How the GOP wants to fix health care

By Rep. Tom Price (Confirmed as HHS Secretary at 2:00 a.m. today)
Politico, July 30, 2009

I can attest that nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government’s intrusion into medicine through Medicare.

http://www.politico.com…

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Man your stations.

3-in-10 struggling to maintain current financial situation

Monmouth University Polling Institute, February 7, 2017

Paying for health care has emerged as the top concern of American families, according to the latest national Monmouth University Poll. Two years ago this concern was clustered with job security and other household bills as causing the most anxiety for American households.

Currently, 1-in-4 Americans (25%) report that the cost of health care is the biggest concern facing their family right now. Two years ago, 15% reported this as their family’s primary concern. Anxiety about meeting health care costs now outpaces job and unemployment worries (14%) as well as concerns about paying everyday household bills (12%). Health care is the top concern of American families regardless of income level or partisan identity. A variety of other concerns register in the single digits, such as school costs (4%) and taxes (4%).

“The top three concerns were clustered together just two years ago. Now, health care has jumped to the top of the list as Americans grapple with balancing their household budgets,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute in West Long Branch, New Jersey. “It’s also worth noting that issues that have been dominating the news, such as immigration and national security, rank very low on the list of items that keep Americans up at night.”

19. Turning to issues closer to home, what is the biggest concern facing your family right now? [LIST WAS NOT READ]

25% – Health care costs

14% – Job security, unemployment

12% – Everyday bills, groceries, etc.

4% – College tuition, school costs

4% – Taxes

3% – Housing, mortgage, rent

3% – Social Security, seniors

3% – Family illness, health

3% – The economy

3% – Safety, crime

3% – Immigration

3% – Civil rights

2% – Retirement saving

2% – Terrorism, national security

1% – Quality of government

1% – Education policy

1% – Trump as president

1% – Climate change, environment

2% – Other

10% – Don’t know/No answer

https://www.monmouth.edu…

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Without being given a list of choices, when asked “what is the biggest concern facing your family right now,” the most common response was “health care costs” (25%). That places this concern well in front of job security (14%) and household bills (12%) with which it was tied two years ago. Although the improvement in the economy has reduced other concerns, health care has become the top concern of American families.

Although the Affordable Care Act did bring improvements, concerns have not been allayed. As the Republicans fumble around with their rhetoric of “replace,” “repair,” and “access,” it becomes ever more clear that they do not have a program that will reduce the health cost burden on most American families. In fact, many of the policies they support will increase the financial burden on individuals and families.

House Speaker Paul Ryan says that they will have a proposal in place by the end of next month. We know that the policies under consideration will not provide individuals with relief from the high costs of health care.

Since health costs are the number one concern of Americans, it is imperative that we intensify our message that the current financing system, even with the Republican tweaks, will leave the public vulnerable to high health care costs. But we have an answer! A well designed single payer national health program – an improved Medicare for all – will ensure that everyone has access to all essential health care services without being burdened by unaffordable premiums or out-of-pocket costs.

For those who would benefit from an elevator speech:  We can pay for it by reducing the profound administrative waste of our fragmented, multi-payer system (the waste of private insurers and the burden they place on the system); we can each afford it by funding the system through equitable tax policies (contributing based on ability to pay), and we can eliminate the perversities of high deductibles and narrow provider networks, eliminating surprise bills while giving us free choices of our health care professionals and hospitals.

Let’s get the word out ASAP. Congress is getting ready to move!

I’ve put my family on a health insurance experiment. It’s been a challenge

By Ashish Jha
STAT, February 6, 2017

Enrollment in high-deductible health insurance plans has exploded over the past five years. I’m learning the hard way how these plans do — and do not — work.

About one-third of American workers covered by health insurance are now in high-deductible health plans, in which the policy holder pays a substantial portion of the cost of health care services out of pocket before insurance coverage kicks in. Many economists and health policy experts believe that these plans are a promising way to reduce health care spending.

So when a high-deductible plan became available through my employer, Harvard University, a couple years ago, I decided to enroll my family in it. If this is going to be a big national experiment, I thought that I, as a physician and a health policy scholar, ought to know what it’s like to live with this kind of health insurance. Debra, my wife, was not convinced.

My family is now in its second year under a high-deductible plan. That means we are responsible for paying the first $6,000 of our health expenses for the year, for everything from a doctor visit for a flu shot to surgery.

It has been an educational enterprise.

