Summary: Building on an inauspicious decade of failed efforts to improve care or save money for Medicare, value-based care is now the darling of CMS and scores of private companies involved in its latest incarnation, REACH. Health and equity rhetoric aside, it’s all about profits for investors. Greed dressed up to be presentable in public.

Value-Based Care is a Pretext for Privatization, Counterpunch, July 13, 2022, by Kay Tillow

Later this month, right before Medicare’s 57th birthday on July 30, corporate health care and the government players who facilitate their lucrative businesses, will gather for a summit on value-based care. They will speak of driving health equity, of reaching underserved communities, of coordination of care, and accountable care. They will insist that physicians share in risk just like insurance companies. They will advocate the transformation of health care to value-based care, supposedly founded on payment for quality rather than quantity, value instead of volume, and outcomes not fee-for-service.  They will assert that this transformation brings equity, improves care, and saves money. …

While the [Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation] projects have not proven to enhance quality nor to save money, they are very successful at the hidden goal—the insertion of private profit-makers into the health care system and the privatization of Medicare and Medicaid.

Comment:

By Ana Malinow, M.D.

On the eve of Medicare’s 57^th Birthday, no fewer than five former Administrators of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), three of the biggest medical professional societies, almost a dozen academic institutions, influential health policy think tanks, and over 30 corporations will convene to save our sinking primary care ship using value-based care. But like a lifesaver full of holes, value-based care will prove to be another dud unable to control costs and improve care. Worse than that, as Kay Tillow brilliantly wrote last week, “value-based care is a pretext for privatization.” Tillow connected all the dots, naming names, uncovering links, and exposing the players who are set to dole out public dollars for private gain.

The lifeline we are tossed is ACO REACH, the latest invention out of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. HJM has pointed out fundamental problems with REACH: excess profit, paltry equity efforts, and impaired physician-patient trust among them.

REACH promises to bring value-based care to all of Medicare by 2030. As Tillow points out, this will not address the ineffectiveness of a system that led to 339,000 unnecessary COVID deaths nor combat the low US life expectancy compared to peer countries during the COVID pandemic. Value-based care, for all its aspirations to achieve equity, will not make a dent in our highly racialized decrease in life expectancy. While American life expectancy decreased by 2.41 years during the first two years of the pandemic, American Indian/Alaska Native individuals lost almost 5 years, making the life expectancy of AIAN men in the US, low before the pandemic, now comparable to that of men living in Afghanistan.

How are these players suggesting we transform primary care? Listen to a series of 15 “market movers,” all of which target senior care and are Direct Contracting Entities (soon to be ACO REACH), tech platforms to enhance value-based care, underwriters of the delivery of value-based care, or otherwise involved in helping primary care providers earn additional revenue. At least 14 of the 15 movers are publicly traded or investor owned. Or sit down for a fireside chat (end of July, no thanks!) with two companies, one publicly traded and another one backed by venture capital, focusing on delivering care to the underserved. Or take in a seminar on driving equity in primary care with Chief Innovation Office of One Medical, funded by Carlyle Group. Or learn about partnerships with private equity. Or listen to health care disruptors Google, Walgreens, and Amazon.

If you don’t think value-based care is all about privatization, think again. As Tillow writes, this “upcoming corporate extravaganza” will sink us for good.

Instead of privatizing the health care system, we should be organizing for a national, single payer program. That’s the lifeline we need.

http://healthjusticemonitor.org…

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Summary: Hidden in the fine print of the REACH program launched by CMS to transform traditional fee-for-service Medicare we discover a pivotal, nasty feature: Physicians will share in the financial savings achieved by capitated contractors. This destroys more than 50 years of beneficiary confidence that doctors’ decisions are based on their best medical interests.

ACO Realizing Equity, Access, and Community Health (REACH) Model Request for Applications, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), February 24, 2022

All Participant Providers and Preferred Providers … may receive a distribution from the ACO of any shared savings payment received by the ACO …

ACO REACH Model PY2023 Participant and Preferred Provider Management Guide, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Revised June 2022

Comparing GPDC to the ACO REACH Model, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), February 2022

A very detailed table, to explain REACH to the public. However, NO mention of sharing savings with providers.

