By Leonardo Bursztyn, Aakaash Rao, Christopher P. Roth, David H. Yanagizawa-Drott
National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2020

Abstract

We study the effects of COVID-19 coverage early in the pandemic by the two most widely-viewed cable news shows in the United States – Hannity and Tucker Carlson Tonight, both on Fox News – on downstream health outcomes. We first document large differences in content between the shows and in cautious behavior among viewers. Through both a selection-on-observables strategy and a novel instrumental variable approach, we find that areas with greater exposure to the show downplaying the threat of COVID-19 experienced a greater number of cases and deaths. We assess magnitudes through a simple epidemiological model highlighting the role of externalities and provide evidence that misinformation is a key underlying mechanism.

Conclusion

Examining the effects of misinformation is particularly important during a pandemic given the large externalities involved and the significant consequences of misinformed behavior for individuals’ health and for the health care system as a whole. The two most widely-viewed cable news shows in the United States — Hannity and Tucker Carlson Tonight, both on Fox News – originally took very different stances on the risks associated with the novel coronavirus. While Hannity downplayed the threat during the initial period of the virus’ spread in the United States, Tucker Carlson Tonight warned its viewers that the virus posed a serious threat from early February. In this paper, we show that differential exposure to these two shows affected behavior and downstream health outcomes.

We begin by validating differences in content with independent coding of shows’ transcripts. Consistent with the differences in content, we present new survey evidence that Hannity’s viewers changed behavior in response to the virus later than other Fox News viewers, while Carlson’s viewers changed behavior earlier. Using both OLS regressions with a rich set of controls and different instrumental variable strategies exploiting variation in the timing of TV consumption, we then document that greater exposure to Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight increased the number of total cases and deaths in the initial stages of the coronavirus pandemic. We also show that a standard epidemiological model can, with reasonable parameter levels, match the approximate magnitude of our measured treatment effects. Finally, we also provide additional evidence that misinformation is an important mechanism driving the effects in the data. Our results indicate that the provision of misinformation on mass media can have significant societal consequences.

https://www.nber.org…

Thursday, June 18, 2020 Scoreboard: Hannity and Carlson Lead Fox News to 4th Straight Prime-Time Win

https://www.adweek.com…

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Do television hosts have a responsibility when they disseminate misinformation that results in adverse consequences on the viewing audience? This elaborate study demonstrated that differential exposure to Fox’s Sean Hannity and Fox’s Tucker Carlson affected behavior and downstream health outcomes. They originally took very different stances on the risks associated with the novel coronavirus. Hannity downplayed the threat during the initial period of the virus’ spread in the United States, while Tucker Carlson warned his viewers that the virus posed a serious threat. The authors document that greater exposure to Hannity relative to Carlson increased the number of total cases and deaths in the initial stages of the coronavirus pandemic. They also provide additional evidence that misinformation is an important mechanism driving the effects in the data.

Sean Hannity’s glib approach in disseminating misinformation killed people. He has personally contributed to the tragic outcomes of the COViD-19 pandemic. Yet the most recent ratings demonstrate that the public still supports Hannity and Carlson.

Freedom of speech does not allow you to shout “FIRE!” in a crowded theater, nor should it allow you to disseminate false information that creates a major public health hazard. Hannity’s audience may not care, but their behavior in a pandemic harms other innocent people. What should our response be?

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By Douglas Barthold, Anirban Basu
Health Affairs Blog, June 18, 2020

High-deductible health plans (HDHPs) covered more than 30 percent of enrollees in employer-sponsored plans in the United States in 2019, up from 4 percent in 2006.

The growth of HDHPs is driven by the pursuit of reduced health care spending and premiums for both employees and employers through channeling elements of consumerism and managed care. Often, HDHPs are offered along with a savings option (health savings account or health reimbursement arrangement) in a consumer-directed health plan.

Recently, however, there have been concerns about the out-of-pocket cost burdens imposed on patients by HDHPs and other plans.

It is becoming increasingly clear that HDHPs’ indiscriminate reductions in care usage may not be the best way to contain health care costs. In this post, we suggest that combining the principles of HDHPs and value-based insurance design (VBID), by offering deductible exemptions for high-value services, could provide nuanced incentives with potential to preserve access to the most important services while reducing use of only more wasteful care.

Why Did HDHPs Fail To Deliver Their Intended Consequences?

