December 15, 2023
Podcast host Joe Sparks outlines why a single-payer Medicare for All system would be good for everybody—including patients, physicians, workers, and the nation as a whole.
Additional episodes will be uploaded monthly. Subscribe in iTunes, or access a complete archive of the podcast, below.
What Does the Working Class Really Want?, The Atlantic, Dec. 11, 2023, by George Packer
From the late 1970s until very recently, the brains and dollars behind both parties supported versions of neoliberal economics: one hard-edged and friendly to old-line corporate interests such as the oil industry, the other gentler and oriented toward the financial and technology sectors. This consensus left the battleground open to cultural warfare. The educated professionals who dominate the country’s progressive party have long cared less about unions, wages, and monopoly power than about race, gender, and the environment. …
[There is an] outpouring of new books that pay political attention to those overlooked Americans of all races who lack a college degree, many employed in jobs that pay by the hour—factory workers, home health aides, delivery drivers, preschool teachers, hairdressers, restaurant servers, farm laborers, cashiers. During the pandemic, they were called “essential workers.” Now they’ve been discovered to hold the key to power, giving rise to yet another round of partisan dreaming of realignment, this time hinging on the working class. But these Americans won’t benefit from their new status as essential voters until the parties spend less effort coming up with what they think the working class wants to hear, and more effort actually delivering what it wants and needs. …
Joshua Green’s fast-paced, sober, yet hopeful The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics argues that a Democratic renewal is already under way. … Green traces the Democrats’ estrangement from working Americans back to the ’70s; he begins his story with a moment in 1978, when Jimmy Carter abandoned unions for Wall Street. The narrative reaches a climax in 2008, when the financial crisis destroyed home values and retirement savings while taxpayer dollars rescued the banks that had triggered it, convincing large numbers of Americans that the system was rigged by financiers and politicians. Because of policy choices by the Obama administration—Democrats’ last spasm of neoliberalism—much of the blame fell on the former party of the common people. Yet out of the wreckage rose a new group of Democratic stars who sounded like their New Deal predecessors, many of whom were every bit as radical. Taking aim at corporate elites, Green’s protagonists want to increase economic equality through worker power and state intervention. Though Sanders and Warren failed as presidential candidates, Green argues that their populism transformed the party, including the formerly moderate Joe Biden, who has pushed a remarkably ambitious legislative agenda with working-class interests at its center. …
One party supports unions, the child tax credit, and some form of universal health care, while the other party does everything in its power to defeat them. One president passed major legislation to renew manufacturing and rebuild infrastructure, while his predecessor cut taxes on the rich and corporations. Yet polls since 2016 have shown Republicans closing the gap with Democrats on which party is perceived to care more about poor Americans, middle-class Americans, and “people like me.” …
Now, encouraged perhaps by the excesses and failures of a professional-class social justice movement, and by the relative success of Biden’s pro-worker agenda, they seem to be finding their voice. [P]olling data from Wisconsin and Massachusetts provide evidence that Americans are less divided on cultural issues than activists on both sides, who benefit by stoking division, would like: “If you look at the country’s voters, and put aside the culture wars, what you find are genuine differences between the parties’ voters over economic issues.” The real disagreements have to do with taxation, regulation, health care, and the larger problem of inequality. Democrats’ way forward seems obvious: emphasize differences on economics by turning left; mute differences on culture by tacking to the middle. If the party can free itself from the moneyed interests of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and the cultural radicalism of campus and social media, it might start to win in red states.
By Jim Kahn, M.D., M.P.H.
George Packer is a wonderful writer on politics: progressive, incisive, clear. In this piece, he argues that for the Democrats to achieve a solid and enduring electoral majority, they must first and foremost address the economic needs of the working class. The political and moral need to bolster the working class (and poor!) is unassailable. However, the moderation of cultural stances that he proposes will generate controversy on the left.
Where does single payer come in? The article says, “some form of universal health care”. That’s not enough, because anything short of comprehensive, financially unimpaired coverage will fall short. We in the single payer movement clearly still have education and organizing to do even with savvy progressive thinkers.
Does single payer – a profound economic hand up – also foster progressive cultural norms? I propose that it does: when vulnerable middle-class families have the reassurance of stable and affordable health care, they won’t blame others for depriving them of this critical need. Through sharing in a common social good, the “other” of different social groups is more likely to become “one of us”. That doesn’t get us to the full array of progressive cultural values, but it sure helps.
https://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.
How Britain Put One of the World’s Best Health Care Systems on Life Support, Video Op-Ed (7 minutes), New York Times, Dec. 7, 2023, by Adam Westbrook
[HJM spoiler: privatization and under-funding!]
By Jim Kahn, M.D., M.P.H.
This excellent opinion video uses seven minutes to concisely, vividly, and powerfully capture the causes of NHS collapse: privatization and under-funding. Both Labor and especially Tory leaders starve the beloved NHS in favor of ill-conceived expensive privatization schemes often involving US corporations. A national treasure has been pushed into crisis by politicians beholden to for-profit interests. Brexit amplified the problems by lowering access to health professionals.
Although I commend the NY Times for offering this impressive opinion video, I must take it to task for obscuring the video’s main point in the written introduction. The video clearly highlights that NHS problems derive from privatization and under-funding. Yet, the introduction does not highlight, or even mention, those issues. Indeed it implies that privatization could be part of the solution. “[A] s the Opinion video above argues, [the] NHS is in jeopardy owing to mismanagement by British politicians. The system was founded in 1948 to provide free health care to all residents and has proudly stood as a much-loved symbol of British identity and the welfare state. The [recent operating] crisis has led to calls for Britain to scrap universal health care and return to a private or hybrid health system, like in the United States and other European countries. But as the Opinion video argues, the NHS woes are not a function of how it’s funded but the result of something else entirely.” Umm, why so obscure?
Why not state outright that privatization and intentional austerity budgets are the core problems, as convincingly portrayed by the video? The US is certainly not worth emulating, and successful health insurance in other wealthy countries reflects the public commitment to universal standard insurance. A normal op-ed introduction echoes the op-ed’s key points, so why coy here?
Happily, the video speaks for itself, eloquently. Share it widely!
By Don McCanne, M.D.
The lesson is extremely important for single payer proponents. Conservatives profess that competition in private markets is the key to success in health care and that governments, as in single payer or a national health service, would destroy the functioning of the health care system. This video shows that one of the finest health care systems in the world, the government-run British NHS, has been crippled by converting it to a private, market-driven system, the exact opposite of what the conservatives are preaching.
Thus when the conservatives say that we can’t have single payer because we have to keep the government out, we can use the video to answer that we must have the government in control, and the conservatives have to keep their private market from controlling our health care.
We should distribute the link to this video widely so that people can understand that in the real world, the private market is destructive to health care and that we need a well designed, government-funded, government-administered single payer system.
