F.T.C. Wary of Mergers by Hospitals

By Robert Pear
The New York Times, September 17, 2014

As hospitals merge and buy up physician practices, creating new behemoths, one federal agency is raising a lonely but powerful voice, suggesting that consumers may be victimized by the trend toward consolidation.

Hospitals often say they acquire other hospitals and physician groups so they can coordinate care, in keeping with the goals of the Affordable Care Act. But the agency, the Federal Trade Commission, says that mergers tend to reduce competition, and that doctors and hospitals can usually achieve the benefits of coordinated care without a full merger.

The commission is using a 100-year-old law, the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, to challenge some of the mergers and acquisitions, and it has had remarkable success in recent cases.

“Hospitals that face less competition charge substantially higher prices,” said Martin S. Gaynor, director of the F.T.C.’s bureau of economics, adding that the price increases could be “as high as 40 percent to 50 percent.”

Doctors and hospitals say they must collaborate to survive and thrive under the Affordable Care Act.

But Deborah L. Feinstein, director of the bureau of competition at the Federal Trade Commission, said the health care law did not repeal the antitrust laws.

Often, Ms. Feinstein said, when hospitals and doctors join forces, their goal is not just to control costs or improve care, but to “get increased leverage” in negotiations with health insurance companies and employers.

“They say they need better rates so they will have more money to invest in their facilities,” Ms. Feinstein said. “When you strip that down, it’s basically just saying, ‘We want a price increase.’ Even if the price increase is motivated by a desire to invest more in the business, that’s problematic. That incentive to invest may not be there if you don’t have competition as a spur to innovation — if you’re not worried about losing business to the hospital down the street.”

The F.T.C. has long argued that mergers can cause higher prices by reducing competition among hospitals in the same market. New research suggests that another dynamic, rarely considered by antitrust officials, can also lead to significant price increases.

The research shows that hospitals gain bargaining power when they are acquired and become part of a big hospital system that has no other presence in the local market.

“Acquisitions of hospitals by large national chains such as Hospital Corporation of America, Ascension Health or Tenet Healthcare may not increase hospital concentration in the affected local markets, but could nevertheless generate higher prices,” said Matthew S. Lewis, an associate professor of economics at Clemson University.

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

Integrating health care delivery services with the goal of improving the quality and price efficiency of health care services for the community at large is an admirable goal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The merger mania taking place is being marketed as a means of achieving that integration. Yet the monkey wrench in the model is the supposed dependency on market competition instead of government oversight as a means of providing higher quality at a lower cost.

Yet merging health care services with the claim that quality improves as costs go down is proving to be a fraud. For the last century we have had to enforce antitrust laws and regulations simply because market consolidation results in oligopolistic control and higher prices instead. We are now seeing this throughout our health care system as providers recognize the business opportunities of greater clout in rate negotiations made possible by anti-competitive consolidation. The FTC has challenged less than one percent of these deals, indicating the conflict within our government of supporting implementation of ACA as opposed to protecting the public from unfair antitrust activities.

The flaw is to be found in the ACA model of reform. Excessive power has been granted to private insurance intermediaries that negotiate in the private sector with the providers. The tool they cite repeatedly is competition. Yet not only do we have the seminal work of Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, we also have decades of experience that confirms that this fiction of a market has brought us an outrageously expensive system with only mediocre outcomes on average.

All other wealthy nations cover everyone at an average cost of half of what we spend per person. Their success is based on the role of relatively rigorous government regulation or direct management. Even if the FTC stepped up its antitrust functions, our private insurers would continue to use a wide variety of business practices that advance their own interests at our cost. The vested interests in the privately owned sectors of the health care delivery system would also continue to position themselves favorably.

If we had a single payer national health program with a not-for-profit health care delivery system, our stewards would be left with the task of trying to get the system to work best for the benefit of patients – all patients. Would that be so terrible?

Is All “Skin in the Game” Fair Game? The Problem With “Non-Preferred” Generics

By Gerry Oster, PhD, and A. Mark Fendrick, MD
AJMC.com, September 17, 2014

The new blockbuster drug sofosbuvir (Sovaldi) is offering hope to many patients with hepatitis C, but treatment is expensive and many insurers are demanding that patients shoulder a large portion of the cost. The demand that patients pay a larger share of their drug costs, however, is not limited to expensive new medicines. In fact, many patients are now facing substantially higher co-pays for various generic drugs that their insurers have designated “non-preferred,” often including those recommended as first-line treatment in evidence-based guidelines for hypertension, diabetes, epilepsy, schizophrenia, migraine headache, osteoporosis, Parkinson’s disease, and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). We are concerned about this relatively recent development.

