Senate control opens up new possibilities, but the party will still need to contend with arcane rules and the challenges of a narrow majority.

By Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz
The New York Times, January 7, 2021

The Democrats’ new congressional majority puts a variety of health policy ideas suddenly into reach, even if big structural changes remain unlikely.

A series of tweaks bolstering the Affordable Care Act stands the best chance of passage. Legislators could make insurance subsidies more generous, get coverage to low-income Americans in states that haven’t expanded Medicaid, and render moot a pending Supreme Court lawsuit that aims to overturn the entire law.

But structural overhauls like “Medicare for all,” which would move all Americans to a government-run health plan, face a much tougher road. So would elements of Joe Biden’s health agenda, such as a public option, which would give Americans a choice between a new public plan and private insurance.

There are six areas of health policy where congressional aides and health policy experts could see Democrats focusing their efforts this year. Smaller policy reforms are expected to be easier, both legally and politically, while more ambitious policies may not easily slot into reconciliation’s strict rules — or the political preferences of enough Democratic lawmakers.

Affordable Care Act expansions

One priority is raising the income ceiling for those who receive subsidies, expanding the number of people who qualify for help. Another is rewriting formulas to peg the size of the subsidy to a more generous health insurance plan, a way to increase the amount of assistance.

Texas v. California came about because of legislation that a Republican-controlled Congress passed in 2017, lowering the penalty for not carrying health insurance to zero dollars. Democrats could use reconciliation to reverse those changes.

Closing the Medicaid gap

In his campaign plan, President-elect Biden proposed fixing this problem by allowing these patients to enroll in a new public health plan. That type of policy may be too complex to move through reconciliation, but simpler policy options could also do the trick.

Reducing drug prices

Experts thought that certain drug pricing controls might be possible with reconciliation, since they have clear budgetary effects. But the politics of passage could be difficult with narrow majorities in both the House and Senate and such strong opposition from the drug industry.

A public option

President-elect Biden included a public health insurance option, available to all Americans, in his 2020 campaign platform. The slim majority in the Senate, however, may make it hard to move this type of plan forward.

Medicare for all

The larger obstacle to such a plan is more likely political than procedural. Currently, a majority of House Democrats back Medicare for all, but that would not be nearly enough votes to pass such a bill. An even smaller share of senators back the plan.

https://www.nytimes.com…

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz are very astute observers of the national health policy and politics agenda. You can rely on their reporting to provide an accurate prediction of the policy agenda under the Biden administration.

It is most likely that health reform activities will be limited to making adjustments to the Affordable Care Act which will allow more individuals to participate and will provide limited additional financial relief for those already in the program, but, basically, there will be little fundamental change to our expensive, administratively wasteful, and inadequate health care financing infrastructure. Particularly disconcerting is that the private insurance sector will have an even greater role in health care financing through an expansion of the ACA exchanges, and an expansion of the Medicaid managed care programs. When the private insurers are a major source of our health care financing dysfunctions, it seems disingenuous to expand their role.

President-elect Biden has stated that he will not approve a single payer Medicare for All program. That does not mean that we should walk away and wait another four years. It does mean that the political threshold has not been met to expect enactment in the near future, and that means that our task is to expand our efforts to educate the public as to the features of the single payer model that make it a moral imperative. So, instead of having less to do because of Biden’s rejection of the model, it means that we need to greatly intensify our advocacy efforts, and that means we have a lot of work to do. It is an imperative that a national, single payer, improved Medicare for All remain the ultimate, compelling goal.

A word needs to be said about the public option. Right now there is fairly intense political activity to try to convince Biden and Congress to enact a Medicare-like public option as an incremental step towards the eventuality of single payer Medicare for All. It is proposed that the public option could be created and then later expanded into a universal Medicare for All.

First of all, a model that would be suitable for a single payer system cannot be created as a stand-alone option in our fragmented system of health care financing. Single payer needs to be financed with progressive taxes, but you cannot expect individuals to pay for their own private plans, whether or not employer-sponsored, and also pay progressive taxes to buy coverage for others who choose the public option. Also, much of the financial feasibility of the single payer system derives from eliminating hundreds of billions of dollars in administrative excesses, but with a public option in a market of private plans, most of the administrative waste would be perpetuated, Also, the administrative savings of our traditional Medicare program would not be duplicated in a public option that must be designed much like our current private plans to be able to compete in the marketplace – a dysfunctional model that we are trying to eliminate. The lack of administrative efficiency in both the structure of the public option and in the administrative complexity that it places on the health care delivery system would allow opponents of single payer to say that the public option proves that single payer cannot save money.

If such a public option were designed as a transitional program to be replaced by single payer in about four years – an approach supported by many of the public option advocates – the definitive single payer model must be mandated in the initial legislation or else it would be abandoned when it became obvious that it didn’t work, as indicated above. It cannot work because it is not a single payer system and forgoes almost all of the single payer efficiencies.

Some say we should have a four year transitional public option anyway. Why? Avoid disruption? Disrupting one-fourth of the system each year would be more complex and more expensive than disrupting the entire system in a single step. Disrupting health care coverage for people over 65 by placing them on Medicare was done as a single step on July 1, 1966. It was a beneficial disruption, and it worked just fine.

Beneficial disruption is sort of like John Lewis’ good trouble. After yesterday’s disaster we sure could use a large dose of good trouble right now.

Peace.