Comment:

By Jim Kahn, M.D., M.P.H.

I’ve focused on various problems that will plague REACH, most recently the leeway permitted for fast diagnostic upcoding and thus rapid profit growth.

Then, the worst feature of all, hiding in the program details, jolted me: REACH is structured to make doctors complicit in the money game. Specifically, they can receive a portion of the “shared savings” generated when their patients use fewer Medicare resources than the capitation amount. With a discount imposed on their regular fees, the pressure to reduce care and thus recoup income is immense.

To be crystal clear: when doctors reduce or delay care, by skipping diagnostic tests or referrals to specialists or treatments, and their patients spend less overall, doctors get a financial bonus by receiving a portion of the savings.

And when doctors participate in diagnostic upcoding, they share in the resulting increased savings under the higher capitation level.

With REACH contractors permitted to keep ALL of the first 25% in savings, the incentive to reduce care is powerful. And with doctors eligible to receive a slice of those savings, clinical decisions will have two competing masters: patient well-being and provider income.

So, for nearly six decades, traditional Medicare beneficiaries could count on doctors to focus on their well-being, with no incentive to save (or, with the early ACOs, a very small incentive).

This central program feature is spelled out in contractor documents (request for proposal, program guidance), but not mentioned in the CMS material disseminated to the public. I think I know why: CMS knew it would be hugely unpopular.

We need to save traditional Medicare, by ending REACH and removing for-profit intermediaries and the co-opting of physicians. We need to focus on patient welfare. We need single payer!

http://healthjusticemonitor.org…

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Summary: A commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine by individuals consulting for huge health care companies argues that REACH, the new corporate-focused funding mechanism for traditional Medicare, will enhance equity. Their assertion is hype, with no evidence. Single payer would guarantee equity.

“REACHing” for Equity—Moving from Regressive toward Progressive Value-Based Payment, New England Journal of Medicine, July 9, 2022, by S Gondi, K Joynt Maddox, & R Wadhera

Comment:

By Ana Malinow, M.D.

Even before the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) rebranded the Global and Professional Direct Contracting model as ACO REACH, requiring “all model participants [to] develop and implement a robust health equity plan to identify underserved communities and implement initiatives to measurably reduce health disparities within their beneficiary populations,” the industry had been flagellating itself over its lackluster equity outcomes. The authors explain why value-based care payments, the darling of health policy experts, have failed so miserably to address health equity.

Just what is value-based care (VBC)? Good luck finding a definition to this slippery term. Mostly, it is defined in terms of its goals, as in this article, published in the New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst, that describes the VBC model as one where hospitals and physicians are paid and rewarded on patient outcomes while controlling costs. Benefits for patients include spending less money to achieve better health; for providers, achieving efficiencies and greater patient satisfaction; for payers, controlling costs and reducing risk; for suppliers, aligning price with patient outcomes; and for society, becoming healthier while reducing overall spending.

There is no shred of evidence that this has ever happened or ever could. The New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery, a recent peer-reviewed project of NEJM Catalyst, publishes articles which “are vetted rigorously and are evaluated for originality, innovation, readability, clarity, relevance… practicability and scalability.” Evidence is not mentioned. All aspiration and fluff. The Catalyst offers “exclusive sponsorship opportunities for organizations that recognize the value of joining an industry dialog while aligning their brand and solutions with influential NEJM Catalyst audiences.” A dangerous alliance for the venerable NEJM.

To pay based on value, one should define value. But defining and measuring value in medicine and rewarding or punishing the physician for creating or failing to create value are elusive because: 1) there are over 85,000 CPT service codes, making it difficult if not impossible to decide which value to measure; 2) inevitably, services not chosen receive less attention; 3) patients see multiple providers every year despite being assigned to one PCP; and 4) most of the determinants of health are outside the control of the physician.