For many years, most insurers had formularies that consisted of only 3 tiers: Tier 1 was for generic drugs (lowest co-pay), Tier 2 was for branded drugs that were designated “preferred” (higher co- pay), and Tier 3 was for “nonpreferred” branded drugs (highest co-pay). Generic drugs were automatically placed in Tier 1, thereby ensuring that patients had access to medically appropriate therapies at the lowest possible cost. In these 3-tier plans, all generic drugs were de facto “preferred.” Now, however, a number of insurers have split their all-generics tier into a bottom tier consisting of “preferred” generics, and a second tier consisting of “non-preferred” generics, paralleling the similar split that one typically finds with branded products. Co-pays for generic drugs in the “non-preferred” tier are characteristically much higher than those for drugs in the first tier.

To better understand coverage policies in plans with 2 tiers for generic drugs, we identified several such offerings, including both commercial plans and those under the Medicare Part D program, via an informal search of the Internet. For 6 such plans, we examined coverage policies for 10 widely used drugs—all generically available—that are recommended as first-line treatment in current evidence-based guidelines.

While 2 of the plans provide access on a “preferred” basis to all of the medicines we considered, 1 or more of the drugs are “non-preferred” in all of the remaining plans. Metformin, for example, is a “non-preferred” drug in 1 plan, despite being a first-line treatment for type 2 diabetes mellitus. Two plans have no “preferred” generic anticonvulsant drugs; 3 plans have no “preferred” generic antipsychotic medicines; levodopa is designated a “non-preferred” agent in 3 plans; 4 plans have no “preferred” generic triptans (for migraine headache); and all generic antiretrovirals are Tier 2 agents in 4 plans. When there are no “preferred” generics from which clinicians and patients with particular diseases can choose, it may be argued that the diseases themselves effectively are “non-preferred.”

It is sometimes argued that patients should have “skin in the game” to motivate them to become more prudent consumers. One must ask, however, what sort of consumer behavior is encouraged when all generic medicines for particular diseases are “non-preferred” and subject to higher co-pays. The answer is informed, we believe, by a 2007 JAMA study of cost sharing by researchers at RAND, which was based on a review of 132 published studies. The authors report that “(i)ncreased cost sharing is associated with lower rates of drug treatment, worse adherence among existing users, and more frequent discontinuation of therapy” and that “for certain conditions, the evidence clearly indicates that more cost sharing is associated with increased use of other medical services, such as hospitalizations and emergency department visits.

When insurers designate clinically important generic medicines “nonpreferred” and there are no therapeutically equivalent “preferred” alternatives from which to choose, it cannot be argued that patients are thereby motivated to become more prudent consumers. The existence of clinically sound therapeutic choices is a precondition for any meaningful effort intended to make patients put “skin in the game.” Without choice, such policies are simply punitive and run counter to established principles of formulary design and management.

http://www.ajmc.com/publications/issue/2014/2014-vol20-n9/Is-All-Skin-in-the-Game-Fair-Game-The-Problem-With-Non-Preferred-Generics

Charles Ornstein of ProPublica provides an excellent discussion of this in today’s New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/18/upshot/how-insurers-are-finding-ways-to-shift-costs-to-the-sick.html

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

Why are the insurers establishing tiers of generic drugs with different levels of cost sharing? Cost sharing does shift some of the responsibility of paying for care from the insurer to the patient, but this goes far beyond that.

Establishing tiers of drugs with different levels of cost sharing originally was to encourage patients to select generic drugs which were much less expensive for the insurer to cover. Unfortunately, with our let-the-market-work policies, drugs are being priced in the stratosphere. Even generics have seen skyrocketing price increases. You might think that this is why the private insurers have decided to place generics in tiers, but you would be missing their nefarious strategy.

What we are seeing is the placement of generic drugs used to treat serious chronic diseases into the non-preferred tier which then exposes the patient to greater cost sharing. The shopping behavior that the insurer is encouraging is to have patients with chronic disorders leave their plans and enroll in their competitors’ plans instead. Thus the tier of non-preferred generic drugs has been established to chase away patients who have “non-preferred” chronic diseases – non-preferred by the insurer, that is.