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By Brian M. Rosenthal
The New York Times, January 5, 2021

When the coronavirus began spreading through New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo ordered state-run hospitals to stop suing patients over unpaid medical bills, and almost all of the major private hospitals in the state voluntarily followed suit by suspending their claims.

But one chain of hospitals plowed ahead with thousands of lawsuits: Northwell Health, which is the state’s largest health system and is run by one of Mr. Cuomo’s closest allies.

The nonprofit Northwell sued more than 2,500 patients last year, records show, a flood of litigation even as the pandemic has led to widespread job losses and economic uncertainty.

They hit teachers, construction workers, grocery store employees and others, including some who had lost work in the pandemic or gotten sick themselves.

After this article was published Tuesday morning, Northwell abruptly announced it would stop suing patients during the pandemic and would rescind all legal claims it filed in 2020.

Across the country, medical debt lawsuits have grown increasingly common in recent years, as health care costs have risen and insurance companies have shifted more of the burden onto patients through larger deductibles and co-payments. The cases are rarely contested in court and usually lead to default judgments, allowing hospitals to garnish wages and freeze accounts to extract money, sometimes without the patient’s knowledge.

Northwell had not been alone in pursuing debt through the courts during the pandemic. About 50 hospitals in New York have sued a total of 5,000 patients since March, according to a search of filings in courts around the state.

In an interview last month, Richard Miller, the system’s chief business strategy officer, defended the cases, saying Northwell had the right to collect what it was owed.

“We have no interest in pursuing these cases legally. It’s not what we want to do,” Mr. Miller said, before the hospital changed course on Tuesday. “Unfortunately, in some cases, they’re not leaving us much of an option.”

St. Peter’s Health Partners, which runs a chain of hospitals in the Albany area and filed about 1,000 lawsuits last year, and Oneida Health, a health care system near Syracuse that filed about 500 lawsuits, both said in statements that they temporarily stopped suing in the spring but resumed over the summer.

https://www.nytimes.com…

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Is this any way to finance our health care system? Sue people who cannot afford to pay their medical bills? We have discussed this many times before, and we have discussed a better financing system that would prevent medical debt, besides guaranteeing health care for everyone – single payer improved Medicare for All.

Why is this still an issue?

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By Adam Gaffney, David U. Himmelstein, Steffie Woolhandler, and James G. Kahn
Health Affairs, January 2021

Abstract

The return of a Democratic administration to the White House, coupled with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic–induced contractions of job-based insurance, may reignite debate over public coverage expansion and its costs. Decades of research demonstrate that uninsured people and people with copays and deductibles use less care than people with first-dollar coverage. Hence, most economic analyses of Medicare for All proposals and other coverage expansions project increased utilization and associated costs. We review the utilization surges that such analyses have predicted and contrast them with the more modest utilization increments observed after past coverage expansions in the US and other affluent nations. The discrepancy between predicted and observed utilization changes suggests that analysts underestimate the role of supply-side constraints—for example, the finite number of physicians and hospital beds. Our review of the utilization effects of past coverage expansions suggests that a first-dollar universal coverage expansion would increase ambulatory visits by 7–10 percent and hospital use by 0–3 percent. Modest administrative savings could offset the costs of such increases.

Conclusion

The supply-focused framework advanced in this article challenges the long-dominant paradigm among US health economists that health care demand (and costs) must be curbed by forcing patients to have “skin in the game.” Many health care systems have constrained utilization and cost growth without resorting to cost barriers while achieving universal coverage and a more equitable distribution of care. The US can do the same.

https://www.healthaffairs.org…

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Universal Healthcare Less Costly Than Previously Projected: Harvard / UCSF Study

Physicians for a National Health Program, January 5, 2021

Previous projections of the costs of universal coverage, much cited by its opponents, have concluded that expanded coverage would lead to surging healthcare use and costs. But a new study by researchers from Harvard Medical School, the University of California San Francisco and the City University of New York at Hunter College published January 5 in Health Affairs concludes that predictions of large cost increases are likely wrong. The researchers, citing real-world experience with society-wide coverage expansions in the US and ten other wealthy nations, conclude that universal coverage increases the overall use of care only modestly, or, in some cases, not at all.

The researchers find that a factor rarely considered in the previous analyses – the finite supply of doctors’ and nurses’ hours and hospitals beds – has constrained cost and utilization increases in essentially all past coverage expansions, and would similarly prevent a surge in use under Medicare for All or other universal coverage reforms. The study finds strong evidence that new services provided to the people who gain coverage would likely be offset by reductions in useless or low-value care currently over-provided to the well-off.

Overall, the study estimates that a Medicare for All reform offering first-dollar universal coverage would lead to a 7-10% increase in outpatient visits, and a 0-3% increase in hospital use, figures far lower than most previous analyses, which could be readily offset by administrative cost savings.

https://pnhp.org…

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

This report refutes the claim that the surge in health care utilization under a single payer Medicare for All program would not be affordable for the nation. Under modest supply-side constraints, health care would be prioritized according to need, causing the health care professionals to reduce unnecessary care for patients with minimal needs thereby making way for patients with greater needs. That trade-off produces the benefit of improved efficiency.

Another important conclusion is that it is unnecessary to erect financial barriers to care such as deductibles and other cost sharing which otherwise might cause patients to forgo essential health care services.