Remember, it was John McCain, a Republican, who gave a thumbs down to prevent repeal of a government health care program: Obamacare. We can all join together to get universal health care done with a system proven to be effective: single payer.
https://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.
Family health Insurance Is No Longer Affordable Through Small Employers, KFF, Nov. 28, 2023, by Drew Altman
One thing that really jumped out from our 25th annual KFF employer health benefit survey: Small employers no longer have affordable coverage for workers with families.
Workers employed by small firms – those with fewer than two hundred employees – would need to pay $8,334 on average towards the premiums each year for family coverage. But enrolling a family at these firms can often be much more – a quarter of covered workers at small firms must pay $12,000 annually or more to enroll in family coverage.
But that doesn’t include what workers pay for deductibles or other out-of-pocket costs which are also typically higher at small firms. 57% have to pay $3000 or more before at least one member of the family meets the deductible and the plan starts covering most services. For 35% of covered workers at small firms, the deductible is at least $5000.
The bottom line: For many of the almost 50 million people working for the 3.2 million smaller companies in America, family coverage is no longer affordable. It is likely to be prohibitive for the really small companies, the pizza shop, the dry cleaners, or the bakery. Salaries at firms of less than 200 employees are $44,600 on average compared to $63,200 for workers at larger firms.
Between two-in-ten and three-in-ten lower income workers with employer coverage reported problems paying their medical bills, or that they could not pay them at all, in the last year. It’s logical that affordability challenges are always much worse for people who are chronically ill or who have major illnesses and need more care, but that’s also the opposite of how a health system should work.
Study finds high rates of inadequate health insurance coverage for commercially insured children, Academic article: Consistency and Adequacy of Public and Commercial Health Insurance for US Children, 2016 to 2021, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Nov. 28, 2023, by Jamie R. Daw, et al.
1 in 5 children in the U.S. have inadequate health insurance, i.e. insurance that either has unreasonable out-of-pocket costs or doesn’t have benefits that meets the child’s medical needs.
Inadequate insurance is particularly high among kids with commercial insurance (approximately 1 in 3 commercially insured vs. 1 in 10 publicly insured kids).
Survey reveals 72% of consumers unable to pay health care bills immediately, Medical Economics, Nov. 29, 2023, by Todd Shryock
A survey commissioned by AccessOne found that 72% of consumers find themselves unable or unwilling to pay their health care bills immediately.
Nearly half of those surveyed (48%) have taken drastic measures to curb expenses, including postponing essential care and forgoing prescription medications.
The survey also found that almost a third of respondents expressed no confidence whatsoever in their ability to settle a medical bill exceeding $500. 32% turn to personal credit cards, exacerbating their financial burden.
By Don McCanne, M.D.
Those who believe that the Affordable Care Act should work well for all of us, if only we take advantage of what it has to offer, should be paying more attention to what is going on.
These three new sources show us that employer-sponsored plans are still leaving health care unaffordable for employees of small businesses, but that is now extending into larger businesses as well.
Commercial health insurance is leaving far too many children inadequately covered, which certainly exposes the falsehood that our private plans are working well for those who can afford them.
In spite of our various insurance programs, supposedly made universal by Obamacare, health care consumers are facing ever greater health care debt that they are no longer able to manage and causes them to forgo further essential care.
Note that these reports deal with only the most fundamental function of health insurance: paying medical bills. We are now also being inundated with manipulations that are designed to move our health care dollars away from patient care and to wealth creation for the billionaire investors that are taking away our choices in health care.
Enough!
Time for an equitable, publicly funded and publicly administered health care system that will provide each of us with affordable care, care that we need, when we need it: Single Payer!
https://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.
By Noam Scheiber
The New York Times, December 3, 2023
Dr. John Wust does not come off as a labor agitator. A longtime obstetrician-gynecologist from Louisiana with a penchant for bow ties, Dr. Wust spent the first 15 years of his career as a partner in a small business — that is, running his own practice with colleagues.
Long after he took a position at Allina Health, a large nonprofit health care system based in Minnesota, in 2009, he did not see himself as the kind of employee who might benefit from collective bargaining.
But that changed in the months leading up to March, when his group of more than 100 doctors at an Allina hospital near Minneapolis voted to unionize. Dr. Wust, who has spoken with colleagues about the potential benefits of a union, said doctors were at a loss on how to ease their unsustainable workload because they had less input at the hospital than ever before.
“The way the system is going, I didn’t see any other solution legally available to us,” Dr. Wust said.
At the time he and his colleagues voted to unionize, they were one of the largest groups of private-sector doctors ever to do so. But by October, that distinction went to a group that included about 400 primary-care physicians employed in clinics that are also owned by Allina. The union that represents them, the Doctors Council of the Service Employees International Union, says doctors from dozens of facilities around the country have inquired about organizing over the past few years.
And doctors are not the only health professionals who are unionizing or protesting in greater numbers. Health care workers, many of them nurses, held eight major work stoppages last year — the most in a decade — and are on pace to match or exceed that number this year. This fall, dozens of nonunion pharmacists at CVS and Walgreens stores called in sick or walked off the job to protest understaffing, many for a full day or more.
The reasons for the recent labor actions appear straightforward. Doctors, nurses and pharmacists said they were being asked to do more as staffing dwindles, leading to exhaustion and anxiety about putting patients at risk. Many said that they were stretched to the limit after the pandemic began, and that their work demands never fully subsided.
But in each case, the explanation runs deeper: A longer-term consolidation of health care companies has left workers feeling powerless in big bureaucracies. They say the trend has left them with little room to exercise their professional judgment.
“People do feel put upon — that’s real,” said John August, an expert on health care labor relations at the Scheinman Institute at Cornell University. “The corporate structures in health care are not evil, but they have not evolved to the point of understanding how to engage” with health workers.
Allina said that it had made progress on reducing doctors’ workloads and that it was partnering with health care workers to address outstanding issues. CVS said it was making “targeted investments” in pharmacies to improve staffing in response to employees’ feedback, while Walgreens said it was committed to ensuring that workers had the support they needed. Walgreens added that it had invested more than $400 million over two years to recruit and retain staff members.
Professionals in a variety of fields have protested similar developments in recent years. Schoolteachers, college instructors and journalists have gone on strike or unionized amid declining budgets and the rise of performance metrics that they feel are more suited to sales representatives than to guardians of certain norms and best practices.
But the trend is particularly pronounced in health care, whose practitioners once enjoyed platinum-level social status at high school reunions and Thanksgiving dinners.
For years, many doctors and pharmacists believed they stood largely outside the traditional management-labor hierarchy. Now, they feel smothered by it. The result is a growing worker consciousness among people who haven’t always exhibited one — a sense that they are subordinates constantly at odds with their overseers.
“I realized at end of the day that all of us are workers, no matter how elite we’re perceived to be,” said Dr. Alia Sharif, a colleague of Dr. Wust’s at Allina who was heavily involved in the union campaign. “We’re seen as cogs in the wheel. You can be a physician or a factory worker, and you’re treated exactly the same way by these large corporations.”