The authors of “REACHing for Equity,” one of whom consults for the Centene Corporation, the largest Medicaid managed care organization in the U.S. [KJM], and the other for the giant CVS Health [RKW], honestly admit to the many flaws of VBC, including:

1. Disproportionally penalize outpatient clinicians who care for poor adults through Medicare’s Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS).
2. Transfer resources away from safety-net hospitals and potentially widening inequities in care through all Medicare’s hospital value-based programs.
3. Perpetuate structural racism by penalizing institutions caring for high proportions of Black adults.
4. Reward practices and hospitals with robust infrastructure that can adapt to logistic and reporting requirements (draining resources from needier practices and hospitals).
5. Set up unrealistic expectations for providers with patients who use fewer resources due to lack of services, putting them at a disadvantage.
6. Encourage gaming the system by avoiding high-utilizing patients and widening long-standing racial disparities.
7. Encourage gaming the system of well-resourced providers who maximize their scores based on their existing performance without improving care.
8. Punish providers who care for low-income populations who often have fewer resources to dedicate to score optimization.
9. Encourage upcoding.
10. Strategically drop high risk beneficiaries or clinicians whose panels consist of large numbers of these patients to reduce spending and increase their chances of earning shared savings.

One would think 10 well-referenced reasons would be enough to put this model, which has exacerbated health inequities, to rest, but no. They argue that VBP has failed to advance health equity because equity wasn’t prioritized. And that’s where ACO REACH will be different. Because this new model will prioritize equity (while keeping everything else the same), equity will be achievable. How?

First, the new model includes a new “health equity benchmark adjustment” and will pay providers who care for underserved patients $30/month/beneficiary in the top decile of disadvantage and a downward adjustment for providers not caring for the underserved. This is supposed to entice providers to care for underserved beneficiaries. But providers get this payment even if the beneficiaries do not receive any services to address health inequities. We are made to believe this $30 adjustment should be enough to transfer resources back into safety-net hospitals and physicians.

Second, providers are supposed to fill out a health equity plan. These plans are supposed to use “payment reform as a lever to foster local efforts that promote equity,” but the equity plan is a 5-step boilerplate created by the CMS Office of Minority Health, reminiscent of a 5th grader’s attempt at QI. Other efforts by CMS to “promote health equity” include the CMS Health Equity Awards, which in 2020 went to UnitedHealthcare. A previous award recipient was the Centene Corporation. CMS would like us to put our hopes on corporations to address structural racism.

Third, REACH models are supposed to collect and submit data on demographics and social determinants of health, to the extent that beneficiaries are willing. Figuring out how to define and measure social risk adjusters, just like value, will spawn a whole new cottage industry, creating another level of middlemen. Thus, mandating data collection without mitigating any inequities should be sufficient to counter gaming the system.

Really?

Value-based payment has been an invention peddled by policy elites through peer-reviewed publications. Some of those policy experts now admit that VPC is regressive. However, instead of taking these “lessons learned” and recommending the model be scrapped altogether, they propose to expand it to include “equity” and make it mandatory – with no evidence it will work.

In addition to medical outcomes, as well as to the day-to-day financial responsibility of risk-sharing arrangements, physicians will now be responsible for the equity outcomes of their patients. What’s next? Inflation? Arguing against VBC, Lisa Rosenbaum wrote also in NEJM that doctors want the best care for their patients. Tying financial incentives, and the documentation burden that is involved, to value, cost and now equity, has already harmed and will prove fatal to the profession and to patients.

Why not model national single payer, known to increase value, equity, and lower costs around the world? Or are the sponsors of our models too beholden to the profiteers to offer real progressive change?

http://healthjusticemonitor.org…

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Summary: A chief health officer and pediatrician at Indiana University speaks plain and powerful truth about growing insurance cost-sharing – it’s designed to reward insurers, to the health and financial detriment of the insured.