This really does demonstrate how much more evil the private insurers have become. They will continue to find new ways to swindle us. What is insane is that we continue to tolerate them when we know that there is a far better solution – a single payer national health program. Why is the nation not outraged?

Why the Geographic Variation in Health Care Spending Can’t Tell Us Much about the Efficiency or Quality of our Health Care System

By Louise Sheiner
Brookings Institution, September 2014

Abstract

This paper examines the geographic variation in Medicare and non-Medicare health spending and finds little support for the view that most of the variation is likely attributable to differences in practice styles. Instead, I find that socioeconomic factors that affect the need for medical care, as well as interactions between the Medicare system and other parts of the health system, can account, in an econometric sense, for most of the variation in Medicare health spending.

The paper also explores the econometric differences between controlling for health attributes at the state level (the method used in this paper) and controlling for them at the individual level (the approach used by the Dartmouth group.) I show that a state-level approach can explain more of the state-level variation associated with omitted health attributes than the individual-level approach, and argue that this econometric difference likely explains much of the difference between my results and those of the Dartmouth group.

More broadly, the paper shows that the geographic variation in health spending does not provide a useful way to examine the inefficiencies of our health system. States where Medicare spending is high are very different in multiple dimensions from states where Medicare spending is low, and thus it is difficult to isolate the effects of differences in health spending intensity from the effects of the differences in the underlying state characteristics. I show, for example, that previous findings about the relationships between health spending, the share of physicians who are general practitioners, and quality, are likely the result of omitted factors rather than the result of causal relationships.

I. Introduction

It is well known that Medicare spending per beneficiary varies widely across geographic areas. The conventional wisdom from the leaders in this research area, the Dartmouth group, is that little of this variation is accounted for by variation in income, prices, demographics, and health status, and, instead, most of the variation represents differences in “practice styles.” Further, the Dartmouth research suggests that the additional health spending of the high-spending areas does not improve the quality of health care, and, indeed, might even diminish it.

One of the implications of the Dartmouth work is that health care spending can be reduced without significant effects on health outcomes. For example, Sutherland, Fisher, and Skinner (2009) argue “Evidence regarding regional variations in spending and growth points to a more hopeful alternative: we should be able to reorganize and improve care to eliminate wasteful and unnecessary service.” This view was promoted by the Obama Administration as part of the effort to reform health care. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, then OMB-director Peter Orszag, referring to the Dartmouth work, noted “If we can move our nation toward the proven and successful practices adopted by lower-cost areas and hospitals, some economists believe health-care costs could be reduced by 30% — or about $700 billion a year — without compromising the quality of care.

The Dartmouth group has also argued that this geographic variation holds the key to reducing excess cost growth in health care. According to Fisher, Bynum, and Skinner (2009), “By learning from regions that have attained sustainable growth rates and building on successful models of delivery-system and payment system reform, we might… manage to “bend the cost curve.” ……. Reducing annual growth in per capita spending from 3.5% (the national average) to 2.4% (the rate in San Francisco) would leave Medicare with a healthy estimated balance of $758 billion, a cumulative savings of $1.42 trillion.”

In this paper, I reexamine the geographic variation in health spending at the state level and find little support for the Dartmouth views. I find that most of the geographic variation in Medicare spending is explainable, at least in an econometric sense, by differences in socioeconomic factors that affect the need for medical care and the resources available in the nonelderly population to finance it. Although it is not possible to rule out the Dartmouth view that the differences in spending reflect differences in practice styles, I show that there are other explanations for the variation in spending that seem to be better supported by the data. Furthermore, I show that the relationships between health spending (both Medicare and non-Medicare), physician composition, and quality are likely the result of omitted factors rather than the result of causal relationships.

More broadly, the paper shows that the geographic variation in health spending does not provide a useful way to examine the inefficiencies of our health system. States where Medicare spending is high are very different from states where Medicare spending is low, and thus it is difficult to isolate the effects of differences in health spending intensity from the effects of the differences in the underlying state characteristics. Insights into the relationship between health spending and outcomes are more likely to be provided by natural experiments such as that analyzed by Doyle (2007), who showed that among visitors to Florida who had heart attacks, outcomes were better at hospitals with higher spending, the true experiment run in Oregon in which a group of uninsured low-income adults was selected by lottery to be given the chance to apply for Medicaid (Finkelstein et al, 2011), or the recent paper by Finkelstein et al which focuses on Medicare beneficiaries who move (Finkelstein, 2013).