The details vary across health care fields, but the trend lines are similar: A before-times in which health care professionals say they had the leeway and resources to do their jobs properly, followed by what they see as a descent into the ranks of the micromanaged.
As a pharmacy intern and pharmacist at CVS in Massachusetts beginning in the late 1990s, Dr. Ed Smith found the stores consistently well staffed. He said pharmacists had time to develop relationships with patients.
Around 2004, he became a district manager in the Boston area, overseeing roughly 20 locations for the company. Dr. Smith said CVS executives were attentive to input from pharmacists — raising pay for technicians if there was a shortage, or upgrading clunky software. “Every decision was based on something that we said we needed,” he recalled.
Dr. Wust looked back on his days in an independent practice of about 25 doctors with a similar wistfulness. “We were all partners,” he said. “It was relative workplace democracy. Everybody got a vote. Everybody’s concerns were heard.”
Over time, however, consolidation and the rise of ever-larger health care corporations left workers with less influence.
As so-called pharmacy benefit managers, which negotiate discounts with pharmacies on behalf of insurers and employers, bought up rivals, retail giants like Walgreens and CVS made acquisitions as well, to avoid losing market power.
The chains closed many of their newly owned locations, driving more customers to existing stores. They sought to cut costs, especially labor costs, as the benefit managers reined in drug prices.
Around 2015, Dr. Smith stepped down from his role as a district manager and became a frontline pharmacist again, reluctant to supervise co-workers under conditions he considered subpar. “I couldn’t ask my pharmacists to do what I couldn’t accomplish,” he said.
Among his frustrations, he said, was the need to strictly limit the number of workers each pharmacy could schedule. “Every week that you’re over your labor budget, you get a call, regardless of prescription volume, from your district manager,” Dr. Smith said. “If your budget for tech hours is 100 and you used 110, you get a phone call. It’s not much money — maybe $180 — but you’re getting a call.”
Asked how labor budgets were applied, CVS said managers were “provided guidance” based on expected volume and other factors, with adjustments made to ensure adequate staffing.
Dr. Smith and other current and former CVS and Walgreens pharmacists said their stores’ allotment of hours for pharmacists and pharmacy technicians had dropped most years in the decade before the pandemic.
The pharmacists also described being held to increasingly strict performance metrics, such as how quickly they answered the phone, the portion of prescriptions that are filled for 90 days rather than 30 or 60 days (longer prescriptions mean more money up front) and calls made urging people to fill or pick up prescriptions.
For years, Walgreens and CVS pharmacists could largely ignore these narrower metrics so long as overall profits and customer satisfaction stayed high. But in the early to mid-2010s, both companies elevated the importance of these indicators, several pharmacists said.
At Walgreens, many pharmacy managers began reporting to a districtwide retail supervisor rather than a supervisor trained as a pharmacist. “It coincided with more pushing of the metrics,” said Dr. Sarah Knolhoff, a Walgreens pharmacist from 2009 to 2022.
“Never having been a pharmacist, they would push the pharmacy the same way they would push the front end,” Dr. Knolhoff added, alluding to the rest of the store.
CVS said that performance metrics were needed to ensure safety and efficiency for patients but that in recent years it had reduced the number of metrics it tracked. Walgreens announced last year that it would no longer rely on “task-based metrics” in performance reviews for pharmacy staff members, though it still used them to track store-level performance.
The transition for doctors and nurses came around the same time. As independent medical practices found they had lost leverage in negotiating reimbursement rates with insurers, many doctors went in house at larger health systems, which could use their size to secure better deals.
The passing of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, along with federal rule-making efforts, rewarded bigness by tying reimbursement to certain health outcomes, like the portion of patients who must be readmitted. Getting bigger helped a hospital system diversify its patient population, the way an insurer does, so that certain groups of high-risk patients weren’t financially ruinous.
Administrators increasingly evaluated their medical staff according to similar metrics tied to patients’ health and put a variety of incentives and mandates in place.
Doctors and nurses chafed at the changes. “Corporate tells you how to manage your patient,” said Dr. Frances Quee, president of the Doctors Council, which represents about 3,000 doctors, most of them at public hospitals. “You know that’s not how you’re supposed to manage your patient, but you can’t say anything because you’re scared you’re going to be fired.”
At Allina, primary care doctors are given incentives to talk to patients about their high-risk or chronic medical conditions, even if those conditions are well managed and aren’t relevant to a visit.
“Is that a valuable use of our 25 minutes together?” said Dr. Matt Hoffman, a primary care doctor at an Allina clinic that unionized in October. “No, but it means Allina gets more money from Medicare.”
Dr. Wust said hospital administrators increasingly relied on management theories borrowed from other industries, like manufacturing, that sought to minimize excess capacity.
For example, he said, obstetricians at Allina had one or two hold spots a day of 15 minutes each, in case of a patient emergency, when he began working at the system. Several years ago, Allina took away these buffers, instructing obstetricians to double book instead.
Asked about the hold spots, Allina said, “We’re always looking at how we’re using our resources to deliver high-quality care.” It said the incentives tied to high-risk conditions could still be achieved if a doctor stated that the problem was no longer relevant. Dr. Josh Scheck, another Allina primary care doctor, said he found the nudge helpful and not very time consuming to address. He said the health system had allowed his clinic to experiment with ways to make its work flow more efficient.
Other health workers complained that some of the metrics they’re evaluated on, like patient satisfaction, made them feel like retail clerks or dining employees rather than medical professionals.
Adam Higman, an expert on hospital operations at the consulting firm Press Ganey, said consolidation and the increased use of metrics had arisen in response to a need to lower U.S. health care costs, long the world’s highest per capita, and ensure that the spending actually benefits patients.
He pointed to data showing that more empathetic and communicative doctors and nurses — factors that affect patients’ experience — lead to healthier patients.
But Mr. Higman acknowledged that many health systems had increased tensions with doctors and nurses by failing to involve them more in developing and putting in place the system of metrics on which they are judged. “The progressive, smart health systems and medical groups are listening to physicians, looking at their experience and turnover and creating venues to have discussions,” he said. “If not, that’s one of the contributing factors to organizing.”
The pandemic magnified these strains.
As retail chains rolled out Covid-19 vaccines, pharmacists complained of being overworked to the point of skipping bathroom breaks and said they worried constantly about making mistakes that could harm patients. (CVS said it began closing most pharmacies for 30 minutes each afternoon last year to give pharmacists a consistent break. Walgreens said “dedicated pharmacist meal breaks” began in all stores in 2020.)
Doctors and nurses found that their already backed-up inboxes were suddenly bursting, as frightened patients clamored for medical advice. Administrators sought to squeeze more patients into overloaded hospitals and clinics.