What’s Wrong With Health Insurance? Deductibles Are Ridiculous, for Starters, New York Times, July 7, 2022, by Aaron E. Carroll

More than 100 million Americans have medical debt, according to a recent Kaiser Health News-NPR investigation. And about a quarter of American adults with this debt owe more than $5,000.

The Affordable Care Act was supposed to improve access to health insurance, and it did. Unfortunately, it has not done enough to protect people from rising out-of-pocket expenses in the form of deductibles, co-pays and co-insurance.

This moral-hazard argument assumes that patients are rational consumers, and it assumes that cost-sharing in the form of deductibles and co-pays makes them better shoppers. Research shows this is not the case.

People are not smart shoppers or rational spenders when it comes to health care. When you make people pay more, they consume less care, even if it’s for lifesaving treatment.

The average deductible on a silver-level plan on the A.C.A. exchanges rose to $4,500 in 2021.

Those who receive insurance from their employers aren’t much better off than those who buy on the A.C.A. marketplaces. The average deductible for insurance offered by large companies in the United States was more than $1,200.

Those are only the deductibles. After they are paid, people must still cover co-pays and co-insurance until they hit the out-of-pocket maximums. The good news is that the A.C.A. limits these in plans sold in the exchanges. The bad news is that they’re astronomical: $8,700 for an individual and $17,400 for a family. A large majority of Americans don’t have that kind of money sitting in accounts, certainly not after paying an average of about $5,000 in premiums each year for a benchmark individual silver plan.

The purpose of insurance is to protect people from financial ruin if they face unexpected medical expenses. Reducing the amount that they need to pay from six figures to five is necessary, but not sufficient. It’s not enough to give people insurance.

Aaron E. Carroll is the chief health officer for and a distinguished professor of pediatrics at Indiana University.

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

For many decades we’ve recognized we have a very serious problem. We have a very expensive health care system which exposes far too many to significant medical debt because our fragmented, dysfunctional health insurance system has been inadequate to provide the financial protection that patients need.

It seems obvious that we need to provide as a solution a system that provides health care access to the patient – all patients – without exposing them to medical debt. But instead of looking for a solution that takes care of the problems of patients, we have been looking for solutions that take care of the problems of the insurer.

Thus we have perpetuated the moral-hazard argument: make the patient feel the financial pain of the health care they are about to consume so that costs to the insurer will be reduced by eliminating superfluous care. Well, we know what that does: it results in skipped necessary care and impaired health outcomes, even death, and it results in medical debt because of the direct charges the insurer passes on to the patient – both the opposite of what a health care financing system should be achieving.

Dr. Carroll’s proposed solutions would modify current health care financing, e.g., by offering better insurance for the chronically ill and reference pricing for drugs and procedures. His solutions are piecemeal, subject to gaming, and inadequate.

Suppose all of these decades we had been looking for solutions that took care of our target –patients – rather than a marketplace intermediary – insurers, what would these solutions look like? Well, they would provide health care access to absolutely everyone without burdening them with medical debt. Instead of reducing spending by erecting financial barriers to patient care, we would reduce spending by eliminating this very expensive, administratively complex insurance industry and its investors.

For decades we’ve known that a publicly administered single payer system is what we clearly need, yet we have continued to privatize even our existing public programs such as Medicare and Medicaid to the benefit of private equity rather than to the benefit of patients.

So why do we keep electing legislators and an administration that take care of the superfluous, dysfunctional, egregiously wasteful insurance industry when we want them instead to take care of the health care needs of the people?

http://healthjusticemonitor.org…

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Summary: A news article reports on Congressional hearings on problems with Medicare Advantage. An academic article describes big challenges and valuable public benefits lost if traditional Medicare is replaced by Medicare Advantage. Our apologies for a longer-than-usual post … too many Medicare Advantage failings to review!

(HJM bolding for key points)

Government Watchdogs Attack Medicare Advantage for Denying Care and Overcharging, KHN, June 29, 2022, by Fred Schulte

Congress should crack down on Medicare Advantage health plans for seniors that sometimes deny patients vital medical care while overcharging the government billions of dollars every year, government watchdogs told a House panel Tuesday.

