deductible, which average $1,318 for single coverage this year. Covered workers in smaller firms (three to 199 workers) face an average deductible of $1,836 this year. That’s 66 percent more than the $1,105 average deductible facing covered workers at large firms (at least 200 workers).

Since 2010, both the share of workers with deductibles and the size of those deductibles have increased sharply. These two trends together result in a 67 percent increase in deductibles since 2010, much faster than the rise in single premiums (24%) and about seven times the rise in workers’ wages (10%) and general inflation (9%).

“With deductibles rising so much faster than premiums and wages, it’s no surprise that consumers have not felt the slowdown in health spending,” Foundation President and CEO Drew Altman said.

http://kff.org/health-costs/press-release/employer-family-health-premiums-rise-4-percent-to-17545-in-2015-extending-a-decade-long-trend-of-relatively-moderate-increases/

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

For Quote of the Day subscribers who go straight to the comment (and many of you do), today’s message is presented instantly in a single visual – merely click on the link above and check out the graph accompanying the news release.

In words, the graph shows that, for the past five years, inflation is flat, workers earnings are flat, employer-sponsored health insurance premiums are continuing to increase, and health insurance deductibles are skyrocketing!

That explains why so many patients with “good” employer-sponsored health plans feel that health care costs are out of control, even though we’re told they’re not – their deductibles have increased at seven times the rate of increase in their wages!

We have the wrong model of health care financing in the United States. We need single payer.

Medicare is the patriotic, prudent, medically vital thing to do

By Ed Weisbart, M.D.
Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Sept. 22, 2015

We need to improve Medicare and provide that to all Americans. It’s the patriotic, prudent and medically vital thing to do.

I appreciate the serious tone that Sally Pipes took in presenting her Koch-funded arguments against single-payer national health insurance (“Government single-payer health coverage may be nation’s future,” Sept. 20). I particularly appreciate that she accurately represented my own comments; that I, along with at least 59 percent of physicians in the U.S., believe the evidence is overwhelming that single-payer would be the most efficient way to finance high quality health care for all Americans.

Our current system produces mediocre results, with the result that the CIA World Fact Book identifies Americans as ranking 51st in life expectancy at birth. Less widely recognized is that our world ranking in life expectancy changes drastically after we hit the age of Medicare eligibility. According to the Institute of Medicine, our life expectancy before age 65 ranks the worst out of 17 modern nations. Once we hit age 65, our life expectancy ranking rapidly climbs to a position nearly the best in the world. As proud Americans, we should honor the fact that we have a world-class publicly financed health care system — Medicare.

The beleaguered Veterans Administration (VA) system does not represent the only possible model for an American single-payer system. Critics of the VA should realize that our recent years of increased military service have led to vastly increased demands on the VA, without a concomitant adjustment in resources for these new patients. Although significant service problems exist, their clinical outcomes have long been among the best in the nation. Pointing out the VA’s challenges, while intentionally not pointing out that the same issues exist in our private insurance industry, is only meant to be inflammatory and misleading. And it has little to do with questions about national health policy.

Fortunately, there is a robust North American experiment in single-payer versus private insurance: Canada vs. the USA.

Up until 1971, both of our nations were spending roughly the same 7 percent of our GDPs on health care, and had been following the same general cost trend curves. Our life expectancies were within a year of each other.

In 1971, Canada fully implemented its national health insurance. That same year, President Richard Nixon signed the HMO Act into law.

After beginning with a system performing very similarly to our own, Canada now spends roughly half of what we spend, and its life expectancies are now two and a half years longer than ours. Health care is far from perfect in Canada, but it’s dramatically better.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, 14 percent of Americans now report having unmet health needs. One percent of us have this problem due to waiting lists or unavailability of a service, 8 percent due to cost issues and 5 percent from an assortment of other reasons. Compare this to the 11 percent of Canadians with unmet health needs: 6 percent of Canadians report the problem as a result of waiting lists or unavailable services, 1 percent due to cost and 4 percent from other reasons. Yes, Canadians have longer waiting lists than we do, but their problem pales in comparison to the number of Americans who never even make it to our waiting lists and have unmet needs due to the cost of care. The key driver of Canadian waiting lists is their decision to fund a system at 50 percent of our own.