The intended premise of HDHPs is that beneficiaries facing the full costs of health care services during the deductible phase will engage in price shopping and subsequently choose care commensurate with expected benefits of that care. The hope is that the combination of lower prices and a different mix of services could increase the value of health care used while also reducing costs. Unfortunately, evaluations of HDHPs suggest that consumers neither price shop nor can they discriminate between high- and low-value care when facing high deductibles; accordingly, they reduce use of both essential and inessential services. Not only is this behavior likely to lead to worse health for beneficiaries, but short-term savings for both the beneficiary and the insurer may be offset by increased long-term spending associated with preventable adverse health events. The lack of the hoped-for response to HDHPs (price shopping and reduction in unnecessary care only) may stem from a lack of price transparency, inability to pay for essential care during the deductible phase, or inadequate information about the value of alternate health care services and technologies.

Tying-In Value Conversations Within HDHPs

Health services can be underused and overused when there are differential health-related returns across services, but patients are unaware of the differences. VBIDs have been used by insurers as a mechanism to address this information problem, by signaling the value of alternative health care technologies to consumers through variable cost sharing.

To date, most applications of VBID have focused on applying such designs to copays but not to deductibles. Consequently, results of such applications show the promise of VBID, but to a limited scale, owing to the relative inelasticity of demand for care related to small copay variation. Tying value-based cost sharing within deductibles could generate a bigger “nudge” to align use with value.

Value-Based High-Deductible Plans

We suggest that value-based high-deductible plans (VHDP), which combine the principles of HDHPs and VBID, and have been suggested as “a natural evolution of health plans,” could provide a robust alternative in insurance markets and achieve the goals of both low costs and high value of health care delivery. Our enthusiasm for such designs stems from the dispersion of price-elasticities observed when a value-based system was implemented on copayments. We expect such dispersion can be expanded substantially when VBID is applied to develop VHDPs. Specifically, VHDPs would nudge consumers toward high-value technologies (for example, preventive medications) by exempting their costs from the deductibles, while also providing consumers with transparency on the full costs of low-value services (for example, MRI for back pain or headache), and disincentivizing their use. This would generate a more elastic demand for low-value services, which in turn could move the markets for insured health care services toward more efficient outcomes.

In health care, where we know that both quality and value are at least partially unobservable to the patient, efficient outcomes are typically not attainable, especially when cost sharing indiscriminately alters prices. A VHDP would provide nuanced cost sharing to influence behavior in a manner similar to prices in traditional markets, therefore resolving information asymmetries for low-value services, reducing distortions, and increasing social welfare.

Challenges To Adoption Of Value-Based HDHPs

While value-based pricing improves beneficiaries’ ability to observe value, and therefore reduces the information asymmetries inherent in health care markets, the definition of “value” is an open question. Value could be included in decisions about which services should be exempt from the deductible. The decision of which elements to consider in this decision will depend on the stakeholders and perspectives (for example, payer, health system, employer, societal).

A potential downside of VHDPs is plan complexity, but improved communication (perhaps through health plan stewards) could address this limitation. It would be relatively straightforward to incorporate the cost-sharing design of VHDPs to a value-based tiering system, now widely used in cost sharing.

Qualitative studies of VBID have identified additional barriers to VBID implementation. For example, patients are skeptical of value-based tradeoffs, do not necessarily trust the information provided by their plan, and may resist changes in care delivery. Payers tend to be skeptical of the clinical significance of adherence improvements from VBID and have expressed concern over low return on investment and administrative and information technology hurdles. Finally, providers are concerned about changes to patient behavior that puts their practice at financial risk.

These concerns are important, but potentially addressable with education and carefully planned implementation, to allow VHDPs to strike a nuanced balance between reducing moral hazard consumption of care and adequate risk protection. Such a balance is critical to controlling health spending while maintaining access to the highest-value services and reducing financial uncertainty.

https://www.healthaffairs.org…

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Who should be denied health care? People who do not have enough money to pay for it? Apparently we don’t believe that since we have set up systems to try to ensure that health care is available to essentially everyone. We place funds in health insurance risk pools to be sure that funds are there to pay for care when needed. For those who do not have insurance and are too poor to buy it, we set up programs such as Medicaid and CHIP. We help fund community health centers that provide reduced-cost or free care for the needy. We set up programs to cover special groups such as seniors (Medicare), or veterans (VA health care). We require Emergency Departments to accept critical patients who are unable to pay for care (though we reserve the right to ruin their credit if they don’t pay).

Though we have set up these systems, the fragmented and dysfunctional nature of them leaves tens of millions without insurance or with inadequate insurance that results in financial hardship when health care is required. Although our national health expenditures are now $4 trillion, the system is not working for too many individuals and families. With a properly designed financing system, $4 trillion is enough to pay for health care for everyone. The single payer model of an improved Medicare would work just fine. The financing of the system is an issue entirely separate from the delivery of health care. Under single payer, when you need health care, you get it. It’s that simple.