Also the reduction in administrative costs by switching to a more efficient single payer Medicare for All can produce enough savings to pay for most or all of the costs of increasing the patient population while decreasing out-of-pocket cost sharing.

It is not that we can’t afford Medicare for All, rather it is that we cannot afford not to do it.

Stay informed! Visit www.pnhp.org/qotd to sign up for daily email updates.

By Katy Talento, Sc.M., and Ge Bai, Ph.D.
MedPage Today, January 2, 2021

Health insurance brokers market themselves to employers as a buyer’s agent, promising to use their expertise to find employers the best deal. A new study, however, reported a positive association between health insurance broker commissions and premiums paid by employers offering fully insured group health plans to their workers.

What’s more, brokers are also paid various types of bonuses by insurance carriers, based on the amount of total business the broker has placed with the carrier, the amount of new business delivered to the carriers, or other types of metrics based on profit delivered to the carriers.

If you’re an employer looking for fully insured health insurance plans, your broker has every incentive to sell you a higher-priced plan compared to a lower-priced plan, a plan structured to produce more profit for the carrier rather than savings to you, a plan sold by the carrier that has a better bonus structure compared to a better plan for you offered by another carrier.

Larger employers often hire one of a handful of major insurance carriers to administer a self-funded plan, in which the employer pays all of the medical claims incurred by its workers. The carrier is merely a claims processor, writing checks to hospitals and doctors out of the employer’s own bank account. What incentive does that carrier have to make sure the employer isn’t being overcharged, billed erroneously, fraudulently, or billed for inappropriate and unnecessary care at more expensive sites of care? None. They just mail the check. It’s not their money on the line.

So fully insured employers buy plans sold by agents who have no incentive to keep costs down or recommend the most suitable plan; self-funded employers have carriers that have no incentive to keep costs down or quality high. That economic jujitsu is stealing prosperity and growth from American businesses, and stealing the American dream from the working class.

https://www.medpagetoday.com…

Ge Bai, Angela Park, et al, Medical Care Research and Review: The Commissions Paid to Brokers for Fully Insured Health Insurance Plans, December 16, 2020:
https://journals.sagepub.com…

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

When the Affordable Care Act was drafted, one of the goals was to protect and perpetuate employer-sponsored health plans, the part of the health insurance market that was said to be functioning well. No doubt the health insurance brokers that sell these plans were in agreement with this assessment.

The insurance brokers are strictly administrative intermediaries who provide no health care services whatsoever, but they add significantly to the costs of health plans offered by employers though broker commissions and bonuses. The brokers can increase these payments from the insurers by manipulating the insurance products sold to the employers, often increasing the brokers’ own profits without providing any added value to the employer or the insured employees. These brokers are yet one more reason why health care costs are so high in the United States in a system rife with mediocrity and wasteful administrative excesses.

The brokers no doubt contend that they are providing a valuable service to the employers by not leaving them stuck with a one-size-fits-all plan but instead customizing the plan to fit the wishes of the employer. But what customization is offered? Higher deductibles and other cost sharing that erect financial barriers to health care? Narrow provider networks that may exclude professionals and hospitals that the employees may prefer or even need? Limiting services covered by the plan? Using tiering or stepped therapy that create more barriers to care? Regardless, they will certainly select plans that will provide higher commissions and bonuses without bothering to explain those features to the employers buying the plans.

So then the employer has a choice of private plans, fulfilling President-elect Biden’s assurances that private health plans will always be available.

Wait. Shouldn’t these plans be compared to the dreaded one-size-fits-all plan? What would a single payer improved Medicare for All plan offer? All essential services would be covered, throughout life. Hundreds of billions of dollars in administrative waste would be eliminated (including the fees of superfluous brokers). The financial barriers of cost sharing would be essentially eliminated. Individuals would have the freedom to choose their own health care professionals and institutions. Equitable, progressive tax policies would be used to fund the system, making care affordable for each of us.

Market advocates claim that choices in insurance plans reduce costs while improving quality, yet the opposite is true since markets do not work in health care, except at the extreme margin. What we really want is the comprehensive, effective, equitable, affordable one-size-fits-all plan that really does take care of all of us without threatening our financial security. We certainly don’t need to pay the brokers to advise us that we should go ahead and accept improved Medicare for All. By now, we can figure that out on our own.

Stay informed! Visit www.pnhp.org/qotd to sign up for daily email updates.

By Yvette Cabrera
Los Angeles Times, February 13, 1995

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO — Back in the 1960s, after Mexican farm workers left the fields at each sunset, Dr. Monte McCanne’s office in this tiny agricultural town would begin to fill with laborers and their children. The doctor was always in, sometimes as late as 10 p.m., and he never rejected a patient who couldn’t pay.

Now in his 34th year of practice, McCanne, a primary-care physician who also provides obstetric services, says patients continue to come to him for medical care because he still welcomes all, even those uninsured, undocumented or unable to pay.

“I’ve always thought that…all I had to do was walk out the door and down the street and I’d find people in desperate need,” said McCanne, 60.

Former city planner Raymundo Becerra said: “I see Monte as a key player in the community who very humbly and quietly does his work. He is an old-town family doctor who has the love and respect of the Latinos here.”

About 75% of McCanne’s patients are Latino.

Even when Becerra arrived in San Juan Capistrano in 1973, he was surprised to meet so many people who were patients of Monte McCanne.