Today, 45 years into this Grand North American Experiment, Canadians spend half, have 20 percent less unmet health needs and live 2.5 years longer.

It’s time to call off this experiment. We need to improve Medicare and provide that to all Americans. It’s the patriotic, prudent and medically vital thing to do.

Ed Weisbart M.D. is a family physician and chairs the Missouri chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program. He volunteers at a variety of safety net clinics in St. Louis, Missouri, and across the nation.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865637288/Medicare-is-the-patriotic-prudent-medically-vital-thing-to-do.html?pg=all

Bassett calls race a critical factor in public health

By Dan Goldberg 
Politico New York, Sept. 1, 2015

Last week, New York City’s health commissioner gathered her staff in their Long Island City headquarters.

It was part of a regular brown-bag series Bassett offers for the staff. Usually she brings in outside speakers, but last Monday she decided to give the talk herself. She decided to explain how racial inequality fits into her vision of public health.

Health disparities, she said, are not the result of income inequality alone. An understanding of public health requires an understanding of how persistent racism has impacted the health and well-being of people of color in specific geographic areas.

“Neighborhoods that are disadvantaged need [to] correct a historic injustice,” Bassett told POLITICO New York. “The framing matters.”

Bassett believes her department should view public health issues, in part, through the lens of racial injustice, on the premise that health inequalities won’t be solved simply by offering new services, and can’t always be addressed with new regulations.

For example, for years health department officials have warned that sugary drinks contribute to obesity and heart disease, and blacks in New York City have higher rates of both when compared to whites. To tackle that problem, Bassett said, it’s imperative to understand how and why sugary drinks are more often marketed to black and Latino youth, and to counter such messages by having teens talk to peers in their neighborhoods about healthy eating.

“When I joined the health department [as commissioner], everyone talked about income inequality — no one would talk about race,” she said. “The first step toward solving anything is bringing it into the public discourse.”

She explained to her staff how she feels racism and public health fit together, and how physicians and public health officials have a role to play in the #blacklivesmatter debate, which has been part of the national discourse since the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner on Staten Island after encounters with police officers.

“With the death of Eric Garner, everyone asked the question, how are we tackling racism,” said Bassett, who wrote a commentary in The New England Journal of Medicine explaining how she felt physicians should engage with the movement.

“There is great injustice in the daily violence experienced by young black men,” she wrote. “But the tragedy of lives cut short is not accounted for entirely, or even mostly, by violence.”

Her presentation to staff last week included slides that showed how life expectancy in East Harlem is nine years less than it is in Murray Hill, and how the maternal mortality rate for black women is 11 times higher than for white women. 

Bassett’s more expansive view of public health counts racism as a social determinant. It means universal pre-K and affordable housing are as much public health issues as immunization rates. It also means gun violence and police violence are just as much a public health concern as cigarettes and sugary drinks. 

It’s an opinion Bassett has voiced for decades but one that remains controversial throughout much of the country.

(Surgeon general Vivek Murthy had his confirmation held up for months because he tweeted that guns were a public health issue.)

Bassett did not criticize the New York Police Department, opting instead to focus on police violence as a broader national issue, but it is hard to separate her broader criticisms from current conditions on the ground. Broken windows policing, championed by police commissioner Bill Bratton, is now decried by many leaders in the African American community, who accuse the department of systematically harassing young black men. Garner’s death didn’t just spark a debate over racism in America. It led to a spate protests over how police officers treated black men and women. 

Mayor Bill de Blasio has tried — often unsuccessfully — to sympathize with both the protesters who want police reform and the police officers trying to do their jobs.

Bassett avoided explicitly addressing the politics, but said it is crucial to know the numbers, praising The Guardian’s “The Counted” series, which tracks people killed by U.S. law enforcement officers in 2015. 

Viewing racism as both a social justice issue and a public health issue has been a cause of Bassett’s since the mid-1980s, when she challenged liberals to do more than simply acknowledge socioeconomic factors.

“Racism disproportionately concentrates blacks into the lower strata of the working class and further causes blacks in all class strata to be racially oppressed,” she wrote in 1986.