As far as financing a single payer system is concerned, it is still important to pool risk. All funds are paid into a single universal risk pool that covers everyone. Funds are paid into the pool based on ability to pay. Lower income individuals pay less and those with higher incomes pay more. The most equitable way to do this is through progressive taxes. Under this system there is a transfer from the healthy to the sick and from the wealthy to the poor. Most on average will pay less than they do under our current dysfunctional financing system though the wealthy will pay more although still an amount that will be easily affordable for them. So, again, the system functions best when the delivery of health care is totally separated from its financing.

We have a problem. The current system serves some sectors of the medical-industrial complex very well, especially the expensive, administratively-burdensome private insurance industry. Although we waste tremendous resources keeping this industry in play, it has not been able to adequately fulfill the important function of transferring funds from the healthy to the sick and from the wealthy to the poor. They have phased in various gimmicks under the umbrella of consumer-directed health care. They have introduced the exchange of money into the actual health care delivery setting, conflating to some extent the delivery and the financing of health care.

By requiring copayments, coinsurance, and the much larger deductibles, they are placing the patient in the role of a shopper in the health care marketplace. This has been disastrous. The out-of-pocket cost-sharing has made health care unaffordable for far too many of us, and it does so by erecting financial barriers directly tied to the delivery of health care services. The maldistribution of the $4 trillion that we are spending is creating financial hardships and even bankruptcy for too many of us, not to mention that the administrative complexity is wasting tremendous financial resources that should be going to health care instead.

Recognition of these problems certainly is not new. In fact, in response the industry has gone out of its way to manipulate the consumer-directed policies to continue to serve their own industry well, but at a dear cost to the patients.

The extremes to which they go by adding more administrative complexity is demonstrated in today’s article by Barthold and Basu. They explain how the current system is not working well, but their solution is that they want more of it. They report the effort to improve shopper selection by lowering copayments for higher-valued services while increasing copayments for those services of lesser value. Acknowledging that the very modest changes in out-of-pocket spending have not been enough to improve health shoppers’ behavior, they suggest the innovation of using the much larger deductible to make a greater difference in the intensity of the shoppers’ experiences so they will more likely choose higher value care, at least in theory.

The deficiencies should be obvious to anyone who has studied health policy. How do you determine which care is of higher value? Since all patients are different, how do you determine whether that higher value applies to a specific patient? What other choices are there out in the health care marketplace, and how do you find out about them? These issues can be quite complex, as the authors recognize, so their solution is to consider adding more personnel – health plan stewards – to assist the patient in decisions on how they should spend the deductible. More administrative waste and grief!

The obsession with the ideological preference for consumer-directed health care has served the insurance industry well, and has kept the policy community busy, but it has done so at a great disservice to patients, not to mention the burden that it has placed on the health care delivery system. The entire concept, along with the insurers, needs to be dumped. We should take money out of the health care delivery transaction, and simply provide health care whenever and wherever it is needed. The administrative cost of collecting equitable, progressive taxes to pay for the system is a minuscule fraction of the administrative waste that we would recover by changing to single payer Medicare for All.

Imagine prepaid health care where the entire health care system is prepaid for all of us. Can hardly wait.

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By Gracie Himmelstein, M.A., Kathryn EW Himmelstein, M.S.Ed., M.D.
International Journal of Health Services, In Press (Posted June 18, 2020)

Abstract

Racial inequities in health outcomes are widely acknowledged. This study seeks to determine whether hospitals serving people of color in the United States have lesser physical assets than other hospitals. With data on 4,476 Medicare-participating hospitals in the U.S., we defined those in the top decile of the share of Black and Hispanic Medicare inpatients, as “Black-serving” and “Hispanic-serving” respectively. Using 2017 Medicare cost reports and American Hospital Association data, we compared the capital assets (value of land, buildings and equipment), and the availability of capital-intensive services at these hospitals and other hospitals, adjusted for other hospital characteristics. Hospitals serving people of color had lower capital assets, e.g. $5,197/patient-day at Black-serving hospitals, $5,763 at Hispanic-serving hospitals, and $8,325 at other hospitals (p<.0001 for both comparisons). New asset purchases 2013-2017 averaged $1,242, $1,738, and $3,092/patient-day at Black-serving, Hispanic-serving and other hospitals respectively (p<.0001). In adjusted models, hospitals serving people of color had lower capital assets (-$215,121/bed, p<.0001) and recent purchases (-$83,608/bed, p<.0001). They were also less likely to offer 19 of 27 specific capital-intensive services. Our results show that hospitals that serve people of color are substantially poorer in assets than other hospitals, and suggest that equalizing investments in hospital facilities in the U.S. might attenuate racial inequities in care.