Witnesses sharply criticized the fast-growing health plans at a hearing held by the Energy and Commerce subcommittee on oversight and investigations. They cited a slew of critical audits and other reports that described plans denying access to health care …

Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), chair of the subcommittee, said seniors should not be “required to jump through numerous hoops” to gain access to health care.

The watchdogs also recommended imposing limits on home-based “health assessments,” arguing these visits can artificially inflate payments to plans without offering patients appropriate care. …

Bliss said seniors “may not be aware that they may face greater barriers to accessing certain types of health care services in Medicare Advantage than in original Medicare.”

Leslie Gordon, of the Government Accountability Office, the watchdog arm of Congress, said seniors in their last year of life had dropped out of Medicare Advantage plans at twice the rate of other patients leaving the plans.

Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), who chairs the influential Energy and Commerce Committee, said he was “deeply concerned” to hear that some patients are facing “unwarranted barriers” to getting care.

James Mathews, who directs the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, which advises Congress on Medicare policy, said Medicare Advantage could lower costs and improve medical care but “is not meeting this potential” despite its wide acceptance among seniors.

Notably absent from the hearing witness list was anyone from CMS, which runs the $350 billion-a-year program.

[CMS] officials clearly knew years ago that some health plans were abusing the payment system to boost profits yet for years ran the program as what one CMS official called an “honor system.”

CMS aimed to change things starting in 2007, when it rolled out an audit plan called “Risk Adjustment Data Validation,” or RADV. Health plans were directed to send CMS medical records that documented the health status of each patient and return payments when they couldn’t.

The results were disastrous, showing that 35 of 37 plans picked for audit had been overpaid, sometimes by thousands of dollars per patient. Common conditions that were overstated or unable to be verified ranged from diabetes with chronic complications to major depression.

Yet CMS still has not completed audits dating as far back as 2011, through which officials had expected to recoup more than $600 million in overpayments caused by unverified diagnoses.

Medicare Advantage Enrollment Growth Implications for the US Health Care System, JAMA, June 28, 2022, by Gretchen Jacobson & David Blumenthal

Medicare Advantage will be the dominant source of Medicare coverage by 2025. This development creates significant challenges ….

[T]he need to find new ways to set Medicare Advantage payment rates. Currently, Medicare Advantage plans in local markets are paid to cover Medicare benefits based on the average costs of providing those same benefits to patients in traditional Medicare within the same market. Yet, basing payments on the costs of covering remaining enrollees in traditional Medicare will be less appropriate as these individuals become less and less representative of the Medicare population…

[P]otential loss of the vital role that traditional Medicare has had in shaping the health care system generally. Traditional Medicare has led the way in developing quality standards and measures that have been widely applied and in transparently sharing results with the public.

[T]raditional Medicare claims data provide the only nationwide source of consistent, comparable information on patterns of care throughout the country. … have enabled important observations about variability in care within and across geographic areas, and have informed policies to reduce variation, reduce unnecessary spending, and improve the quality of care.

[T]raditional Medicare has helped support rural health care centers and fund graduate medical education. …

[Q]uality and utilization data that traditional Medicare has accumulated on individual clinicians and health care centers are not currently accessible for those same entities serving patients enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans. … Medicare Advantage organizations and their clinicians and health centers are not reimbursed based on encounter data, and thus do not have the same incentives to submit complete and accurate information.

A Medicare Advantage–dominated system also raises questions about how Medicare would work through private plans to achieve the many other public purposes that Medicare has served. Traditional Medicare’s increased payments for clinicians and health care centers in rural areas have helped to maintain access to care for rural populations.

… looming challenges created by the impending transformation of Medicare into a system primarily consisting of competing for-profit health organizations. … [and] consider how to compensate for the vital information about the US health care system that could be lost with the decline of traditional Medicare. …

[C]onsider how to sustain Medicare’s record of innovation in payment and delivery system reform in a program in which the nature and results of innovation are increasingly the proprietary property of private entities. CMMI will have to develop methods to take full advantage of a much more modest traditional Medicare testing ground. Medicare also will have to consider whether and how to incentivize or encourage private organizations to share their most promising innovations— undertaken with public funds—so that Medicare can fulfill its obligations to all beneficiaries and, as a public program, to the health care system generally.