The breaking point came when the height of the pandemic passed, but conditions barely improved, according to many workers. Although health systems had promised to add staffing, many found themselves running deficits amid inflation and a shortage of doctors and nurses.
Professionals who had never considered themselves candidates for union membership began to organize. When she started at Allina in 2009, Dr. Sharif said, “I would not have put unions and physicians in the same mind — it would have been a totally alien concept.” She reached out to the Doctors Council last year for help unionizing her colleagues.
Dr. Quee, the union president, said that inquiries from doctors were up more than threefold since the second group of Allina doctors unionized last month — and that as a result, the Doctors Council was hiring more organizers. (Allina is appealing the outcome of the union vote at the hospital but not at its clinics.) Even pharmacists are reaching out. “Two days ago, pharmacists called me from Florida,” she said. “We’ve never done pharmacists before.”
In September, Dr. Smith, who long ago shifted from CVS district manager to frontline pharmacist, took on an additional role: labor organizer. After CVS fired a district manager who had refused to close some stores on weekends to address understaffing, Dr. Smith helped organize a series of coordinated sick days and walkouts in the Kansas City, Mo., area, where he has worked for the company in recent years.
The walkouts affected roughly 20 locations and drew the company’s chief pharmacy officer and a top human resources official to town for a meeting with the renegades. A few weeks later, CVS said it would rein in vaccination appointments and add work hours for pharmacy technicians, though it had not increased their pay.
CVS said several Kansas City-area pharmacists had called in sick on certain days in September, “resulting in about 10 unexpected pharmacy closures” on one day and part of another. In response, it said, executives met with pharmacists to listen to and address their concerns.
During an interview in October, while Dr. Smith and his colleagues were still awaiting the company’s response, he made clear that his patience had run out. “I’ve been asking and asking and asking for improvements for years,” he said. “Now we’re not asking any more — we’re demanding it.”
Hospital Vitals: Financial and Operational Trends: U.S. hospitals face diminished reserves, mounting reimbursement challenges, Syntellis and American Hospital Association, November 2023
Seniors Scramble as Scripps, Other Health Systems Terminate Medicare Advantage Plans, Times of San Diego, November 2, 2023, by Mark Miller, Reuters
Scripps Health, a major Southern California healthcare provider, announced in September that beginning next year, its popular clinic and coastal medical groups will no longer accept patients enrolled in Medicare Advantage, the managed-care alternative to traditional Medicare offered by commercial insurance companies. That has left 32,000 San Diego seniors rushing to find either new healthcare options or new insurance for 2024.
Disabled people who qualify for Medicare before they turn 65 also are affected. And Scripps is not alone — at least a half-dozen other health systems around the U.S. are terminating Advantage contracts.
… [T]he Scripps Health decision underscores an important downside to Medicare Advantage plans: there is no guarantee that you will be able to stick with your preferred doctors and hospitals. Medicare Advantage plans can drop healthcare providers from their networks — and that happens when providers and insurers cannot agree on contract terms.
Last week Scripps Health CEO and President Chris Van Gorder told Reuters that his institution is on track to lose $75 million or more on care it provides to Medicare Advantage patients this year. The two key issues that led to the decision to stop working with advantage plans, he said, were the rates insurance companies were willing to pay, and the tendency of sicker patients to seek treatment at top-notch medical centers such as those run by Scripps.
He said that Scripps also has struggled with the administrative burden of dealing with Medicare Advantage “prior authorization” procedures — essentially, a process where an insurance company determines if it will cover a prescribed procedure, service or drug.
By Jim Kahn, M.D., M.P.H.
The Medicare Advantage vs. provider battle is ratcheting up. For decades, providers and managed care insurers maneuvered for market position and vigorously negotiated reimbursement rates for “in network” care. Providers with loyal patients obtained higher payments, and those needing patients settled for less; similarly, insurers with large market share could drive tougher bargains. Mergers in both realms shifted power and payment levels over time.
Now, Medicare Advantage plans, ever on the prowl for new ways to raise income and profits, are clamping down on payment, with big jumps in denials and delays. As a result, prestigious providers like Scripps are declining Medicare Advantage; quite a few examples listed here.
I have personal experience with how this phenomenon affects coverage even beyond limited provider networks. I’m insured by Medicare Advantage, despite my many misgivings about MA, because the University of California retirement system offers no way for me to be on traditional Medicare while still insuring the rest of my family (a topic for another day). My MA plan is a “preferred provider organization” (PPO). This means I can see any provider who participates in Medicare and agrees to accept my MA-PPO. For years this worked terrifically well, providing me untrammeled access to top notch Bay Area providers. But recently, a highly regarded academic medical center announced a failure to reach contractual agreement with my MA company. I investigated; reading between the lines, it’s all about money: rates are too low and payment hassles and denials are too high. PPO became PP-No.
Thus, Medicare Advantage increasingly butts heads with the best providers. I’m not taking sides … both insurers and health systems suffer from “profit obsession syndrome” (POS, my own clever name). Yet I do know that this dynamic bodes poorly for access to optimal care, meaning compromised clinical outcomes.
Whereas if we had single payer, hospitals would be paid with reliable global budgets, and reimbursement levels would be standard and fair. Every ideal patient-provider match would be possible. Health would be maximized. Isn’t that what it’s about?
https://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.
By Sam Pizzigati
Inequality.org, November 30, 2023
This past summer the Wall Street Journal took a crack at listing the world’s ten highest-paid corporate CEOs. Nine of the ten, the Journal found, last year pulled down over $100 million. The tenth on the list had to make do with a mere $99 million. And all of these chiefs turned out to share a common home base: the United States.
That U.S. connection should come as no surprise. CEOs in the United States have been pocketing far lusher paychecks than their counterparts elsewhere in the world for quite some time now, giving shills for that excess plenty of practice honing their rationales for it.
At their most basic, those rationales all boil to one word: incentives. Hefty rewards for executives, the argument goes, incentivize top-tier performance. Execs who stand to take home mega millions will move heaven and earth to deliver quality products and services that gain their corporations beaucoup customers and higher share prices.
Where ought the debunking of that notion begin? How about focusing on CEO pay in an American industry that can actually make the difference between life and death for average Americans, an industry where the pay top execs pocket far, far outpaces the compensation of their global counterparts?
Let’s, in other words, talk health care.
America’s top health care execs would rather we not. They’re doing quite nicely these days flying under the radar, their paychecks getting nowhere near the scrutiny that Wall Street’s finest and high tech’s most ebullient superstars have been enduring.
Just how lavishly well are America’s health care CEOs doing these days? In 2022, a down year for the stock market, the CEOs of over 300 publicly traded U.S. health care companies combined to make some $4 billion, analysts at STAT reported this past August. The ten highest-paid of these execs just by themselves pocketed $1.4 billion.
“No matter how you slice it,” notes John McDonough, a veteran Harvard health policy prof, “the people at the top — the CEOs of these companies — are making enormous gains every year compared to ordinary Americans.”