From the Discussion

The physical resources available for care at Black- and Hispanic-serving hospitals in the U.S. are sparse relative to other hospitals. The total value of plant and equipment per patient-day is about one-third less at hospitals serving people of color than other hospitals. Moreover, we found similarly large inequities in investment in new capital assets, which suggests that the gap in assets between hospitals serving people of color and other hospitals will persist, or even widen. Unsurprisingly in view of these large inequities, hospitals serving people of color are much less likely to offer many capital-intensive medical technologies and services.

What lies behind these differences? Until the Great Depression two main sources provided capital to build hospitals – federal, state, and local government funded the building of public hospitals, while private philanthropic donors funded the construction of private hospitals. The 1946 Hill-Burton Act (subsequently rolled into the Public Health Service Act) served to greatly expand the government’s role in hospital capital provision, offering grants and loans to build and modernize health care facilities. More recently, hospitals have funded most capital investments from their accumulated profits (which are called surpluses in non-profit hospitals), or from loans or bonds that must be paid back from future profits. For-profit hospitals can also raise capital from investors. In order to access any of these sources of capital, a hospital must be profitable or expect to garner profits in the future.

Several factors contribute to hospitals’ profitability, and hence access to capital. Payer mix, which is strongly linked to patients’ race, plays a key role. Hospitals have historically collected low payments for the care of uninsured and Medicaid patients (who are disproportionately Black and Latinx), while patients with private coverage are most lucrative. Furthermore, elective admissions are generally more profitable than emergencies, and non-white patients have a lower proportion of elective admissions than do white patients for a variety of conditions.

Although studies linking hospital capital investment and health outcomes are scant, and mostly dated, they suggest a positive relationship between investment in hospital capital and improved patient care. Thus, the gaps in capitalization that we found may contribute to ongoing racial inequities in the quality of hospital facilities, and thus health outcomes.

Hospitals’ capital investments “literally set in concrete the future physical configuration of the health care system”. The inequities we document reflect generations of deficient investment in the health care of communities of color. The term “structural racism” – the perpetuation of racial inequities by cultural, economic and political systems that are often inherited from the past and reproduced in the present – seems peculiarly apropos as a description of these stark inequities.

Gracie Himmelstein is an MD candidate at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and a PhD candidate in Demography and Social Policy at the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. She received her MA in Demography from Princeton in 2019.

Kathryn EW Himmelstein is a resident physician in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. She received her MD degree from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 2018.

https://pnhp.org…

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

At a time when our nation is especially concerned about racial inequities and their adverse consequences, this article is a particularly important contribution since it indicates that variation in capital investments in health care serving various socioeconomic and racial populations is a significant contributor to inequities in health care services and outcomes.

Those familiar with the Physicians’ Proposal drafted by PNHP – basically a single payer model of an improved Medicare for All – are aware that it is not only a proposal to finance the delivery of health care for all, but it also proposes separate budgeting of all major capital investments in health care, using regional health planning boards to allocate capital funds for new facilities and expensive new equipment based on medical need, project quality and efficiency. This would essentially eliminate the inequities in health care facilities that Himmelstein and Himmelstein have demonstrated in their research.

Following are excerpts from a separate press release:

Hospitals that care for large numbers of Black and Latinx patients have far less to spend on their facilities such as buildings and equipment, and offer fewer high-tech services than other U.S. hospitals, according to a new study of hospitals’ capital assets and spending. The peer-reviewed study, released ahead of print in the International Journal of Health Services, used data from 4,476 hospitals to determine the total value of each hospitals’ facilities.

Lead author, Gracie Himmelstein, an MD/PhD candidate at Icahn Mount Sinai Medical School and Princeton University’s Office of Population Studies, and a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Princeton commented: “Our study confirmed the stark differences between rich hospitals and poor hospitals that I’ve seen during my training. Many of the doctors and nurses at poor hospitals are terrific, but they’re fighting an uphill battle; they care for the sickest patients in the most crowded and difficult conditions. To compensate for decades of unequal health financing we need to invest in hospitals serving Black and Latinx patients, and abandon an insurance system that offers hospitals rich rewards to care for some patients, and less or nothing to care for others.”

Co-author Dr. Kathryn Himmelstein, a resident in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School noted, “White Americans were living three and a half years longer than Black Americans even before COVID-19 began ravaging communities of color. If America wants to show that Black lives truly matter, we need to reverse the structural racism that’s literally built into our hospitals.”