Comment:

By Jim Kahn, M.D., M.P.H.

Two unrelated reports on problems with Medicare Advantage, the private insurer side of Medicare:

KHN (Kaiser Health News) lists Medicare Advantage problems discussed in a Congressional hearing: care barriers and denials; excess home health assessments designed to inflate capitation payments; audits revealing widespread overpayment yet languishing >10 years; patients switching to traditional Medicare at the end of life when medical needs rise; Medicare Advantage failing to realize purported advantages; CMS missing in action (and from the hearing).

It’s a familiar story. Promise improved quality and lowered costs for CMS. Fail to achieve those goals (despite claims of success). Game the system to boost capitation payments and avoid meaningful oversight. These revelations aren’t news, indeed are noted regularly in HJM. Yet on and on it goes. CMS – the regulator asleep at the wheel – declined to testify (they can do that?).

The article by Jacobson & Blumenthal is more arcane – about how the traditional fully public fee-for-service part of Medicare has provided consistent national data on medical claims to help improve care and simple methods to adjust payments to support rural areas and medical education. They want CMS to somehow achieve the same abilities with Medicare Advantage, despite the variation and opacity implicit with a multitude of private insurance plans. There’s no indication it can ever happen.

Unfortunately, now traditional Medicare is pursuing a Medicare Advantage look-alike strategy. Engineered by CMS via the REACH program, for-profit ACO “entities” receive a capitated amount per patient. It will yield the same dynamics and vulnerabilities as Medicare Advantage. HJM has written often on this. CMS is catering to corporate interests.

In sum: myriad severe limitations associated with growing privatization of Medicare. There seems to be an implication around here somewhere … oh, I see it. Why don’t we transform Medicare into a fully public system, with no role for profit-seeking intermediaries, like it used to be? While we’re at it, let’s adopt the system universally, replacing private insurance, Medicaid, etc. Just like dozens of other countries. We could call it a “single payer.”

http://healthjusticemonitor.org…

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Summary: An important study in the United Kingdom finds that care contracting with for-profit companies sharply raises preventable mortality. Privatization with for-profit providers threatens health outcomes in the UK and, as we have argued before, in the US.

Outsourcing health-care services to the private sector and treatable mortality rates in England, 2013–20: an observational study of NHS privatisation, The Lancet Public Health July 1, 2022, by Benjamin Goodair and Aaron Reeves

Summary:

Background: The effects of outsourcing health services to for-profit providers are contested, with some arguing that introducing such providers will improve performance through additional competition while others worry that this will lead to cost cutting and poorer outcomes for patients. We aimed to examine this debate by empirically evaluating the impact of outsourced spending to private providers, following the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, on treatable mortality rates and the quality of health-care services in England.

Methods: For this observational study, we used a novel database composed of … procurement contracts between April 1, 2013, and Feb 29, 2020 (n=645 674…), across 173 clinical commissioning groups (CCGs; regional health boards) in England … identifying [providers] as National Health Service (NHS) organisations, for-profit companies, or charities. We supplemented these data with rates of local mortality from causes that should be treatable by medical intervention, indicating the quality of health-care services. …

Findings: We found that an annual increase of one percentage point of outsourcing to the private for-profit sector corresponded with an annual increase in treatable [preventable] mortality of 0·38% (95% CI 0·22–0·55; p=0·0016) or 0·29 (95% CI 0·09–0·49; p=0·0041) deaths per 100 000 population in the following year. This finding was robust to matching on background characteristics, adjusting for possible confounding factors, and measurement error in our dataset. Changes to for-profit outsourcing since 2014 were associated with an additional 557 (95% CI 153–961) treatable deaths across the 173 CCGs.