It is important to note at the outset that nothing in this paper suggests that improvements in our health system are unattainable. Rather, the paper suggests that comparisons of spending between high cost states and low costs states are unlikely to provide a measure of how much we can hope to gain by efforts to improve health system efficiency.

The paper is organized as follows. I first give a brief overview of the literature on geographic variation. Then I present the basic results from the Medicare regressions, and show that the cross-state variation in average Medicare spending is well explained by differences in population characteristics across states. I compare my results to those of the Dartmouth group and suggest a number of reasons why my results differ. I show that, econometrically, there is a difference between controlling for attributes at the individual level (the Dartmouth approach) and controlling for them at the state level (the approach used here), and that this difference is likely to be empirically important when it comes to health care. I argue that my state-level approach better controls for the variation in health and other socioeconomic variables that affect health demand. In addition, to the extent that there are area differences in practice styles, I show that these too likely reflect systemic differences across states, and thus would likely be difficult to alter.

I then explore the relationships between Medicare and non-Medicare spending across the states, and show that the two appear to be somewhat negatively correlated. This correlation is quite important in thinking about the relationship between provider workforce characteristics, quality, and health spending. In particular, I show that taking into consideration some of the demographics and health insurance variables by state changes the conclusions one gets from previous studies. Finally, I show that the growth rates of Medicare spending are negatively related to the level of health spending—that is, low spending states tend to have higher growth rates than high-spending states. The conclusion assesses the implications of this work for Medicare policy.

VIII. Conclusions

The evidence presented in this paper shows that most of the variation in Medicare spending across states is attributable to factors that affect health and health behaviors, rather than to random variation in practice styles. Isolating the exact channels through which differences in health affect Medicare spending is difficult, however, because both the need for health spending and provider practice styles will likely be affected by variations in population health and variables that are correlated with it.

But the paper has several findings that suggest that the variation in Medicare spending does not represent wasteful spending that could be easily eliminated without significant effects on the health system. First, population characteristics have more explanatory power for Medicare spending than measures of social capital, indicating that the variation in patient characteristics is more important than variation in provider characteristics. Second, health measures are significantly more correlated at the state level than at the individual level, making it likely that state level regressions do a better job of controlling for unobserved variation in population health. Third, there does not seem to be a significant relationship between the use of “preference- sensitive procedures” and the level Medicare spending. Fourth, states with high levels of Medicare spending tend to have lower levels of non-Medicare spending. Providers in these states may face greater financial difficulties, and may “volume shift” to Medicare patients in order to cover costs.

The paper also shows that conclusions about the relationships between health spending, physician composition, and quality are sensitive to the inclusion of variables like the share of the population uninsured, black, or diabetic. What this sensitivity demonstrates is the difficulty of using the geographic variation in spending for hypothesis testing. It is not surprising that states in the South spend more on Medicare and have worse outcomes. These states perform significantly worse in numerous areas, including high school graduation rates, test scores, unemployment, violent crime, and teenage pregnancy. There are many ways that such differences can affect health utilization and outcomes, including differences in underlying health, social supports and social stressors, patient self-care and advocacy, ease of access to services, capabilities of hospital and physician nurses and technicians, and cultural differences in attitudes toward care. A comparison of health spending in Mississippi with health spending in Minnesota is not likely to provide a useful metric of the “inefficiencies” of the health system in isolation; rather, the difference in spending likely mirrors broader societal problems unrelated to the health system per se.

Finally, the evidence also suggests that low-cost states are not low-growth states. Thus, the geographic variation in Medicare spending is probably not the key to finding ways to slow spending growth while continuing to improve quality over time.

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/projects/bpea/fall%202014/fall2014bpea_sheiner.pdf

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

Did this paper really say what it seems like it said? Wow! It is important because it seems to be a highly credible challenge to the principle that much of the waste in health care spending is due to variation in practice styles, as allegedly demonstrated by the Dartmouth group.

According to this Brookings paper by Louise Sheiner, “The evidence presented in this paper shows that most of the variation in Medicare spending across states is attributable to factors that affect health and health behaviors, rather than to random variation in practice styles.” Further, “But the paper has several findings that suggest that the variation in Medicare spending does not represent wasteful spending that could be easily eliminated without significant effects on the health system.”

Double wow! This suggests that the efforts of reducing waste through accountable care organizations (ACO) that are designed based on the Dartmouth studies of waste are mostly for naught. It also explains why to date the experiments with ACO models have had very little impact on either efficiency or quality.