Our experiment is showing me again and again that it’s extremely hard to be a health care consumer in Massachusetts — just as I’m sure it is in other states. Want to know how much a particular type of health care costs, like a visit to a specialist or getting a minor surgery? Good luck figuring it out. My insurance company’s online tool was hard to use and, even as a physician, I could almost never guess what sets of services a visit to the doctor might generate.

The second lesson was that being a health care consumer is stressful, at least the way the system is currently set up. Here’s an example. Our son had surgery last year. We got a call saying it was time for his one-year follow-up. Deb stressed for nearly two months over whether or not to make the appointment. Of course she wants our son to get the care he needs, but did he truly need this follow-up? That’s both the promise and the peril of high-deductible plans — they are supposed to make you think twice about consuming health care.

She eventually went with our son for his one-year follow-up — they spent two minutes with the surgeon — and paid $465 for the visit. I’m not sure my son, or my spouse, felt any better afterward. There were many examples like this sprinkled throughout the year, but the most profound one was the one I experienced for myself.

I have supraventricular tachycardia, a common heart rhythm problem. When it hits, my heart races at about 180 beats per minute. It comes on a couple of times a year, lasts a few minutes, and usually isn’t a big deal. But one morning I woke up with my heart racing. After 30 minutes, I wondered if I should go to the emergency department, knowing that I’d probably get stuck with a multi-thousand-dollar bill. So I kept waiting. After an hour, during which my heart kept beating furiously, my chest started to hurt. I knew what that meant — I was at risk of having a heart attack.

Deb asked me what I would tell a patient in this situation. That was easy: I’d tell him or her to call 911. But I kept waiting. Finally, about 15 minutes later, the abnormal rhythm finally broke and I felt my heart calm down. I was lucky — I had rolled the dice and things had worked out.

If we continue with high-deductible health plans the way they exist today, more and more people will experience what my family did — the stress of having to make medical decisions with little information and few choices. At best, we’ll have a health care system that might save a little money — but at the risk of harming the health of our citizens.

Ashish Jha, MD, is an internist at the VA Boston Healthcare System, and a professor of health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

https://www.statnews.com…

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

There are two potential adverse consequences of requiring high deductibles in health insurance plans. Developing a serious medical problem can expose the individual to financial hardship. Even more serious is that the potential for financial exposure can cause an individual to make a terribly consequential decision in electing to forgo medical care because of the deductible.

Some say that we merely need to provide the patients with adequate information and then patients can make their own informed decisions. That is a fundamental principle in consumer-driven health care. But the rhetoric does not match the real world.

In this instance, a noted physician and professor of health policy, Ashish Jha, made a decision to protect his personal finances even though that decision could have cost him his life! As an optimally informed patient-consumer, he made the wrong decision, even though fortunately he escaped the worst consequences.

Several other nations that cover everyone at a cost much lower than ours are able to provide care with first dollar coverage – no need to use high deductibles in a misguided effort to contain spending. Surely the United States could do the same.

Projected Coding Intensity In Medicare Advantage Could Increase Medicare Spending By $200 Billion Over Ten Years

By Richard Kronick
Health Affairs, February 2017

Abstract

Over the past decade, the average risk score for Medicare Advantage (MA) enrollees has risen steadily relative to that for fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries, by approximately 1.5 percent per year. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) uses patient demographic and diagnostic information to calculate a risk score for each beneficiary, and these risk scores are used to determine payment to MA plans. The increase in relative MA risk scores is largely the result of successful efforts by MA plans to identify additional diagnoses, also known as coding intensity, and not of changes in enrollees’ true health. In this article I estimate the effects of coding intensity on Medicare spending over the next decade. Under the moderately conservative assumption that coding intensity will decelerate, Medicare expenditures are expected to increase by approximately $200 billion. CMS has implemented a variety of strategies since 2010 that lessened the impact of coding intensity on Medicare spending; it has a variety of policy responses at its disposal to mitigate the impact going forward. The problem could be largely solved if CMS adjusted for coding intensity using the principle that MA beneficiaries are no healthier and no sicker than demographically similar fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries, returning to the budget-neutrality approach that was introduced in 2004 and later abandoned.

From the Introduction

In the three decades that Medicare has been contracting with health maintenance organizations and other health plans, figuring out how to pay the plans accurately and fairly has posed a persistent challenge. Rapid growth in enrollment in Medicare Advantage (MA) plans has raised the stakes involved in getting the answer right: Over 30 percent of Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in Medicare Advantage and account for an estimated $200 billion in Medicare payments in 2017, or approximately 1 percent of the gross domestic product.