Statement of conflict of interest:

Gracie and Kathryn Himmelstein are daughters of Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, co-founders of Physicians for a National Health Program and icons in the world of health policy research. Not only do the Himmelstein sisters have no conflict of interest inherent in this study, they passionately share with their parents a common interest in health care justice for all. For those of us near the end of our productive years dedicated to health reform advocacy, we can be heartened to know that the future is in good hands. America really will have health care justice for all, and, eventually, so will the world.

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By James M. Perrin
The Milbank Quarterly, June 2020

Barbara Starfield built the field of primary care research and galvanized research and policy documenting the central importance of primary care in health and health care delivery. Her work spanned decades, showing how primary care improves population health and lowers health care expenditures. It guided many of us in the quest to improve health and health care, and rates of publications with primary care in the title have more than doubled from fewer than 1,000 in 2005 to more than 2,000 in 2018. The remarkable and comprehensive review that Starfield and her colleagues, Shi and Macinko, published in 2005 in The Milbank Quarterly summarized a wealth of US and international studies demonstrating that a) health is better in areas with more primary care physicians, b) people who receive care from primary care physicians are healthier, and c) the main characteristics of primary care are associated with better health. Those studied characteristics are first contact care, holistic person-focused care over time, comprehensive care, and coordinated care, concepts expanded in various primary care medical home criteria at the national and state levels. Furthermore, better health outcomes are found in communities and countries that distribute health resources equitably, have no or low copayments for health care, have a universal financing mechanism guaranteed by a publicly accountable body (government or government-regulated insurance plans), and have professional incomes for primary care physicians comparable to those for other specialists. Systems with strong primary care orientation and where primary care physicians are identified as the usual source of care are associated with decreased racial and socioeconomic health disparities and with decreased deaths from premature mortality, infant mortality, and overall mortality from chronic pulmonary disease, cardiovascular disease, and heart disease.

What progress has the United States made since the 2005 Starfield publication? During this period, the United States has become even more racially and ethnically diverse, especially among younger groups. Many in the health sector—and elsewhere—have recognized the importance of the social determinants of health and the role the health sector can play in addressing those determinants. Growing rates of mental and behavioral health conditions, often coexisting with other chronic health conditions, have spawned progress in integrating mental and behavioral health in primary care teams. Spurred partly in response to the recognition of the multifactorial antecedents of health and the central role of mental health, general and subspecialty clinical practice has increasingly embraced team-based care, including some combination of nurse care coordinators, mental health personnel, and family health workers—a phenomenon that Starfield recognized while pondering how to maintain important personal relationships between patients and providers with the transformation to teams. Much work has gone into training team members in their collaborative efforts and, through such work, emphasizing the importance of maintaining a productive personal relationship with ongoing patients.

Despite these generally favorable changes in primary care, the United States has recently experienced striking increases in mortality among people aged 15-60 years. Although some of this growth reflects the opioid epidemic and other drug and alcohol use, much mortality comes from suicide (reflecting the increase in mental health conditions) and cardiovascular and heart disease, partly resulting from the epidemic of obesity. Although high-quality primary care could prevent many of these deaths, the United States perpetuates a serious imbalance in financial support for primary care versus other health investments, with primary care and mental and behavioral health chronically underfunded. Starfield noted that greater relative investment in primary care improves population health and decreases health care expenditures. The US strategy limits access to preventive care throughout the life course for some populations, especially those with low income. Coupled with the persistence of poverty among young families in the United States—much worse than in other OECD countries—the lack of adequate primary care creates an unhealthy underclass beginning in childhood (or even prenatally) and continuing to affect health and death over the decades. The persistent rapid growth of US health care expenditures further indicates the lack of systematic work to implement Starfield’s findings and recommendations. For example, although the Affordable Care Act included provisions to lower the growth in total health care expenditures, many provisions required upfront funding that Congress declined to provide. This failure reflects a lack of political will to take on a complex and powerful health care industry driven by specialist investigations and interventions, rather than investment in primary care to increase access, promote prevention, improve overall quality of care, and reduce unnecessary and potentially harmful specialist care. The United States has paid the price of increased disability, mortality, and other indicators of poor health along with rising costs, all highlighted by Starfield and her colleagues.

Are there important points of light? The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have stimulated greater investment in primary care, especially through their State Innovation Models and Primary Care Plus initiative. However, here too strategies have had negligible impact on equitable pay for primary care physicians, with, for example, the resource-based value structure oriented to procedures over cognitive services and, thus, balanced against adequate support for primary care tasks. Several states have worked to increase primary care investment, some through their Medicaid programs and others through broader health policy oversight, including direct calls for identifying and increasing the percent of health care dollars spent on primary care from public and private sources. The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine recently empaneled a new study on Implementing High Quality Primary Care, the first serious attention to primary care by the Academies in more than a quarter century. We can hope this new attention will lead to stronger political will and policy changes that begin to approximate Starfield’s original vision for primary care.