But even as she talks about how deeply ingrained race is as a factor in the system, Bassett also makes it clear that she doesn’t view the problems as unsolveable. 

One of her slides showed how infant mortality rates for black babies declined after the Jim Crow era ended in the south, and how they quickly aligned with those in the north. 

Jim Crow was a far more overt form of racism than anything New York City sees today, but the larger point Bassett tried to impress upon her staff is that racial factors do play an outsize role in health outcomes.

That is why Bassett, in a break from her predecessors, focuses so much attention on neighborhood initiatives.

Her theory, supported by census data, is that because New York City is such a segregated city, geographically targeting department resources is critical in achieving health equity. 

“We can use our data to both learn more and highlight the issues, and contribute to critical research that lends to a better understanding in which race contributes to poor health outcomes,” she said.

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2015/09/8575583/bassett-calls-race-critical-factor-public-health

PNHP note: Dr. Bassett is a member of the board of PNHP’s New York Metro chapter.

Drug Goes From $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight

By Andrew Pollack
The New York Times, Sept. 20, 2015

Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection.

The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager. Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“What is it that they are doing differently that has led to this dramatic increase?” said Dr. Judith Aberg, the chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She said the price increase could force hospitals to use “alternative therapies that may not have the same efficacy.”

Turing’s price increase is not an isolated example. While most of the attention on pharmaceutical prices has been on new drugs for diseases like cancer, hepatitis C and high cholesterol, there is also growing concern about huge price increases on older drugs, some of them generic, that have long been mainstays of treatment.

Although some price increases have been caused by shortages, others have resulted from a business strategy of buying old neglected drugs and turning them into high-priced “specialty drugs.”

Cycloserine, a drug used to treat dangerous multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, was just increased in price to $10,800 for 30 pills from $500 after its acquisition by Rodelis Therapeutics. Scott Spencer, general manager of Rodelis, said the company needed to invest to make sure the supply of the drug remained reliable. He said the company provided the drug free to certain needy patients.

In August, two members of Congress investigating generic drug price increases wrote to Valeant Pharmaceuticals after that company acquired two heart drugs, Isuprel and Nitropress, from Marathon Pharmaceuticals and promptly raised their prices by 525 percent and 212 percent respectively. Marathon had acquired the drugs from another company in 2013 and had quintupled their prices, according to the lawmakers, Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president, and Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland.

Doxycycline, an antibiotic, went from $20 a bottle in October 2013 to $1,849 by April 2014, according to the two lawmakers.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association sent a joint letter to Turing earlier this month calling the price increase for Daraprim “unjustifiable for the medically vulnerable patient population” and “unsustainable for the health care system.” An organization representing the directors of state AIDS programs has also been looking into the price increase, according to doctors and patient advocates.

Daraprim, known generically as pyrimethamine, is used mainly to treat toxoplasmosis, a parasite infection that can cause serious or even life-threatening problems for babies born to women who become infected during pregnancy, and also for people with compromised immune systems, like AIDS patients and certain cancer patients.

Martin Shkreli, the founder and chief executive of Turing, said that the drug is so rarely used that the impact on the health system would be minuscule and that Turing would use the money it earns to develop better treatments for toxoplasmosis, with fewer side effects.

“This isn’t the greedy drug company trying to gouge patients, it is us trying to stay in business,” Mr. Shkreli said. He said that many patients use the drug for far less than a year and that the price was now more in line with those of other drugs for rare diseases.

“This is still one of the smallest pharmaceutical products in the world,” he said. “It really doesn’t make sense to get any criticism for this.”

This is not the first time the 32-year-old Mr. Shkreli, who has a reputation for both brilliance and brashness, has been the center of controversy. He started MSMB Capital, a hedge fund company, in his 20s and drew attention for urging the Food and Drug Administration not to approve certain drugs made by companies whose stock he was shorting.

In 2011, Mr. Shkreli started Retrophin, which also acquired old neglected drugs and sharply raised their prices. Retrophin’s board fired Mr. Shkreli a year ago. Last month, it filed a complaint in Federal District Court in Manhattan, accusing him of using Retrophin as a personal piggy bank to pay back angry investors in his hedge fund.