Health insurance company CEOs have annually rated as among the health care industry’s most royally rewarded. In 2022, America’s five top-paid health insurer chiefs all pulled down over $20 million, Insurance Business magazine reported earlier this month.
The lowest-paid of these top five, UnitedHealth Group’s Andrew Witty, had to make do with a mere $20.9 million, a reward 331 times greater than the pay that went to UnitedHealth’s most typical employees.
Top execs in the “insurtech” side of the health care industry — firms that claim to be using high tech to make health insurance more efficient — seem to have an even greater compensation upside. Alignment Healthcare’s John Kao took home $34.1 million in 2022 after a $46-million payday in 2021. Bright Health’s George Mikan two years ago took in $180 million.
The chief execs of U.S.-based health care companies clearly have all the incentive they could possibly need to deliver outstanding performances. The quality of health care in the United States — by the reasoning of the defense team for sky-high U.S. CEO pay — should be unparalleled worldwide.
Especially compared to Canada.
Our neighbor to the north has not a single mega-million health care exec. The reason? Right after World War II, in the province of Saskatchewan, Canadians started setting up a tax-funded nonprofit health care system that guarantees free universal health services. By the early 1960s, all Canada’s provinces and territories had joined in on the effort.
The top executives in Canada’s health care system today make a fraction of the compensation that goes to health care execs in the United States. In 2021, the CEO of Ontario Health “raked in” just $826,000. The top health exec in the province of Alberta that same year collected a mere $583,443.
Canadians, according to the rationale of apologists for U.S. CEO pay, ought to be paying dearly for the low pay that goes to the execs who run Canada’s health care system. People in the United States, by the apologist logic, ought to be enjoying far better health care and health than people in Canada. In fact, the reverse has become the case, as analysts have been documenting for years.
By 2010, as a Population Health Metrics research journal analysis detailed just over a dozen years ago, a healthy 19-year-old Canadian could “expect to have 52 more years of perfect health versus 49.3 more years for Americans.”
Compared to Canadians, a PBS report would observe in 2020, “Americans have for years paid far more for health care while staying sicker and dying sooner.”
Other still more recent research has placed Canadian and U.S. health outcomes in a more global context. In 2021, the Commonwealth Fund in New York compared the performance of health care systems in 11 high-income countries around the world: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the United States.
“The United States ranks last overall,” the Commonwealth Fund data analysts point out, “despite spending far more of its gross domestic product on health care.”
U.S. performance on metrics that measure everything from access to health care to health outcomes, declare the Commonwealth Fund researchers , “falls well below the average of the other countries and far below the two countries ranked directly above it.”
The United States, the Commonwealth Fund added this past January, also “has the lowest life expectancy at birth” and “the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions.”
Two leading research centers, The Peterson Center on Healthcare and KFF, piled on with still more unnerving health care data this past October.
Back in 1980, the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker illustrates, life expectancy at birth showed no major differences between the United States and comparable advanced industrialized nations. But the global life-expectancy gap “has grown substantially in the following decades,” with Americans in 2021 averaging just 76.4 years in life expectancy and its peer countries averaging 82.3.
What’s going on here? How can the United States be spending so much on health care and seeing so little in return? Where does America’s health care CEO pay fit in to all this?
We’ve had no shortage of culprits when it comes to explaining how unhealthy the United States has become. Many observers point to poor diets, for instance, or the lack of adequate exercise.
But analysts like Stephen Bezruchka, a population health professor emeritus at the University of Washington, are urging us to look deeper into how our American society has evolved since the middle of the 20th century. We have over those years, they note, become a much less equal nation. Our richest are making much more — as the CEO pay data confirm — and paying a much smaller share of their hefty incomes in taxes.
“Healthier societies have a smaller gap between the rich and the poor than we do,” notes Dr. Bezruchka. “That gap causes an enormous amount of stress in our society — road rage, air rage, stress at work, child abuse.”
Dr. Bezruchka has come to call stress “the 21st century tobacco.”
“We have learned,” he warns, “that inequality kills.”
CEO compensation in the United States has contributed mightily to that inequality. Top execs don’t just collect big paychecks. To make sure they can end up collecting those paychecks, American CEOs regularly make corporate decisions that boost corporate profits at the expense of their employees and the public at large. Their fortunes also bankroll the politicos who oppose high taxes on high incomes — and the programs to help modest-income families those high taxes could be underwriting.
Curbing excessive CEO pay clearly won’t solve all the problems that face us. But curbing that excess would certainly make for a wonderfully substantive start.
By Cheryl Kunis, M.D., M.S.
Medpage Today, Second Opinions, November 27, 2023
In 1973, The New York Times published an editorial entitled “Medicarelessnessopens in a new tab or window,” questioning the allocation of public funding for “special interest groups” — specifically, for patients with end-stage renal disease. Just 2 months earlier, President Richard Nixon had signed the Medicare Amendments Bill, which expanded coverage for dialysis and transplantation. The editorial argued that the benefits of prioritizing funding for expensive therapies like dialysis over other societal needs were unclear. At the heart of the issue was whether legislators, given limited resources, were acting responsibly when deciding how to prioritize public funding.
Exactly half a century later, the question of “Medicarelessness” is more relevant than ever, although in an entirely different context. Medicare has expanded dramatically since its inception in 1965. Supposedly to improveopens in a new tab or window its efficiency, Congress eventually created Medicare Advantageopens in a new tab or window (MA) in 2003. This new program, which is publicly funded but privately administered, ushered in a new era of Medicare privatization.
With the advent of MA, the insurance industry has pioneered new and evolving strategies to maximize profits that have led to widespread accusationsopens in a new tab or window of profiteeringopens in a new tab or window and fraudopens in a new tab or window. In 1973, “Medicarelessness” referred to “reckless” government spending on what became life-saving treatment; today, I believe it’s more appropriate to assign this label to reckless spending used to bolster corporate profits.
In a just society, healthcare is an essential service that benefits all. The U.S. stands apart from other industrialized nations in that healthcare is not guaranteed. Medicare represents an attempt by our country to partially remedy this injustice. It not only provides care to some of the most marginalized members of society (the elderly and disabled), it also helped to desegregate the healthcare system, promoting racial equity.
Despite Medicare’s historic achievements and remarkable popularity (84%opens in a new tab or window of its beneficiaries view it favorably), government-controlled healthcare remains a controversial subject. Politicians in bothopens in a new tab or window partiesopens in a new tab or window have sought to increase the role of private insurance in Medicare, under the conception that care would be cheaper and more efficient in a market-driven system. Contrary to these claims, MA has raised costsopens in a new tab or window for taxpayers using higher patient “risk scores” that are not justified in every case.
MA only saves moneyopens in a new tab or window for insurers who use a range of techniques to extract profits at the expense of patients, such as instituting highly limited networks and arbitrarily requiring prior authorization for many services. Each year, MA plans reject millions of authorization requests, of which about 1 in 7opens in a new tab or window would have been approved under traditional Medicare.