And now it seems like everyone has been delivered by Monte, “sometimes even three generations,” said Becerra.

Monte McCanne is not alone. His brother, Don McCanne, 57, is a San Clemente physician who also provides care regardless of his patients’ ability to pay.

“When other doctors wouldn’t take (obstetrics) patients without insurance, the McCannes would always accept them,” said Thomas E. Shaver, a surgeon at Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo.

“Despite financial hardships that go along with taking care of people without insurance . . . the (McCannes) have really committed their entire professional lives to caring for the Hispanic community in that area,” Shaver said.

At work, instead of typical medical garb, Monte McCanne wears one of the many guayaberas he has received. These lightweight cotton shirts are popular in Mexico’s coastal states of Veracruz and Guerrero.

“Between the two of us we’ve probably done (dubious number edited out – DM) worth of free work…But once you’ve eaten, how much money do you really need?” said Monte McCanne, who, like his brother, is married and maintains a modest lifestyle.

The McCannes are links in a family legacy that has provided for the less fortunate. Their grandfather, a real estate agent who owned orange groves in Pomona, delivered fruit to the mainly Latino residents of low-income neighborhoods in the south side of that city.

Their father, a former architect and schoolteacher who completed medical school while his children were growing up, opened two medical practices in Pomona in the 1950s to provide desperately needed health care. When he opened weekend clinics in San Juan Capistrano and San Clemente in the 1960s, his two sons–doctors themselves–took charge. (Don McCanne’s twin brother also followed in their father’s footsteps: He is an obstetrician for Kaiser Permanente in Fontana).

“We certainly filled a need. When we came here, nobody wanted to serve the indigent,” said Don McCanne, who arrived in San Clemente in 1966, five years after his brother settled in San Juan Capistrano. “But there are always going to be people who have difficulty in obtaining medical care.”

Slowly, word spread through the barrios about the brothers who never asked if their patients were documented residents.

Marcela Conde’s three daughters are the fourth generation of her family whom the McCannes have treated.

“The McCannes have great personalities. When I talk to them they don’t give me the run-around,” said Conde, 23, who was delivered by Monte McCanne and who had two of her daughters delivered by Don McCanne. “My whole family goes to them, from my grandmother and mother to my aunts and sister.”

Having a sibling who’s a doctor nearby has been a blessing for the brothers. They have rotated on-call duties since 1966 and have left town together only once, when their father died 20 years ago.

Though the brothers have the same desire to help the indigent, in many ways they are different. Don McCanne speaks limited Spanish while Monte is bilingual.

Don McCanne is active in his community, serving as chairman of the Mariners Bank in San Juan Capistrano and as a board member at Samaritan Medical Center in San Clemente, while Monte prefers to keep a lower profile.

Don McCanne said he is obsessive when it comes to following rules, while his brother is more casual and “warmer.”

Yet, when it comes to dosages of dedication, the siblings are like twins. Both work late into the evening and on weekends.

Some people object to the McCannes providing health care to illegal residents.

“Orange County is bankrupt. We simply do not have the resources to take care of the world,” said Nancy Thomson, coordinator of Citizens for Responsible Immigration, based in Orange. “These doctors do not have the right to give their services to people who” are here illegally.

Don McCanne responded by saying, “I’m a physician. I take care of people. And I know that offends some people, but every single person deserves adequate health care.”

He added that “the private patients pay the bills and keep us financially viable.”

Long hours, a progression of patients, low Medi-Cal reimbursement rates. Why do the McCannes continue this course?

“There’s a lot of gratification. It’s just the overall feeling of doing something good,” said Don McCanne.

https://www.latimes.com…

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Doctors Have Right to Serve Anyone

Los Angeles Times, Letters to the Editor, February 19, 1995

It was heartwarming to read in “Putting Health First,” (Feb. 13) about the two doctors, (Monte and Don) McCanne, who have committed their lives to serving the Hispanic community of south Orange County without regard to ability to pay or proof of citizenship.

When doctors are too often perceived as primarily concerned with their own bottom lines, it’s reassuring to know that these men give so freely of their talents.

In contrast, I was sickened by the outright meanness expressed by Nancy Thomson, coordinator of Citizens for Responsible Immigration, in her objection to the McCannes providing medical health care to illegal residents. Her position that Orange County’s bankruptcy somehow means that “these doctors do not have the right to give their services to people who” are here illegally is incredible. Is she so lacking in care for her fellow man that she would deny the doctors’ right to deliver their own services to whomever they please?

And what about Newt Gingrich’s position that private charity should replace government in caring for the needy? These doctors are reducing the county’s cost of caring for the indigent in emergency rooms. Their basic humanity stands in sharp contrast to the barely concealed bigotry of the anti-immigration groups.

A. McINTYRE
San Clemente

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Congratulations to the McCanne brothers. Their work and altruism is a true reflection of the Libertarian views. They are helping others without a law requiring them to do so and without any laws telling them they cannot.

ANNA M. APOIAN
Corona

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I am a middle-class, third-generation American. Thirty years ago, my daughter, Lisa, was very ill and none of the fancy doctors in South County knew what was wrong. Dr. Monte McCanne diagnosed leukemia and sent us to Children’s Hospital of Orange County for affordable care, as we had no insurance at the time. Dr. Monte remained our family physician for many years.

Nancy Thomson of Citizens for Responsible Immigration says: “These doctors do not have the right to give their services to people who” are here illegally. These doctors have the right to give whatever they like to whomever they like. Thomson is a disgrace to humanity.