The Milbank Quarterly, June 2020, “Detailing the Primary Care Imperative–Remembering Barbara Starfield”:
https://www.milbank.org…

The Milbank Quarterly, September 2005, “Contribution of Primary Care to Health Systems and Health”:
https://www.milbank.org…

National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Implementing High-Quality Primary Care”:
https://www.nationalacademies.org…

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

It is interesting to observe how much we already know about how we can improve our health care system thereby reducing its profound waste that makes it the most expensive system in the world while improving its performance and outcomes, and yet we fail to act. Two systemic changes that would greatly improve value and performance would be to reinforce and expand primary care, and to enact and implement a single payer national health program – an improved version of Medicare that would include everyone.

Today’s selection honors Barbara Starfield and the legacy she left with her work in describing the virtues of primary care. We clearly need a single payer national health program built on a strong foundation of primary care. The task would not be at all difficult – simply enacting and implementing the single payer and primary care policies that have been well described in many other venues.

Since we know what is wrong, and we know how to fix it, why haven’t we done it? Without getting into the subject of divisive politics, we should recognize the imperative of single payer and primary care and just go ahead and do it. For those who clamor about politics, let’s just push them to the side and move forward. There should be plenty of others out there who would enthusiastically join together with us as we include other important policies such as improving our public health infrastructure, supporting the black lives matter movement, advocating for a sustainable environment, shielding us from the threat of guns, improving housing, reducing socioeconomic inequities – especially the maldistribution of income and wealth, making public education more accessible and affordable, providing opportunity for the Dreamers, and… well, you know, making our nation and the world a better place for all of us.

Let’s just not let great ideas, like those of Barbara Starfield, slip away from us by defaulting to mere inertia. We’re better than that.

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Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), June 2020

As part of its mandate from the Congress, each June the Commission reports on refinements to Medicare payment systems and issues affecting the Medicare program, including broader changes in health care delivery and the market for health care services.

Realizing the promise of value-based payment in Medicare: An agenda for change

The Commission outlines a multiyear effort to establish a strategic direction for Medicare payment policy and delivery system design that could be implemented by the Congress and CMS. This work will be aimed at identifying changes that broaden the use of value-based payment (which characterizes methods of paying for health care services that provide stronger incentives than fee-for-service to control overall costs while maintaining or improving quality) by encouraging more providers to organize into “accountable entities.” Medicare Advantage and accountable care organizations could serve as vehicles to broaden the use of value- based payment, but both programs need to be improved to realize that potential.

The Commission contends that policymakers will need new approaches to both how Medicare pays providers and how services are organized and delivered to address the currently unsustainable trends in Medicare spending.

Challenges in maintaining and increasing savings from accountable care organizations

CMS has made it a priority to move more Medicare beneficiaries into alternative payment models in which providers are responsible for the cost and quality of care. One such model is the accountable care organization (ACO). ACOs are now responsible for 23 percent of Medicare beneficiaries with both Part A and Part B coverage. Given the rapid growth in ACOs, it is important to evaluate whether they are generating savings for the Medicare program and thus helping make the program more sustainable.

To date, ACOs have generated modest savings, with most evaluations estimating 1 percent to 2 percent reductions in spending from existing ACO models. Some have expressed a concern that the ability of Medicare ACOs to achieve savings has been limited because key constituencies are not sufficiently engaged with ACOs and have incentives that run counter to those of ACOs.

Because Medicare savings from Medicare Shared Savings Program ACOs have been relatively small thus far (although still greater than most care coordination demonstrations), there is a risk that those savings could be eroded, or even completely offset, by unwarranted shared savings payments. Patient selection in ACOs could result in unwarranted shared savings payments, whether the selection is intentional or not. For example, if high-cost beneficiaries are disproportionately shifted out of an ACO in its performance year—while remaining in the baseline years—performance-year spending will decrease in relation to the ACO’s benchmark. This phenomenon could occur if clinicians with high-cost beneficiaries bill under a taxpayer identification number (TIN) that is not part of the ACO or if a clinician bills for patients with low spending under the ACO’s TINs and bills for patients with higher spending relative to their risk score under a non-ACO TIN.

The current system allows an ACO to strategically change the composition of its TINs to increase the likelihood of receiving unwarranted shared savings relative to benchmarks, creating a vulnerability for the Medicare program.

Properly matching the clinicians included in an ACO’s baseline and performance years will allow a more accurate assessment of an ACO’s performance and reduce opportunities for unwarranted shared savings.