But the most egregious method of profiteering, in my opinion, is the practice known as “upcoding.” MA insurers receive payments that are determined in part by patient diagnoses. The more diagnosis codes submitted, the higher the payment. MA plans have taken advantage of this, inflatingopens in a new tab or window the number of diagnoses on patient charts without providing additional care. Upcoding is so widespread that the Department of Justice has investigated or sued nearly all large MA insurers for either this practice or another form of fraud.
It is morally indefensible for billions of taxpayer dollars allocated for healthcare to be siphoned off as corporate profit. Margins for MA plans are significantly higheropens in a new tab or window than other types of insurance, to the point that some companies are leavingopens in a new tab or window employer-based insurance altogether to focus on government plans. In 1973, The New York Times questioned programs designed to benefit a medically needy “special interest group”; now, we have a program designed not to heal the sick, but one that instead ends up feeding taxpayer money to a far from needy special interest group: insurers.
Not only does MA cost taxpayers billions, it doesn’t even work for many of the patients that Medicare was created to serve. Despite the low premiums and benefits that MA plans aggressively advertiseopens in a new tab or window, the reality is that costs are only manageable when beneficiaries are healthy. If they become ill, their insurer can deny payment for services or restrict accessopens in a new tab or window through limited networks, often forcing patients to pay out of pocket or forgo treatment. According to a 2021 Government Accountability Office reportopens in a new tab or window, patients in their last year of life disenrolled from MA plans to join traditional Medicare at more than twice the rate of all other MA beneficiaries, potentially driven by limitations accessing specialty care under MA and by unforeseen expenses.
Proponents of MA claim that privatization promotes innovation and efficiency, but its role in healthcare appears questionable at best. The reality is that no matter what, profit-driven corporations will likely never put the interests of the public above those of their shareholders. Privatization allows the government to shirk fiscal and moral responsibilities at the expense of those it claims to serve. It is a myopic strategy that benefits corporations, yet keeps costs largely public. In short, the privatization of Medicare is “Medicareless.”
“Medicarelessness” poses a much greater threat in 2023 than it did in 1973. We are thoughtlessly subsidizing the private insurance industry at an extravagant cost to the American taxpayer, and dismantling a vital and beloved public program. We must accept that life-sustaining services should remain in public hands to safeguard citizens from the gravest injustices. Medicare remains a potent symbol of our most sacred democratic principles: equality, dignity, and self-determination. We can no longer afford to be “Medicareless,” both ethically and financially. We must say no to privatization.
Dr. Cheryl Kunis is a nephrologist and bioethicist. She currently serves as clinical professor of medicine emerita and special lecturer at Columbia University, and adjunct clinical professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. She also serves as the director of national issues at Physicians for a National Health Program, New York Metro Chapter.
Justice for the Palestinians and Security for Israel, New York Times, Nov. 22, 2023, by Sen. Bernie Sanders
On Oct. 7, Hamas, a terrorist organization, unleashed a barbaric attack against Israel, killing about 1,200 innocent men, women and children, and taking more than 200 hostages.
Israel, in response, unleashed what amounts to total war against the Palestinian people. According to the Gaza health ministry, more than 12,000 Palestinians, about half of whom are children, have been killed and many more wounded. And the situation becomes more dire every day.
This is a humanitarian catastrophe that risks igniting a wider regional conflagration. We all want to end it as soon as possible.
Hamas has made it clear that its goal is perpetual warfare and the destruction of the state of Israel.
For those of us who believe in peace and justice, it is imperative that we do our best to provide Israelis and Palestinians with a thoughtful response that maps out a realistic path to addressing the reality we face today. Here are my thoughts as to the best way forward and how the United States can rally the world around a moral position that moves us toward peace in the region and justice for the oppressed Palestinian population.
We must demand an end to Israel’s indiscriminate bombing. Israel is at war with Hamas, not innocent Palestinian men, women and children.
There must also be a significant, extended humanitarian pause so that badly needed aid – food, water, medicine and fuel – can get into Gaza and save lives.
There must be no long-term Israeli re-occupation and Blockade of Gaza. If Hamas is going to be removed from power, as they must be, and Palestinians given the opportunity for a better life, an Israeli occupation of Gaza would be absolutely counterproductive and would benefit Hamas.
Israel must guarantee displaced Palestinians the absolute right to return to their homes as Gaza rebuilds.
There must be a commitment to broad peace talks to advance a two-state solution.
For many years, the United States has provided Israel substantial sums of money – with close to no strings attached. The blank check approach must end. The United States must make clear that… there are conditions… (and those conditions are listed above).
We must recommit to this effort. The stakes are just too high to give up.
Statement to Physicians for a National Health Program on our 35th Anniversary, Nov. 2023, by Sen. Bernie Sanders
Let me thank PNHP for the extraordinary work you have been doing for the last 35 years, making it clear that health care is a human right, not a privilege, and exposing the broken and disastrous current health care system. I don’t have to tell you that we are now spending almost twice as much per capita on health care as the people of any other country and yet we have 85 million uninsured/underinsured, that people right now cannot find a doctor, we don’t have enough nurses, we don’t have enough pharmacists, we don’t have enough mental health providers. This system is a disaster, and what we have got to continue to do is work to make sure that every man, woman and child has health care in this country as a human right. And when we do that, we not only are going to improve our life expectancy, not only going to keep people healthier, we’re going to reaffirm that, in a democracy, government works for the people and not just the insurance companies or the drug companies. So keep up the great work, and I look forward to working with you. Thank you.
By Jim Kahn, M.D., M.P.H. and Don McCanne, M.D.
We can be thankful that we have a politician like Bernie Sanders who will attempt to keep us headed in the direction that will bring justice to all, whether it is in the current military crisis in Israel and Gaza, or it is in our own disastrous expensive but inadequate health care system.
In fact, when you compare the two tragic circumstances, we should be even more reactive to the circumstances. The war tragically caused initially a loss of 1,200 innocent Israeli lives followed by a loss of 12,000 innocent Palestinian lives. But what is our dysfunctional health care system costing us? Due to our fragmented health insurance system, we are losing 300 lives per day, 2000 per week, 8000 per month, or 100,000 per year – all of them non-combatants.
On both accounts, these are fundamental moral issues that are dictated by our politicians. But who selects our politicians? We do! And on what basis? Hopefully we would choose them based on a solid understanding of actual facts and the moral implications of applying those facts.
Bernie Sanders presents the facts behind the Israel-Hamas war and the benevolent, moral outcome we would see if our nations had politicians that were selected based on what decisions they would make that were best for the people.
Although we are not seeing military destruction with the deficiencies in our health care system, we are seeing a tremendous loss of life, not to mention the great loss of resources due to our highly flawed financing system. We know that a well-designed single payer system would save those lives we are losing due to its current deficiencies, not to mention providing us with much greater value for our health care dollar.