House Speaker Paul Ryan’s proposal to convert Medicare into a premium support system raises the stakes even further. In such a system, beneficiaries might be required to pay a larger premium for traditional Medicare than for Medicare Advantage. It is critically important that any premium differential between traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage under premium support reflect differences in efficiency, quality, and covered benefits, and not differences in risk selection or coding practices.

The inclusion of diagnoses in the payment system creates strong incentives for MA plans to report as many diagnoses as they can legitimately support—incentives that are not present in traditional Medicare. As a result, the average risk score for MA enrollees has increased by approximately 1.5 percent per year more than the average risk score of fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare beneficiaries over the past decade, with little indication that the relative morbidity of MA enrollees has actually increased. If this remarkably consistent rate of increase in relative Medicare Advantage risk continues over the next decade, Medicare payment will increase dramatically.

Despite the attention given to coding intensity by CMS and Congress over the past decade, unless there is a further policy response, Medicare will substantially overpay MA plans over the coming decade—likely to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

From the Discussion

Political And Technical Obstacles

The political obstacles to a robust solution are formidable. Aggressive action to mitigate the effects of coding intensity would raise the ire of the Medicare Advantage industry and might well engender a lobbying effort involving the spectacle of buses circling the Capitol, with multitudes of MA enrollees imploring members of Congress to protect their benefits. The Medicare Advantage industry and enrollees would be angered by the prospect that aggressive response to coding intensity would increase premiums or reduce supplemental benefits enabled by the rebates that plans receive for bidding below their benchmarks.

In addition, aggressive action to mitigate the effects of coding intensity might raise concern among some policy makers about the stability and growth of the Medicare Advantage program.

The technical obstacle is determining how to accurately measure coding intensity. As discussed more fully in the Appendix, various reasonable approaches exist to measure the effects of coding intensity.

Budget-Neutrality

As originally conceived, the budget-neutrality adjustment was not designed as an adjustment for coding intensity, but it could serve that purpose well moving forward. It rests on a simple principle: namely, that MA enrollees are no healthier and no sicker than demographically similar FFS Medicare beneficiaries. If one accepts that principle, then it follows that aggregate payments to MA plans should be equal to the amount that would have been paid using demographic risk adjustment. As shown in this article, if CMS were to calculate the coding intensity adjustment using this principle, payments to MA plans would be approximately $200 billion less over the next decade than if the coding intensity adjustment remained at the statutory minimum of 5.91 percent.

Although there is evidence that the introduction of diagnostic risk adjustment using diagnoses from ambulatory care encounters in 2004 reduced favorable selection into MA plans, analyses by Joseph Newhouse and colleagues show that favorable risk selection into Medicare Advantage likely remains to some degree. More recent evidence provided by Pete Welch and me, and extended in Exhibit A-2 of the Appendix to this article, also suggests that MA enrollees are no sicker, and may well be healthier, than demographically similar FFS Medicare beneficiaries. Thus, the budget-neutrality method of calculating the coding intensity adjustment will result in payments to Medicare Advantage that are at least fair, if perhaps still slightly too generous.

Conclusion

The analysis presented in this article cannot solve the political problem of creating support for a robust response to the problems created by differential coding in Medicare Advantage. I hope, however, that this work will create the foundation for a solution to the technical problem by fostering a discussion of how best to measure and adjust for differential coding between Medicare Advantage and fee-for-service Medicare. Solving this problem is an important prerequisite to the establishment of a stable and equitable future for the current Medicare Advantage program, and even more important if Congress were to convert Medicare into a premium support system.

http://content.healthaffairs.org…

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Some long-time readers of these messages may be bored by yet another article confirming that the private Medicare Advantage plans have been successful in being paid significantly more than we are spending for comparable patients in the traditional fee-for-service Medicare program, but it is crucial to understand that this is a major part of the strategy to privatize the Medicare program, and we taxpayers are being cheated as they pull off their scheme.

This year we will see intensified efforts to convert to a premium support program (vouchers) which will enrich private insurers as costs are transferred onto the backs of Medicare beneficiaries, with the goal of privatizing the entire Medicare program. Insurers win, patients lose, and the libertarian ideologues snicker in the background.