JOAN DANIELS
Laguna Niguel

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Boos to Nancy Thomson for her position that “these doctors do not have the right to give their services to people who” are here illegally. Come on.

But kudos to Drs. Don and Monte McCanne for their medical services to the poor and indigent for long years, regardless of the ability to pay. These men have to be among the brightest luminaries in our community.

FATHER RICHARD WOZNIAK
Associate Pastor
La Purisima Catholic Church
Orange

https://www.latimes.com…

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Okay, this looks like kind of a weird Quote of the Day, but it seems to be appropriate for the very last day of a very difficult year. I had long ago forgotten about this article published a quarter of a century ago, but one of our sons stumbled on it yesterday through Google, and he sent it to us.

So what is the story behind this story? Simply, we believed that everyone should have health care and linking that care to the ability to pay frequently was just not right. I joined the practice in July, 1966, the month when Medicare and Medicaid were implemented. Medicare was great. It paid fair rates and opened up referral channels to specialized care. Medicaid helped to reduce our losses on care for the indigent, although we had to rely on other sources for our own (modest) net incomes. Even the uninsured were not there for charity. They paid their fees when they could, though it didn’t seem fair after seeing them labor in the agricultural fields. Private insurance worked well in the earlier years of our practice, but the managed care revolution erected significant barriers to care in the form of limited provider networks, higher deductibles and other cost sharing, and burdensome administrative excesses such as prior authorization requirements.

We became convinced more than ever that we needed a national health insurance program that covered everyone. What a pleasure that would have been to be able to just take care of the patients and ignore the payment issues. In fact, I began speaking and writing on a program that I called “UNIVERSAL MEDICARE – Health Care for Everyone.” I had red, white, and blue bumper stickers made up with this slogan. I read about Physicians for a National Health Program and immediately joined them, though California lagged the East Coast and Chicago in activating the organization.

Unfortunately, Monte developed a disabling neurological problem and had to retire. By this time a community health center was established in San Juan Capistrano, so we were able to close the practice knowing that our patients could still receive care. Our more affluent patients had no problem finding other physicians who were enthusiastic about practicing in an Orange County coastal community. Although we certainly missed our patients, we didn’t feel like we abandoned them.

It was at that point, over two decades ago, that I decided to devote my remaining productive years to advocate for health care reform, primarily as a volunteer for Physicians for a National Health Program (all of us at PNHP are volunteers, except for the small, highly dedicated staff).

So what is the point of today’s message? I look at Quentin, Jack, Bud, Bob and some of the other icons of the health care reform movement who have left us, and I realize that there is so much more work left to do, and it’s going to have to be done by you. I just hope that some of us can provide a modicum of inspiration to help move the process forward. We are so close. We have the policy worked out, but we still have to align the politics. 2021 is ripe for lighting that fuse. Liftoff time!

Stay informed! Visit www.pnhp.org/qotd to sign up for daily email updates.

By Peter Lazes and Marie Rudden

The purpose of this book

As both of us have been occupied in our careers with what makes organizational systems more effective and have observed the central role of frontline staff and caregivers in this effort, we offer methods for restructuring healthcare systems in a way that makes collaboration and active communication among administrators, medical staff, and patients a key value. This book explores exactly what it takes to effectively engage staff and providers in improving the patient care shortcomings within their institutions. We do this by presenting case studies of institutions that have successfully implemented major systemic changes in this manner, by reviewing research findings and outcomes, and by conveying the direct words and experiences of staff who have participated in changing their healthcare organizations.

We have shaped this book around the specific methods that healthcare systems can employ in order to enlist their frontline staff in diagnosing and rectifying difficulties in providing high-quality patient care. This book not only is a manual detailing what can be achieved when frontline staff have a direct voice in controlling their practice environments, but also was written to provide a method for accomplishing transformative changes in how our hospitals and outpatient clinics work.

All Americans deserve and should have access to high-quality, affordable healthcare services delivered by professionals who know them and who have sufficient time and resources to care for them.

In sum, this book will inform you about the historical development of approaches for engaging frontline staff in job redesign and in the creation of more effective organizational systems. The book gets you under the covers, so to speak, exploring what it really takes to effectively initiate, implement, and sustain employee involvement activities. It demonstrates how Labor-Management Partnerships particularly can help organizations to evaluate the effectiveness of their current systems and to design more functional structures. We emphasize too the importance of establishing collaborative leadership processes to engage and sustain employee participation efforts.

Peter Lazes, PhD, a clinical and industrial psychologist, was the founder and former director of Programs for Employment and Workplace Systems and of the Healthcare Transformation Project, both at Cornell University.

Marie Rudden, MD, his wife and co-author, is a psychiatrist and psycho-analyst, an associate editor for the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, a member of the North American Editorial Board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and a clinical assistant professor in psychiatry at Weill Cornell School of Medicine.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com…

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

In a personal email communication, Peter Lazes writes, “In addition to a national payment system, I would suggest that it is critical to create ways for frontline staff and unions to become active partners in the creation of new structures and systems to improve access and coordination of care. Bills, administrative actions and some form of Medicare for All are important, but it is critical that we find ways to make use of the sufficient knowledge of frontline staff (from housekeeping staff to attending physicians) in order to achieve needed breakthroughs… structures themselves will not be sufficient nor will just “bold” leadership from management. Current healthcare management leadership has achieved only anemic improvements in improving the quality of patient care. And a national payment system by itself will not achieve reducing inequalities nor improve overall health outcomes. Systemic changes along with a national payment system is needed.”