Replacing the Medicare Advantage quality bonus program

The Commission maintains that Medicare program payments should take into account the quality of care delivered to beneficiaries, and the Commission has formalized a set of principles for designing Medicare quality incentive programs. Medicare’s quality bonus program (QBP) for assessing and rewarding quality performance in the Medicare Advantage (MA) program is not consistent with these principles, and in Chapter 3 we recommend replacing it with a new quality program: the MA value incentive program (MA–VIP).

In our June 2019 report to the Congress, we outlined multiple significant flaws in the QBP program. Those flaws must be addressed so Medicare can have confidence that the MA program encourages and appropriately rewards high quality in a manner that ensures that program dollars are wisely spent.

The Commission recommends that the Congress replace the QBP with an MA–VIP that includes the following five key design elements:

• Scores a small set of population-based measures.
• Evaluates quality at the local market level.
• Uses a peer-grouping mechanism to account for differences in enrollees’ social risk factors.
• Establishes a system for distributing rewards with no “cliff” effects.
• Distributes plan-financed rewards and penalties at the local market level.

To drive quality improvement, policymakers would need to choose an appropriate amount of payment to fund the reward pool and an effective performance-to-points scale methodology.

In the future, we will attempt to take lessons learned from today’s experience into our assessments of Medicare’s payment systems as we help the Congress grapple with the difficult task of controlling the growth of Medicare spending while preserving beneficiaries’ access to high-quality care and providing sufficient payment for efficient providers.

http://www.medpac.gov…

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Medicare for All? Look at what they keep doing to Medicare!

First they decided that Medicare needed to be turned over to the private insurance industry, and so they established private Medicare + Choice to show that the private insurers could provide higher quality care at a lower cost. That didn’t work, so they replaced the program with private Medicare Advantage and provided the insurers with various incentives to establish plans which they claim lowered costs but actually increased costs when considering that the private plans were cream skimming the healthier patients. So then they introduced risk adjustment which provided the private plans with another opportunity – upcoding to make their patients appear sicker than they really were so the insurers could qualify for higher payments. And quality? They learned to game that as well.

The policy community recognized that there were problems so they decided we needed a new concept. Let’s put the providers in charge and make them accountable for the costs and quality of care. Well that hasn’t worked either. The cost savings were negligible, especially when considering the unaccounted for costs of the providers and the very modest bonuses that wiped out the savings for Medicare. Again there is evidence that they still do not have effective measurements of overall quality.

These two models – private Medicare Advantage and accountable care organizations have been a failure and should be abandoned and replaced with efforts to improve the traditional Medicare program – a program that has been neglected by Congress and the administrations of both parties. No, they won’t give up. Instead they want to replace the ineffective tools of these organizations with other tools that we can predict will be just as ineffective, but will prolong the life of these organizations that are designed under principles advocated by the medical-industrial complex while neglecting those who really count – the patients.

From MedPAC’s perspective, the problem is with Medicare Advantage and accountable care organizations, and that is what they want to fix. Well it’s the patient, doggone it, that needs relief. Medicare Advantage and accountable care organizations are incurable simply because they are artificial constructs that are designed to control costs while protecting the industry, but that doesn’t work because they are based on market incentives, and players in the market will always work the system to satisfy their own interests; patients are only their tools.

Medicare has some serious deficiencies, and they need to be fixed, but not by MedPAC since they fail to make recommendations on the deficiencies that negatively impact patients. There is a plethora of literature that demonstrates that the single payer model of Medicare for All corrects most of the deficiencies in the health care financing system such that patients would have free choice of health care that is accessible, effective, efficient, equitable and affordable for each of us. Tens of millions do not have that now but could without increasing our national health expenditures over the current level.

If you are not convinced, read the 244 page MedPAC report to Congress to see where we are headed. Then read PNHP’s Physicians’ Proposal. Then report back.

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By Victor R. Fuchs, Ph.D.
JAMA, June 12, 2020

To simply return to the prepandemic health care system during a presidential election year would be a mistake. This is a time to think more boldly about the future of the US health care system. The health care system is dysfunctional for many individuals in the US; it is too costly, too unequal, and too uncertain in its eligibility and coverage, with an increasing number of uninsured. However, designing and implementing a better health care system will not be easy. In exploring the challenges and difficulties ahead, it is useful to distinguish between those that are primarily technical issues (although these are not exempt from politics) and those that are political obstacles to significant reform.

Technical Issues

The technical issues involve 2 main issues: how to raise the nearly $4 trillion each year to pay for US health care; and how to organize and deliver the care and compensate those who provide it.