Interpretation: The privatisation of the NHS in England, through the outsourcing of services to for-profit companies, consistently increased in 2013–20. Private sector outsourcing corresponded with significantly increased rates of treatable mortality, potentially as a result of a decline in the quality of health-care services.

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Recently the founders of Physicians for a National Health Program and colleagues (including me) published an article in The Nation indicating why single payer Medicare for All is not enough and community ownership of the delivery system should be involved as well – a system like the British National Health Service. See our HJM post about that here.

In the meantime, our British friends have been experimenting with the alleged benefits of for-profit competition in health care, much as is promoted by the privatizers in our country – here privatizing both the delivery system and the payment/insurance system. Although we had plenty of data to show them the adverse consequences, nevertheless they proceeded with their studies and showed that their outsourcing of services to the private, for-profit sector significantly increased the rates of treatable mortality. Their experiment with privatizing health care killed patients.

(On a personal note, please excuse my repetition of a theme I have covered before. Having recently been exposed to a series of grand mal seizures which left me in a comatose state, I was placed in “hospice at home.” But fortunately having eventually partially recovered again, I felt like I had to take this opportunity to pound home once more real reform instead of being contented with incrementalism that takes such good care of private equity in health care but leaves millions of patients in need poorly served or not served at all. I know I won’t be around to see the reform we need, but maybe some of you will have your passion drive turned up to the level that we can get the job done. I know I can’t quit, so don’t you either.)

http://healthjusticemonitor.org…

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Summary: Independence Day is about celebrating freedom. Let’s contemplate the freedoms we can achieve with universal health insurance.

Comment:

By Jim Kahn, M.D., M.P.H.

On this day in 1776 we declared independence from Great Britain. We asserted, and soon realized, our desire to be free of overseas control and exploitation – political, religious, and financial. Thus was the US founded in freedom (if initially only for white men).

Yet freedoms often conflict with each other, and with our communal goals. The freedom to vote runs up against a claimed freedom to establish local election rules. The freedom to do business conflicts with a commitment to workers, consumers, and the environment. Our independence relies in critical and complex ways on our interdependence. Individual freedom must be balanced with collective welfare.

In health, the balance is askew.

Freedom to profit financially is taken as paramount. Insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and many providers profit outrageously by charging high prices for services that are rationed or cost pennies to produce.

To that profit altar we sacrifice all the other freedoms that should prevail:

• Freedom to seek quality health care without impediment.
• Freedom to choose providers.
• Freedom to select therapies.
• Freedom from medical debt.
• Freedom from administrative barriers and hassles.

These health care freedoms are due to us all, regardless of economic status, race, gender, and citizenship.

We all deserve the freedom to enjoy the “free lunch” that is single payer: cheaper and better.

Freedom means placing community welfare over individual financial gain.

That’s the country I’m rooting for today, and every day.

http://healthjusticemonitor.org…

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Summary: Today’s post by a visiting blogger reflects on recent policy think tank reports on medical debt, and bemoans the lack of attention to a much-needed major financing makeover.

Comment:

By Ana Malinow, M.D.

It always goes like this: excellent reporting and analysis from the best health policy think tanks detailing how the US health care system is failing, building up to a crescendo that surpasses credulity, followed by a conclusion full of banal suggestions as to how we can address these failures. The storyline never deviates.

Take the Urban Institute’s Which County Characteristics Predict Medical Debt? (covered yesterday in HJM), which maps the geographic distribution and drivers of medical debt, a problem unknown in other high-income countries. To our dismay, we find that “the county’s prevalence of chronic conditions is the strongest predictor of a county’s medical debt in collections.” That means, these human beings and their families, who should be worried about their health, are instead worried about their bills.

And the policy insights to address this unimaginable suffering? Let’s see: first, because many of the counties with the highest rates of medical debt are from states which didn’t expand Medicaid, let’s expand Medicaid, the country’s racialized, second-class health care system for the poor. Forget that these people with chronic illnesses will have to prove their poverty month after month to meet criteria.