Mr. Shkreli has denied the accusations. He has filed for arbitration against his old company, which he says owes him at least $25 million in severance. “They are sort of concocting this wild and crazy and unlikely story to swindle me out of the money,” he said.

Daraprim, which is also used to treat malaria, was approved by the F.D.A. in 1953 and has long been made by GlaxoSmithKline. Glaxo sold United States marketing rights to CorePharma in 2010. Last year, Impax Laboratories agreed to buy Core and affiliated companies for $700 million. In August, Impax sold Daraprim to Turing for $55 million, a deal announced the same day Turing said it had raised $90 million from Mr. Shkreli and other investors in its first round of financing.

Daraprim cost only about $1 a tablet several years ago, but the drug’s price rose sharply after CorePharma acquired it. According to IMS Health, which tracks prescriptions, sales of the drug jumped to $6.3 million in 2011 from $667,000 in 2010, even as prescriptions held steady at about 12,700. In 2014, after further price increases, sales were $9.9 million, as the number of prescriptions shrank to 8,821. The figures do not include inpatient use in hospitals.

Turing’s price increase could bring sales to tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars a year if use remains constant. Medicaid and certain hospitals will be able to get the drug inexpensively under federal rules for discounts and rebates. But private insurers, Medicare and hospitalized patients would have to pay an amount closer to the list price.

Some doctors questioned Turing’s claim that there was a need for better drugs, saying the side effects, while potentially serious, could be managed.

“I certainly don’t think this is one of those diseases where we have been clamoring for better therapies,” said Dr. Wendy Armstrong, professor of infectious diseases at Emory University in Atlanta.

With the price now high, other companies could conceivably make generic copies, since patents have long expired. One factor that could discourage that option is that Daraprim’s distribution is now tightly controlled, making it harder for generic companies to get the samples they need for the required testing.

The switch from drugstores to controlled distribution was made in June by Impax, not by Turing. Still, controlled distribution was a strategy Mr. Shkreli talked about at his previous company as a way to thwart generics.

Some hospitals say they now have trouble getting the drug. “We’ve not had access to the drug for a few months,” said Dr. Armstrong, who also works at Grady Memorial Hospital, a huge public treatment center in Atlanta that serves many low-income patients.

But Dr. Rima McLeod, medical director of the toxoplasmosis center at the University of Chicago, said that Turing had been good about delivering drugs quickly to patients, sometimes without charge.

“They have jumped every time I’ve called,” she said. The situation, she added, “seems workable” despite the price increase.

Daraprim is the standard first treatment for toxoplasmosis, in combination with an antibiotic called sulfadiazine. There are alternative treatments, but there is less data supporting their efficacy.

Dr. Aberg of Mount Sinai said some hospitals will now find Daraprim too expensive to keep in stock, possibly resulting in treatment delays. She said that Mount Sinai was continuing to use the drug, but each use now required a special review.

“This seems to be all profit-driven for somebody,” Dr. Aberg said, “and I just think it’s a very dangerous process.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 21, 2015, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Once a Neglected Treatment, Now an Expensive Specialty Drug.

Rent seeking by drug barons

Drug Goes From $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight

By Andrew Pollack
The New York Times, September 20, 2015

Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection (toxoplasmosis).

The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager. Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Turing’s price increase is not an isolated example. While most of the attention on pharmaceutical prices has been on new drugs for diseases like cancer, hepatitis C and high cholesterol, there is also growing concern about huge price increases on older drugs, some of them generic, that have long been mainstays of treatment.

Although some price increases have been caused by shortages, others have resulted from a business strategy of buying old neglected drugs and turning them into high-priced “specialty drugs.”

Cycloserine, a drug used to treat dangerous multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, was just increased in price to $10,800 for 30 pills from $500 after its acquisition by Rodelis Therapeutics.

Doxycycline, an antibiotic, went from $20 a bottle in October 2013 to $1,849 by April 2014, according to the two lawmakers.

Martin Shkreli, the founder and chief executive of Turing, said that the drug is so rarely used that the impact on the health system would be minuscule and that Turing would use the money it earns to develop better treatments for toxoplasmosis, with fewer side effects.

“This isn’t the greedy drug company trying to gouge patients, it is us trying to stay in business,” Mr. Shkreli said.