Of particular concern is the finding that areas in the South with high Medicare spending have worse outcomes, and they also “perform significantly worse in numerous areas, including high school graduation rates, test scores, unemployment, violent crime, and teenage pregnancy.” You cannot help but think that more resources need to be directed toward these societal ills. It is not just health care that needs our attention.

For us, the important take-home point of this paper is that we should turn our attention away from puff programs such as ACOs that hold little promise of delivering on higher quality and lower costs, and turn instead to policies that have been proven in other nations to be effective. Of course we’re referring to a single payer national health program. We already know that it works.

Footing bill for insurers’ pay methods shouldn’t fall on doctors

AMA Wire, September 12, 2014

An increasingly common payment method among health insurers offers these companies significant financial rewards while sticking physicians with all the associated fees and extra work. But physicians are fighting back as the AMA and other health care associations take the issue to the federal government.

Many insurers are choosing to use virtual credit cards for claims payments to physicians, instead of sending paper checks or paying via the electronic funds transfer (EFT) standard transaction. When paying via virtual credit card, insurers send single-use credit card payment information and instructions to physicians via mail, fax or email. The physician’s office staff then processes the payment as they would a patient’s credit card.

For each of these payments, physicians are charged fees that typically amount to 3-5 percent of the total payment, the AMA explained in recent testimony (log in) to the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, an advisory board to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

That adds up. If a physician contractually is owed $5,000, for instance, he or she could have to shell out up to $250 in fees.

In a letter (log in) sent last week to HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell, the AMA and three other leading organizations called on the agency to prohibit insurers from forcing physicians to accept this payment method.

http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/ama-wire/ama-wire/post/footing-bill-insurers-pay-methods-shouldnt-fall-doctors

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Letter , August 25, 2014

To:  The Honorable Sylvia Mathews Burwell, Secretary, Department of Health and Human Services

We, the undersigned organizations, are writing to you to convey our views and recommendations in response to recommendations made to you by the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS) on May 15, 2014.

At issue is a type of non-standard electronic funds transfer (EFT) transaction known as a “virtual card” payment. In a virtual card payment, a health plan or its vendor sends a single-use credit card number to a provider by mail, fax or email. This is known as a virtual card because a physical card is never created or presented to the provider. The provider must then manually enter the virtual card number into its Point-of-Sale (POS) processing terminal, and the card processing network provides an authorization for the payment. The provider then receives funds in the same way as for other card payments – via an Automated Clearing House (ACH) funds transfer from the POS merchant acquiring vendor to the provider’s bank account. For these virtual card payment authorizations, providers pay interchange fees of approximately 3 percent of the value of the payment (though anecdotally some providers have reported paying as much as 5 percent). Providers are unexpectedly losing income through these card fees, which essentially reduce the contracted fee rate that has been negotiated with the health plan for a particular service or services. Many providers are understandably opposed to incurring these fees, especially when they did not choose to use this payment method and when they are faced with a manual, burdensome opt-out process that further delays payment. In many cases, decision- makers in the provider’s office only become aware of the incurred fees after receiving monthly statements from credit card merchants, as the virtual cards are processed by billing office staff without any strategic decision in the practice to accept this form of payment.

American Hospital Association (AHA)
American Medical Association (AMA)
Medical Group Management Association (MGMA)
NACHA, The Electronic Payments Association

(Requires login): https://download.ama-assn.org/resources/doc/psa/x-pub/joint-virtual-card-letter-hhs.pdf

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

It’s in their blood. Private insurers will always find a way to cheat others under the guise of good business practices. Now private insurers are using the scam of “virtual credit cards” in order to keep 3 to 5 percent of agreed upon payments made to physicians under their network contracts, while loading more administrative work onto the backs of the physicians’ staff members.

Thieves. That’s all they are. Thieves.

Addendum:

Some readers commented that the insurers do not receive the transaction fees.

It is true that the insurers do not get the full 3-5% processing fee, but, like reward credit cards, the insurers receive a rebate of up to 1.75% cash.

Private insurers are infamous for their administrative waste. With these virtual credit cards, the insurers are dumping on the providers the administrative fees associated with these virtual cards, plus keeping the card rebates. So the insurers are costing the providers 3-5% even though they are pocketing only a portion. When you think about it, the insurers are receiving roughly a 35 percent return on the administrative investment made by the physicians, and that return is being paid by the physicians. It’s not even the insurers’ own money!