What else does the Urban Institute suggest? Consumer protections against surprise bills, even though the Kaiser Family Foundation just wrote that “surprise bills” represent just a fraction of the unexpected and large medical bills many Americans face. Oh, and yes, increase these poor people’s access to more credit, so they can become even more indebted.

What Urban Institute also finds, yet never elaborate upon, is that “counties with a higher share of the population ages 65 and older have lower rates of medical debts in collections.” That’s the age when people become eligible for Medicare – near universal coverage for the elderly. Not worth highlighting, apparently.

I can’t say with certainty what’s driving these very modest policy proposals rather than system-changing reform. I do know that Urban Institute funding is from mainstays of the current system. According to their 2020 Annual Report, that’s 35% federal government (including HHS and MedPAC), 34% foundations (including Merck, Walmart, Gates, Charles Koch Institute, and Walton Family), and 20% corporations (including JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Salesforce, AARP, Amazon, GM, Microsoft, QuickenLoans, Blue Shield Blue Cross Massachusetts, H&R Block, Lyft, National Associations of Realtors, etc).

And while we are on the subject of excellent reporting and analysis with lame conclusions, the Kaiser Family Foundation, in their recent publication on the burden of medical debt (covered in HJM) goes through excruciating detail describing who has medical debt: just about anyone in the US, but especially people with disabilities, those in worse health, those who live in poverty, Black Americans, people living in the South, and again, people living in Medicaid non-expansion states. At least the KFF has the integrity to write that “simply expanding coverage” will not solve the problem of medical debt in the US. But they refuse to connect the dots they so painstakingly displayed to major system change.

A national, single payer, universal, comprehensive, accessible, equitable health care system would abolish medical debt. Think about it. Why not just come out and say it?

Dr. Malinow is a pediatrician, former president of PNHP, and lead organizer for National Single Payer.

http://healthjusticemonitor.org…

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Summary: Recently we reported on a national survey of medical debt. A new report uses credit bureau data to describe which local factors predict high levels of medical debt in collections. They are: being in the South, % of population with 4 or more chronic medical conditions, % low birth weight, % uninsured, % Black, low average income, and high medical spending.

Which County Characteristics Predict Medical Debt?, Urban Institute, June 15, 2022, by Fredric Blavin, et al.

Medical debt is a critical challenge to Americans’ financial stability and well-being. We use unique Urban Institute credit bureau data on more than 10 million consumers to investigate (1) where people are more likely to have medical debt in collections and (2) which county-level socioeconomic and health characteristics predict medical debt. We find that 79 out of the 100 counties with highest levels of medical debt in collections are in states that have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. These counties are mostly concentrated in Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. We also find that a county’s prevalence of chronic conditions is the strongest predictor of medical debt in collections. In addition, counties with high shares of uninsured, low-income, or Black populations have higher rates of medical debt in collections. We offer a few insights on policies that can reduce medical debt, such as Medicaid expansion and consumer protections through the No Surprises Act.

Comment:

By Jim Kahn, M.D., M.P.H.

Black spots on the US map indicate that >30% of consumers have medical debt in collections. Not just medical debt, but in formal collections processes. Darker blue areas are at 20-30%.

Predictors include high rates of uninsurance, and related to that living in states with no ACA Medicaid expansion. Also the usual markers of vulnerability: % sick with multiple chronic conditions, % low birth weight, % low income, and % Black.

What is wrong with our country that we waste >$600 billion yearly on administrative complexity and profits for a fractured insurance system that torments the most vulnerable among us with financial problems related to getting medical care? We stand alone among wealthy countries in this cruelty.

Our health care financing system is a massive failure — inefficient, unkind, and deadly. No tweaks will fix its fundamental problems. How much clearer could that be?

We must find a way to transform today’s crises into a health system and country we can be proud of.

http://healthjusticemonitor.org…

Stay informed! Subscribe to the McCanne Health Justice Monitor to receive regular policy updates via email, and be sure to follow them on Twitter @HealthJustMon.