Bernie Sanders has legislation in the Senate and Pramila Jayapal has legislation in the House that would provide the basis for what we at PNHP have been saying for 35 years: we need a system that will bring health care justice to us all. But, remember, it is us, the people, who must make efforts to understand the principles that will bring us a system that will save those lives and provide care for all of us, and then we must select politicians with the moral fortitude to enact such an ethically superior system.
We can no longer humor those with political viewpoints that place our government in the hands of individuals who cater to themselves and their billionaire friends by propagating populist, political fictions. We need to raise the political discourse to place us all on the same higher plane wherein truth and caring will remind everyone of the value of each human life.
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.
Larger Employers Fund Worker Obamacare Option as Costs Spike, Bloomberg Law, Nov. 15, 2023, by Sara Hansard
Larger employers … are increasingly funding their workers’ purchases of Obamacare plans during open enrollment instead of providing pricier group health plans, taking a cue from small companies that have used this option.
The number of workers offered individual coverage health reimbursement arrangements grew 171% from 2022 to 2023, and the number of employers with at least 50 full-time employees offering the plans increased 144%, according to the HRA Council, a nonprofit advocacy group.
ICHRAs are tax-free accounts employers use to reimburse employees for health plans that comply with the Affordable Care Act. Employees can use the funds provided by their employers to choose individual plans in the ACA exchanges, rather than having to enroll in the more limited number of group health plans that employers typically offer. With fully-insured group plans, employers pay a health insurer for plans that cover the entire company.
The arrangements started in 2020 under a Trump administration regulation and have primarily been used by companies with fewer than 50 employees that opt to provide workers with health insurance options although the ACA doesn’t mandate it for companies that small.
But with inflation-driven health care costs rising quickly for both workers and employers, some larger companies that are required to comply with the ACA are using the reimbursement plans. …
“We were offering less and less benefit and it was costing more,” McKamey said. “We had to keep pulling out benefits and paring down the plan design in order to keep costs somewhat reasonable for the employees and the employer.”
ICHRAs allow employees to fit plans that meet the needs of young and healthy employees, as well people over age 65, who can receive employer payments that can be used towards Medicare supplemental plans, McKamey said.
By Ed Weisbart, M.D.
Big employers are accelerating the transfer of financial risk for health care to their employees under the false guise of individual choice, freedom, and consumerism. Rather than bearing the rising costs of health insurance, employers are shifting towards paying a flat amount toward whatever insurance product their workers can find in the ACA marketplace, taking advantage of lax ACA rules quietly established near the end of the Trump administration. They do this by contributing to tax-free “Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements” (ICHRAs) that workers can tap to pay part of the cost of insurance they purchase on ACA exchanges.
Under this scheme, employers no longer have to deal with rising premiums – that’s now the worry of workers, not their bosses. Companies pay a flat amount, regardless of premium costs, and workers are left out in the cold as the premium prices climb. Employers call this “Level-Funded Plans”, corporate-speak meant to obscure the fact that they’re abandoning their workers to the whims of inflation and the commercial insurance industry. But hey, at least the workers get to choose the insurance that best meets their current health needs, a fairytale that assumes we’ll never get sicker than we are today. Good luck with that illusion (just one more reason we need single payer!)
This emerging employer strategy is a strong echo of what they did to pensions in recent years.
Thanks to strong union organizing, employers used to fund pensions with a “guaranteed benefit” ensuring a predictable income for retirees – regardless of what happened in the stock market. Retirees liked the pension model because they could rely on it and make personal budgets based on a promised – and earned – income. Employers didn’t like it as it gave them unpredictable costs.
So employers dumped their financial risk from the “guaranteed benefit” of pensions onto workers by switching to “guaranteed contributions” of matching funds deposited into IRAs. Employers prefer the IRA model over pensions as it represents a predictable financial burden.
Retirees saw the fallacy of having their post-retirement income dependent on the stock market and didn’t accept the scam. That is, until employers reframed giving up their negotiated pensions as “you know how to manage your own retirement funds …” or “you deserve your own choice and control over how those funds are invested…” or my favorite “pick the investment strategy that best meets your own personal needs. You’re not the same at 65 as you will be at 90, why should your retirement plan fail to adapt to your changing life situation?”
Sound familiar? “Choose the health insurance you need.” Employers are now trying the same scam in healthcare. The ICHRAs are designed to hide the real intent of employers to shift from funding a financially unpredictable (and, for the worker, reliable) healthcare benefit into just budgeting a flat amount towards the cost of an ACA plan, leaving workers to pick up the rest.
It was a terrible trend that led to the demise of pensions; now it’s a terrible trend that could lead to the demise of (already moribund) health insurance.
On the bright side, health care should have never been linked to employment. The sooner we enact single payer, the sooner workers and employers can stop worrying about this game of whack-a-mole and focus on their work, their employment conditions, and their actual health.
https://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.
By Diane Archer
Common Dreams, November 21, 2023
During this Medicare Open Enrollment period, ask yourself these seven questions. And, please know that you can always call the Medicare Rights Center at 1-800-333-4114 or your SHIP—State Health Insurance Assistance Program—for free, unbiased advice on any of your Medicare questions.
Q. What’s the biggest difference between traditional Medicare and a Medicare Advantage plan? To ensure you have good coverage for both current and unforeseeable health needs, you should enroll in traditional Medicare. In traditional Medicare, you and your doctor decide the care you need, with no prior approval. And, you have easy access to care from almost all doctors and hospitals in the United States with no incentive to stint on your care. In a Medicare Advantage plan, a corporate insurance company decides when you get care, often requiring you to get its approval first. Medicare Advantage plans also restrict access to physicians and too often second-guess your treating physicians, denying you needed care inappropriately. The less care the Medicare Advantage plan provides, the more the insurance company profits. You will pay more upfront in traditional Medicare if you don’t have Medicaid and need to buy supplemental coverage, but you are likely to spend a lot less out of pocket when you need costly care. Regardless of whether you stay in traditional Medicare or enroll in Medicare Advantage, you still need to pay your Part B premium.
Q. Should I trust an insurance agent’s advice about my Medicare options? No. Unfortunately, insurance agents are paid more to steer you away from traditional Medicare and into a Medicare Advantage plan, even if it does not meet your needs. While some insurance agents might be good, you can’t know whom to trust. Keep in mind that while Medicare Advantage plans tell you that they offer you extra benefits, you still need to pay your Part B premium, and extra benefits are often very limited and come with high out-of-pocket costs; be aware that many Medicare Advantage plans won’t cover as much necessary medical and hospital care as traditional Medicare. For free independent advice about your options, call the Medicare Rights Center at 1-800-333-4114 or a SHIP.