It is absolutely essential that we replace the current dysfunctional health care financing system with one that ensures equitable, affordable health care for all – single payer improved Medicare for All. Although the financial realignment will certainly correct many of the deficiencies in the health care delivery system, it will also greatly benefit from continual oversight, analysis and improvement from those most important to the patient – the frontline staff and their patient-oriented organizations, such as the unions.

Stay informed! Visit www.pnhp.org/qotd to sign up for daily email updates.

He used medicine to take on poverty, racism and the threat of nuclear destruction. Two groups he helped start won Nobel Peace Prizes.

By Denise Grady
The New York Times, December 28, 2020

Dr. H. Jack Geiger, who ran away to Harlem as a teenager and emerged a lifelong civil rights activist, helping to bring medical care and services to impoverished regions and to start two antiwar doctors groups that shared in Nobel Peace Prizes, died on Monday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 95.

His death was confirmed by David Shadrack Smith, his stepson.

Dr. Geiger was a leading proponent of “social medicine,” the idea that doctors should use their expertise and moral authority not just to treat illness but also to change the conditions that made people sick in the first place: poverty, hunger, discrimination, joblessness and lack of education.

“Jack redefined what it meant to be a physician,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener, the founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University and the co-founder of the Children’s Health Fund. He added, by email, “He felt it was our right and responsibility as doctors to ‘treat’ hunger, poverty and disparities in health care, as directly and openly as we treat pneumonia or appendicitis.”

The social order, not medical services, determines health, Dr. Geiger said in “Out in the Rural,” a short documentary film made in 1970 about the first community health center in Mississippi. “I’ve never seen any use in what I call the Schweitzer bit,” he added, referring to the humanitarian Dr. Albert Schweitzer, “which is the idea that you stand around in whatever circumstances laying hands on people in the traditional medical way, waiting until they’re sick, curing them and then sending them back unchanged into an environment that overwhelmingly determines that they’re going to get sick.”

In the 1960s, Dr. Geiger was a co-founder, with Dr. Count Gibson, of community health centers in South Boston and in Mound Bayou, in the Mississippi Delta. They provided desperately needed health care but also food, sanitation, education, jobs and social services — what Dr. Geiger called “a road out” of poverty. The centers inspired a national network of clinics that now number more than 1,300 and serve about 28 million low-income patients at more than 9,000 sites.

“I don’t know if some of the Mississippi white power structure cares about dead Black babies or not,” Dr. Geiger said in the film, about the first center in Mississippi. “But if they don’t, even they can’t afford to say so publicly. We have been able to enter and to do things under the general umbrella of health that would have been much harder to do if we’d said we were here for economic development or for social change per se.”

Dr. Geiger was a founding member of two advocacy groups, Physicians for Social Responsibility, which shared the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to end the nuclear arms race, and Physicians for Human Rights, which shared the 1997 prize for working to ban land mines.

He rallied doctors in the Cold War era to speak out against what he saw as a myth being promoted by the government, that nuclear war could be survivable. On the contrary, he insisted, hospitals would be quickly overwhelmed, and even victims with treatable injuries would perish.

Drawing physicians out of the clinic and into the political fray “was a really signal event,” said Dr. Robert Gould, a pathologist in San Francisco and president of the Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

In an email for this obituary sent in 2012, Dr. Geiger said he was driven in part by an outrage over injustice.

“I’ve been angry,” he wrote, “seeing terribly burned children in Iraq after the first Gulf war, or interviewing torture victims in the West Bank, or listening to Newt Gingrich say ghetto kids should learn to be part-time janitors and clean toilets (in another country, they called that Bantu Education). So anger doesn’t vanish, but is replaced by a determination to do something.”

Home Was a Way Station

Herman J. Geiger was born on Nov. 11, 1925, in Manhattan. (It was unclear what the J. stood for, but he was mostly called Jack throughout his life.) His father, Jacob, born in Vienna, was a physician; his mother, Virginia (Loewenstein) Geiger, who came from a village in central Germany, was a microbiologist. Both parents, who were Jewish, had emigrated to the United States as children. Mr. Geiger grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and their home was often a way station for relatives fleeing the Nazis.

“The last to appear were some cousins from my mother’s birthplace, Kirtorf,” Dr. Geiger said in the email. “When they got their visas to come to the U.S., they said, the Nazi authorities were furious. On the night before their departure, the authorities ordered all their neighbors to go out at twilight and stone their house. The neighbors all dutifully gathered — and threw loaves of bread instead.”

That story, Dr. Geiger said, taught him not to stereotype.

He skipped so many grades in the city’s public schools that he graduated from Townsend Harris High School (then in Manhattan, now in Queens) at 14. Too young to start college, he learned typing and shorthand and went to work as a copy boy for The New York Times. He also began hanging out at jazz joints, listening to Billie Holiday, Art Tatum and Fats Waller. His parents were often beside themselves, waiting up for him and sometimes even calling the bars to ask if “Jackie” was there.