This is not the first time the 32-year-old Mr. Shkreli, who has a reputation for both brilliance and brashness, has been the center of controversy. He started MSMB Capital, a hedge fund company, in his 20s and drew attention for urging the Food and Drug Administration not to approve certain drugs made by companies whose stock he was shorting.

In 2011, Mr. Shkreli started Retrophin, which also acquired old neglected drugs and sharply raised their prices. Retrophin’s board fired Mr. Shkreli a year ago. Last month, it filed a complaint in Federal District Court in Manhattan, accusing him of using Retrophin as a personal piggy bank to pay back angry investors in his hedge fund.

Daraprim, which is also used to treat malaria, was approved by the F.D.A. in 1953 and has long been made by GlaxoSmithKline. Glaxo sold United States marketing rights to CorePharma in 2010. Last year, Impax Laboratories agreed to buy Core and affiliated companies for $700 million. In August, Impax sold Daraprim to Turing for $55 million, a deal announced the same day Turing said it had raised $90 million from Mr. Shkreli and other investors in its first round of financing.

Daraprim cost only about $1 a tablet several years ago, but the drug’s price rose sharply after CorePharma acquired it.

With the price now high, other companies could conceivably make generic copies, since patents have long expired. One factor that could discourage that option is that Daraprim’s distribution is now tightly controlled, making it harder for generic companies to get the samples they need for the required testing.

The switch from drugstores to controlled distribution was made in June by Impax, not by Turing. Still, controlled distribution was a strategy Mr. Shkreli talked about at his previous company as a way to thwart generics.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/business/a-huge-overnight-increase-in-a-drugs-price-raises-protests.html

***

The Price of Inequality

By Joseph E. Stiglitz
W. W. Norton and Company

The term “rent” was originally used to describe the returns to land, since the owner of the land receives these payments by virtue of his ownership and not because of anything he does. This stands in contrast to the situation of workers, for example, whose wages are compensation for the effort they provide. The term “rent” then was extended to include monopoly profits, or monopoly rents, the income that one receives simply from the control of a monopoly. Eventually the term was expanded still further to include the returns on similar ownership claims.

Not all rent seeking uses government to extract money from ordinary citizens. The private sector can excel on its own, extracting rents from the public, for instance, through monopolistic practices and exploiting those who are less informed and educated, exemplified by the banks’ predatory lending. CEOs can use their control of the corporation to garner for themselves a larger fraction  of the firms’ revenues. Here, though, the government too plays a role, by not doing what it should: by not stopping these activities, by not making them illegal, or by not enforcing laws that exist.

http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?id=4294967848

***

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

The pharmaceutical industry has run amok, and we are all suffering as a result. We are paying higher taxes and higher insurance premiums to create “rents” for the likes of Martin Shkreli. (You’ll understand what this means if you simply read the excerpts above.)

We should all be outraged, not only with the barons in the pharmaceutical industry, but even more with our own government, which, as Joseph Stiglitz tells us, is “not doing what it should.”

One of our candidates for president says that he “can’t do it alone. We have got to do it together through a strong grassroots movement. We have got to think big.”

Start thinking big.

(PNHP does not endorse any political candidates nor their political parties, though some candidates do endorse policies advanced by PNHP.)

White Coats for Black Lives: Medical Students Responding to Racism and Police Brutality

By Dorothy Charles, Kathryn Himmelstein, Walker Keenan, and Nicolas Barcelo, for the White Coats for Black Lives National Working Group
Journal of Urban Health, Sept. 17, 2015

Last fall, Black people and their allies took to social media and the streets to assert that, despite the non-indictment of officers responsible for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, Black lives matter. While these protests sparked national dialogue about racism and violence against communities of color, our medical school campuses remained silent and detached. As medical trainees invested in the lives and well-being of people of color, we felt called to action by the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Medicine is not immune to the racism that pervades our education, housing, employment, and criminal justice systems. Moreover, racism and police brutality damage the health and lives of people of color, particularly Black people, and must be addressed as a public health crisis.

Initially, students at different medical schools initiated conversations and planned separate actions to engage with larger, national struggles for racial justice.

Full article:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11524-015-9993-9