Q. Why can’t I rely on my friends or the government’s star-rating system to pick a good Medicare Advantage plan? Unlike traditional Medicare, which gives you easy access to the physicians and hospitals you use from everywhere in the U.S. and allows for continuity of care, you can’t count on a Medicare Advantage plan to cover your care from the healthcare providers listed in their network or to cover the medically necessary care that traditional Medicare covers. Even if your friends say they are happy with their Medicare Advantage plan right now, they are gambling with their healthcare. The government’s five-star rating system does not consider that some Medicare Advantage plans engage in widespread inappropriate delays and denials of care, and other Medicare Advantage plans engage in different bad acts that can endanger your health. So, while you should never sign up for a Medicare Advantage plan with a one, two, or three-star rating, Medicare Advantage plans with four and five-star ratings can have very high denial and delay rates.
Q. If I’m enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan, can I count on seeing the physicians listed in the network and lower costs? Unfortunately, provider networks in Medicare Advantage plans can change at any time and your out-of-pocket costs can be as high as $8,300 this year for in-network care alone. You can study the MA plan literature, and you can know your total out-of-pocket costs for in-network care. But, you cannot know whether the MA plan will refuse to cover the care you need or delay needed care for an extended period. This year alone, dozens of health systems have canceled their Medicare Advantage contracts, further restricting access to care for their patients in MA, because MA plans make it hard for them to give people needed care.
Q. Doesn’t the government make sure that Medicare Advantage plans deliver the same benefits as traditional Medicare? No. The government cannot protect you from Medicare Advantage bad actors. The insurers offering Medicare Advantage plans can decide you don’t need care when you clearly do, and there’s no one stopping them; they are largely unaccountable for their bad acts. In the last few years there have been multiple government and independent reports on insurance company bad acts in Medicare Advantage plans.
Q. If I join a Medicare Advantage plan, can I disenroll and switch to traditional Medicare? You can switch to traditional Medicare each annual open enrollment period. However, depending upon your situation, where you live, your income, your age, and more, you might not be able to get supplemental coverage to pick up your out-of-pocket costs and protect you from high costs. What’s worse, you could incur thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs in Medicare Advantage.
Q. If I have traditional Medicare and Medicaid, what should I do? If you have both Medicare and Medicaid, traditional Medicare covers virtually all your out-of-pocket costs. You will get much easier access to physicians and inpatient services in traditional Medicare than in a Medicare Advantage plan if you need costly healthcare services or have a complex condition.
Again, for free independent advice about your options, call the Medicare Rights Center at 1-800-333-4114 or a SHIP.
Diane Archer is president of Just Care USA, an independent digital hub covering health and financial issues facing boomers and their families and promoting policy solutions. Ms. Archer began her career in health advocacy in 1989 as founder and president of the Medicare Rights Center, a national organization dedicated to ensuring that older and disabled Americans get the health care they need.
By Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Dr. Diljeet Singh
The Hill, November 17, 2023
Physicians and policymakers are, in different ways, both responsible for the health and well-being of patients. While physicians care for patients to the best of their ability, policymakers ensure that the structures that make up the health care system are effective and equitable. Whenever and wherever there is a threat to these goals, both groups have a role to play in recognizing and combating it. That is why we are speaking out on the need to make fundamental changes to the Medicare Advantage (MA) program.
MA as it exists today is a threat to patient care, to health equity, and indeed to the integrity of our public health infrastructure. A new report from Physicians for a National Health Program, an organization of doctors working to reform the health care system, shows that for-profit, corporate MA insurers are overpaid anywhere from $88 to $140 billion a year. That’s money coming out of patients’ and taxpayers’ pockets.
MA is the privately-run version of the traditional government-administered Medicare program. Instead of paying directly for care, the government instead pays insurers to “manage” patients’ needs. Enrollment in this program has grown significantly over the past two decades, with over 50 percent of eligible beneficiaries opting for an MA plan in 2023. Unfortunately, growth in the program has not led to better care for beneficiaries or a better deal for taxpayers — just the opposite, in fact. Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars are being siphoned off as profit by insurance companies that don’t even provide necessary care. That money doesn’t just cost our government, it costs seniors. For example, premiums paid for Medicare Part B, which covers most medical services outside of hospitalization, totaled $131 billion in 2022. With the amount of extra money that corporate insurers get from the government, we could totally eliminate Part B premiums and still have money left over.
Where is all this money coming from? It’s complicated, the result of a tangled web of loopholes, policies, and practices that are difficult for an individual beneficiary or physician to see. Even so, scholars and regulators have identified a few major factors that lead to overpayments. For example, insurance companies in MA tend to enroll patients that are healthier and therefore cost less than average but still get paid as if their patients were much sicker. This is called favorable selection, and by some estimates, it could cost as much as $75 billion a year in extra payments.
Because Medicare gives additional money to MA insurers for patients with more severe or more numerous diagnoses, another source of overpayments are all the irrelevant or old conditions that insurers record on patient charts. This practice is known as upcoding; these conditions aren’t being actively treated, so they don’t cost the insurance company anything, but they do lead to as much as $20 billion in extra payments. These methods only scratch the surface of all the ways in which MA insurers take advantage of the system, but the bottom line is clear: these companies are pocketing billions of dollars that belong to Medicare beneficiaries.
Of course, it isn’t just about the money; it’s also about patient care. Medicare Advantage plans tout their low premiums and extra benefits, but often these are only worth it as long as you’re healthy. If you get sick and need complex or significant care, plans start to show their true colors. Difficult authorization processes and narrow networks can make getting treated under an MA plan a nightmare. In fact, high-need patients with chronic conditions and patients in their last year of life are substantially more likely to switch out of MA and back to traditional Medicare, tired of having to justify each and every needed procedure or medication to their insurance company.
In our roles as a member of Congress and a practicing physician, we see different but equally concerning manifestations of these problems. Constituents call in with stories of being lured into an MA plan, and then denied care or prevented from seeing their doctor. Cancer patients, for whom an early diagnosis and treatment plan is imperative to survival, face weeks of delay because of onerous pre-authorization requirements. In fact, some of these patients have ended up needing emergency surgery or aggressive radiation that could’ve been avoided if insurers hadn’t gotten in the way. MA doesn’t just take billions in taxpayer dollars; it makes it harder for doctors to do their jobs, and harder for patients to get well.
With the money that we spend on corporate giveaways, we could entirely fund Medicare’s prescription drug benefit, establish an out-of-pocket maximum in traditional Medicare, or even provide dental, hearing, and vision benefits to everyone on Medicare and everyone on Medicaid. This doesn’t need to be a partisan issue. We should all agree that programs paid for by the people should benefit the people. It’s time to crack down on overpayments in MA and use those resources to improve Medicare for all patients.
Pramila Jayapal represents Washington’s 7th District. Dr. Diljeet K. Singh is a women’s health advocate and an integrative gynecologic oncologist in clinical practice since 1999. She currently serves as vice president for Physicians for a National Health Program.