Jack soon ran away from home and turned up, suitcase in hand, in Harlem’s Sugar Hill section on the doorstep of Canada Lee, a Black actor whom he had seen on Broadway and had gotten to know after talking his way backstage. Mr. Lee, once a teenage runaway himself, let young Jack sleep on the couch — after consulting with his parents — and though Jack sometimes returned home, he spent most of the next year in Harlem.

The year was 1940, and Mr. Lee’s home was a hub for writers, actors and musicians — Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Orson Welles, Paul Robeson, Billy Strayhorn, William Saroyan. The Black guests told harrowing stories of racism, and Harlem was seething over the mistreatment of Black troops at military bases in the South. Jack Geiger took it all in.

In 1941, with a loan from Mr. Lee, he began studying at the University of Wisconsin. He worked nights at a newspaper, The Madison Capitol Times. Because Madison had a curfew for anyone under 18, he said, “I am probably the only police reporter in history who had to get a special pass to be out at night.”

In 1943, after meeting James Farmer, the founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, Mr. Geiger started a chapter of the group in Madison. It was the height of World War II, and after turning 18 that year he left school to enlist in the merchant marine, which he chose because it was not racially segregated.

Rabble Rouser for Justice

Discharged in 1947, Dr. Geiger enrolled as a pre-med student at the University of Chicago. He discovered racial discrimination there — Black patients being excluded from certain hospitals, qualified Black students being rejected by the medical school. He fought the policies for three years and ultimately helped organize a 1,000-strong faculty and student protest strike — an activity virtually unheard of in that era.

He paid a price for his rabble-rousing. The American Medical Association wrote to medical schools warning of his “extracurricular activities.” No school would take him. He had, in effect, been blackballed.

Dr. Geiger went back to journalism for the next five years, as a science and medicine editor for the International News Service (later part of United Press International). It was, he said, “a gorgeous education” that let him read journals, attend conferences, interview researchers and, significantly, meet deans whom he could lobby to let him into medical school. In 1954, at 29, he was admitted to what is now Case Western Reserve University’s medical school in Cleveland.

During his last year at Case Western, he traveled to South Africa and worked with two physicians who were setting up a health center in an impoverished, disease-ridden region of the country called Pholela, which was then a Zulu reserve. A key to the center’s success was that local people — its own patients — worked there and helped run it.

For five months Dr. Geiger took care of patients, visiting thatch huts and cattle kraals, meeting traditional healers and seeing the huge improvements — pit latrines, vegetable gardens, children’s feeding programs — that the health center had brought to the region.

“I learned a little Zulu, including the three oral clicks in that language, which always made me drool, to the hilarity of my African teachers,” he wrote in a chapter he contributed to the 2013 book “Comrades in Health.”

Dr. Geiger’s time in Africa made him want a career in international health. He trained in internal medicine at Boston City Hospital and in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health.

In the “freedom summer” of 1964, he traveled to Mississippi to help care for the civil rights workers who were pouring into the Deep South to campaign for voting rights. The next year, he organized medical care for the people who marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.

“I took a long look around,” Dr. Geiger recalled of his first visit to Mississippi. He saw conditions much like those in South Africa: families living in shacks with no clean drinking water, toilets or sewers; sky-high rates of malnutrition, illness, infant death and illiteracy; few or no opportunities for residents to better themselves and escape. He did not have to travel to Africa to find people in trouble, he realized.

A Clinic in Mound Bayou

Under President Lyndon B. Johnson, the war on poverty had begun, and the Office of Economic Opportunity had been created to pay for projects to help the poor. Sponsored by Tufts University and armed with grants from the opportunity office, Dr. Geiger, Dr. Gibson, Dr. John Hatch and others set up a health center in Mound Bayou, Miss., a poor, Black small town where most people were former cotton sharecroppers whose way of life had been wiped out by mechanization.

The center was a copy of the Pholela project. The clinic, which opened in 1967, treated the sick but also used its grant money to dig wells and privies and set up a library, farm cooperative, office of education, high-school equivalency program and other social services.

The clinic “prescribed” food for families with malnourished children — to be purchased from Black-owned groceries — and the bills were paid out of the center’s pharmacy budget.

The governor complained, and a federal official was sent to Mound Bayou to scold Dr. Geiger for misusing pharmacy funds, which, the official said, were meant to cover drugs to treat disease.

“Yeah,” Dr. Geiger replied, “well, the last time I looked in my medical textbooks, they said the specific therapy for malnutrition was food.”

The official, he said, “shut up and went back to Washington.”

Dr. Geiger helped found Physicians for Social Responsibility in 1961. The group argued that official predictions of the effects of nuclear war minimized the number of casualties and the extent of the destruction it would cause. At the group’s public meetings, Dr. Geiger’s job was “the bombing run” — offering a detailed account of what a one-megaton nuclear bomb would do to the city in which the meeting was being held.

He had a resonant voice and a crisp, forceful delivery. His presentations left audiences stunned, according to a colleague in the group, Dr. Ira Helfand.

Dr. Geiger was a co-author of one of the first articles to look at the medical costs of nuclear war. The article, in The New England Journal of Medicine, predicted the fate of Boston in a nuclear strike — 2 million dead, a half-million injured and fewer than 10,000 hospital beds left in the entire state of Massachusetts. Doctors must “explore a new area of preventive medicine, the prevention of thermonuclear war,” the article said.

It was published in May 1962 — five months before the Cuban missile crisis, which took the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.