An important goal of health care reform should be to replace the current byzantine system of premiums, taxes, tax exemptions, deductions, subsidies, and out-of-pocket payments with a much simpler system of financing health care. An equally important goal is to replace the current multiplicity of public and private health insurance programs with 1 universal program that covers everyone from birth to death. Because the US health care system is so large, it would probably be necessary to approach these goals in stages. It is important, however, to realize that the complexity of the current system is one of the main reasons it is so costly, with high administrative expenses.

A few countries find it more feasible to achieve universal coverage through compulsory health insurance administered by insurance companies under close regulation and supervision by the government. The intent and effect of such programs is similar to that achieved by tax-supported public insurance. For historical and political reasons, the US might prefer this approach in contrast to a so-called single-payer system. Regardless of approach, universal systems have proven to be the best way to ensure that everyone has access to care without bankrupting individuals or governments.

Most health policy experts agree that the prepandemic health care system was inefficient. However, there is no consensus as to what delivery system would be better for the US diversity of health plans. The competition among the plans will have several advantages if the plans follow a few general principles. First, the health plans should be private. Government-run health care would not work well for the US for its entire population. Over the past decade, Medicare has become increasingly privatized, with about 35% of its recipients enrolled in private insurance plans. Second, public insurance would pay for everyone to be enrolled in a health plan of their choice, with open enrollment every year for anyone who wants to change plans. Third, the plans would receive a risk-adjusted capitation fee to compensate plans for the differences in the expected use of enrolled populations.

Capitation reimbursement provides incentives to use resources efficiently, unlike fee-for-service reimbursement that provides incentives for overuse. This is not just a theoretical proposition. The Kaiser Permanente Health Plan has been paid per capita for more than 50 years and has seen its enrollment increase to 12 million patients, one-third more than in the Veterans Health Administration care system. Fourth, within that general framework, each health plan should be free to deploy resources as they deem best. Some plans might want to pay physicians a fixed salary; others might want to have productivity incentives for their physicians. Some plans might choose to deploy many nurse practitioners and physician assistants, others might not. Most plans would probably want to emphasize primary care, reserving specialists and subspecialists for patients who need their attention.

Physician-led health plans that receive risk-adjusted capitation payment are in the best position to allocate resources more efficiently and effectively according to judgments about benefits and costs.

Political Obstacles

Changes in the health care system have always been opposed by many. As Machiavelli observed, proposals for a new order face strong opposition from those who benefit from the old order. This group includes high-income patients who prefer a health care system that caters to their interests and values.

The cost of this system, more than $11 000 per person per year, is tolerable for those with high incomes, but oppressive to most individuals in the US and ruinous for many, leading to missed medicines and bankruptcy.

High-income individuals also prefer US health care research that emphasizes product improvement and ignores cost of care.

Opposition to change will also come from the manufacturers of drugs, devices, and equipment who have made large profits under the old system, and from some physician specialists who have made large incomes.

Most voters do not have high incomes, but another major obstacle is distrust of the government by many in the general population. That sentiment may still be true but may change as current events unfold.

Distrust of the government is difficult to dispel, but it is possible to do so as President Roosevelt proved with his New Deal reforms in the 1930s. Even though it has seemed that major reform of health care would only occur in the wake of a major war, a depression, or large-scale civil unrest that changed the political balance, it now appears that the COVID-19 pandemic may provide the dynamic for major political change. If that occurs, major health care reform will be more attainable.

https://jamanetwork.com…

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

For decades, Victor Fuchs has been telling us, “National health insurance will probably come to the United States after a major change in the political climate — the kind of change that often accompanies a war, a depression, or large-scale civil unrest.” He now says, “Even though it has seemed that major reform of health care would only occur in the wake of a major war, a depression, or large-scale civil unrest that changed the political balance, it now appears that the COVID-19 pandemic may provide the dynamic for major political change.”

In the past he has supported government vouchers to purchase private health plans. He apparently still supports competition of private health plans as in the Medicare Advantage program, though he does state, “an important goal is to replace the current multiplicity of public and private health insurance programs with 1 universal program that covers everyone from birth to death,” presumably considering traditional Medicare plus Medicare Advantage health plans to be “1 universal program.” He singles out Kaiser Permanente as an example of a private health plan – a delivery system that would be included in a single payer Medicare for All program anyway.

It looks like we are very close to agreement on the restructuring of the financing system for health care. And we do indeed have a major change in the political climate with the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic consequences. Though some are looking for a rapid end to the pandemic and a quick economic recovery, that is not going to happen. As the reality that we are in this for the long haul sinks in, the nation should be ready to move forward with single payer Medicare for All – a stable health care financing system that can withstand war, depression, large-scale civil unrest, or even a catastrophic pandemic.

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