There are two methods by which the private insurers are overpaid. They engage in favorable selection – using devious methods to enroll healthier patients – thus spending less than they would if their enrollees were of average health. They also have gamed risk adjustment – qualifying for extra payments by submitting claims indicating that their enrollees are sicker than they actually are.

About one-third of these extra payments are used to enhance benefits, thus enticing seniors to enroll in their plans instead of the traditional Medicare program. You can imagine how attractive lower deductibles could be to individuals who just turned 65 and are used to dealing with private plans. By marketing heavily to them they further improve their favorable selection since those just 65 years old are the healthiest and least expensive members of the Medicare population.

And that other two-thirds of the extra payments? They keep that to help pay for their high administrative costs that characterize the unique waste in the U.S. health care financing system.

But why should Medicare Advantage patients receive more benefits than those remaining in the traditional program? If the same extra payments were used to reduce deductibles and coinsurance in the traditional program then there would be no reason to select the private plans, especially since there are no network restrictions such as those instituted by the private plans. More choice, at no extra cost.

You say you don’t want to increase taxes to pay for better benefits in the traditional Medicare program? Then, for the sake of fairness, at least decrease the overpayments to the private Medicare Advantage plans to the same level that we are paying for the traditional program. Of course, because of their administrative excesses, they could never compete, and they would just go away (just as they were doing under the Medicare + Choice program that was discontinued when the insurers proved that it was impossible for them to provide higher quality at a lower cost).

The study author, Richard Kronick, suggests that we switch to a budget neutrality method of correcting the overpayments. That might reduce the problem of differential coding for risk adjustment, but we could still face the deceptive, opaque methods the insurers use to gain favorable selection.

Regular readers know what the solution is. Throw out the private insurers, improve the traditional Medicare program, and then use it to cover everyone – greater value while ensuring health care access for all.

How Would Republican Plans for Medicaid Block Grants Actually Work?

By Aaron E. Carroll
The New York Times, February 6, 2017

There are only so many ways to cut Medicaid spending.

You can reduce the number of people covered. You can reduce the benefit coverage. You can also pay less for those benefits and get doctors and hospitals to accept less in reimbursement. Or you can ask beneficiaries to pay more.

None of those are attractive options, which is why Medicaid reform is so hard. Medicaid already reimburses providers at lower rates than other insurance programs. How do you reduce the number of beneficiaries when the vast majority of people covered are poor children, poor pregnant women, the disabled, and poor older people? Which of those would you cut?

Reducing benefit coverage has always been difficult because most of the spending has been on the disabled and poor older people, who need a lot of care. Beneficiaries don’t have much disposable income, so asking them to pick up more of the bill is almost impossible.

That doesn’t mean that states haven’t tried. As I’ve discussed in past columns, a number are attempting to increase cost sharing. But this isn’t really a solution because it doesn’t change overall spending much at all.

The fiscal magic behind a block-grants approach is that the federal government can then set how quickly the amount they’re responsible for will increase over time, regardless of how quickly medical spending grows. If a gap develops between how much a state needs to spend, and how much the block grant provides, it’s up to the state to make up the difference.

A recent New England Journal of Medicine article provides some perspective on how this might work by looking at what happened before Medicaid was created in 1965. Care for the poor in the 1950s was done through direct reimbursements to providers. It was calculated on a per-capita basis — the average cash and medical needs of those the programs covered. Those amounts were capped, based on age and demographics. This is quite similar to how many Republican proposals might function.

When these capped amounts weren’t enough to pay for the programs, states had to make cuts. They began to restrict who would be covered, what would be covered and how much care beneficiaries could use. Some states refused to cover children at all. Others didn’t cover doctors’ visits or drugs.

There’s no magic in how Congress reduces spending under a block grant mechanism. It just says it will do so, and leaves the hard decisions to others.

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NYT Reader Comment:

By Don McCanne,  M.D.
San Juan Capistrano, CA

Why should Medicaid be a separate program for low-income individuals? Or Medicare for the elderly and those with long-term disabilities? Or a multitude of private plans based merely on employment status? Or, as the Affordable Care Act attempted to address, having to turn to the highly dysfunctional individual insurance market by default?

The most popular of these alternatives is Medicare. Why don’t we simply improve Medicare and then provide it for everyone? As a welfare program representing individuals with a weak political voice, Medicaid is vulnerable to budget hawks. If we had one program representing all of us, politicians would be motivated to protect the program rather than hacking it with a blunt cleaver.

https://www.nytimes.com…