Dr. Geiger’s marriage in 1951 to Mary Battle, an administrator and executive assistant in health care, ended in divorce in 1968. They had no children. (Ms. Battle died in a car accident in 1977.) In 1982, he married Nicole Schupf, a neuroscientist, epidemiologist and professor at Columbia University.

In addition to his wife and his stepson, Mr. Smith, Mr. Geiger is survived by two stepgrandsons. An older sister, Ruth Ann, a schoolteacher, died in 1986.

In 1978, Dr. Geiger became a professor of community medicine at the City University of New York Medical School at City College of New York.

In his final years, which were marked by bladder cancer, lung cancer and blindness from glaucoma, he continued to write book chapters, articles and editorials and to give talks.

To the end he was an impassioned advocate for civil rights. In an essay published in 2016 by Physicians for Human Rights, he called for more action to fight the lead-poisoning of the water supply in Flint, Mich., and to hold accountable the officials responsible for it.

With characteristic bluntness, he ascribed the contamination to “a contemptuous disregard for the health of people of color, especially if they are poor.”

https://www.nytimes.com…

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Jack Geiger was a revered member of PNHP. He was way ahead of the pack in addressing racial and socioeconomic injustices in health care – problems for which there seems to be a new awakening on the horizon.

We can best honor Jack by continuing to emulate his work on behalf of health care justice for all, with special attention to those with the greatest neglected needs.

Stay informed! Visit www.pnhp.org/qotd to sign up for daily email updates.

Though a state board rejected Mercy’s application to close, hospital officials are working to shut down by May 31. Activists want a moratorium on hospital closings and pressure from the city and state to ensure Mercy remains open.

By Maxwell Evans
Block Club Chicago, December 22, 2020

A coalition of activists are demanding elected officials maintain pressure on Mercy’s ownership to keep the hospital open or sell to someone who will.

The activists held a vigil Monday, a week after a state board unanimously rejected Mercy Hospital’s request to close. Board members agreed closing the Near South Side institution would negatively impact South Siders, especially in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.

Mercy Hospital leadership announced in July the city’s first chartered hospital would shut down, citing monthly operating losses of $4 million and shifting trends in the field of health care away from inpatient services. The news came two months after a billion-dollar plan to consolidate the hospital with three others on the South Side fell apart.

Despite the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board’s rejection of Mercy’s request, the hospital still has options for shutting down — and intends to take advantage of them.

If local leaders don’t take action, organizations within the coalition will mobilize against them in their next elections, Bennett said.

Coalition members include local representatives of the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization, SEIU Healthcare Illinois, National Nurses United, Physicians for a National Health Program, White Coats for Black Lives, and several other groups.

While keeping Mercy open is the coalition’s focus for now, its battle for health equity reaches further.

Members are also organizing to address the dependence of safety net hospitals on Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, “a racist system that in its structure is guaranteeing hospitals don’t have what they need,” said Jitu Brown, board president of the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization.

Hospitals lost 13 cents on every dollar spent caring for Medicare and Medicaid patients in 2017, according to the American Hospital Association. Three out of every four Mercy Hospital patients pay through Medicare or Medicaid, according to a 2019 report.

The battle the keep Mercy open is part of a decades-long struggle to maintain critical health services throughout the South Side.

But health care has continued to shrink, shift or disappear altogether in the South and West sides for years.

https://blockclubchicago.org…

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

How could shutting down a safety net hospital in a region struggling to maintain critical health services advance the cause of health equity? It can’t.

So what reason is being given for the efforts to close Chicago’s Mercy Hospital? They are losing money, they say. How can a busy hospital lose money? They say that it is because three-fourths of the patient population is covered by Medicare or Medicaid, and the American Hospital Association claims that hospitals lose 13 cents on every dollar spent on these patients.

Wait a minute. If your home catches on fire, doesn’t the fire department show up to put out the fire? You have fire insurance on your home so that insurance is used to pay the fire department for its services? No. The fire department provides a public service that is funded by the government. We pay taxes to cover that service. We don’t call that a “loss.” We don’t call care and maintenance of our parks a “loss.” We don’t call highway maintenance a “loss.” They are strictly essential services most appropriately provided by the government.

How is health care different? Shouldn’t it also be a public service funded by the government? Well, it partially is through government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, so we do acknowledge the legitimate role of government in health care financing. But because of the fragmented, dysfunctional method we have of funding health care, we allow tremendous waste in administrative excesses and we have a failure to set prices appropriately, and thus the government appears to underpay for services in comparison to the private commercial insurers (though the concept of cost shift has been refuted by Austin Frakt). When the dependence of safety net hospitals on Medicare and Medicaid can be legitimately labeled a “racist system,” clearly we have an intolerably dysfunctional health care financing system.

The point is that, although we spend more on health care than any other nation, we clearly are not spending it equitably. Though government funds are the major source of Mercy Hospital’s revenues, the amount by which Mercy comes up short in paying its cost of care is not a “loss,” rather it is failure to enact an adequate, comprehensive health care financing system that will meet legitimate costs while, most importantly, providing health care equitably to everyone.

Regular readers know the bottom line here. We need to replace our unjust health care financing system with a well designed, single payer, improved Medicare for All program. Under such a system, with regional planning, Mercy Hospital would be reinforced or replaced to help meet the needs of South Chicago’s residents. In no way would that be a “loss.”

Stay informed! Visit www.pnhp.org/qotd to sign up for daily email updates.