Health system woes, or whose benefit should we be focusing on anyway?

It’s not easy to be a big healthcare system these days, what with all the new rules and incentives for spending less money and providing less unnecessary care. Medicare is leading this charge, with a variety of efforts, mostly recently contained in the 2015 Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, fondly known as MACRA. This law extends previous efforts by Medicare to encourage consolidation and “shared savings” (spend less and you get to keep some) through the creation of “alternative payment models” (APMs), most of which emphasize increasing prospective payment (paying in advance for a basket of services to be delivered to a population) rather than fee-for-service (paying for each service provided).

In some ways, and particularly in some places, such large health systems are well-positioned for these changes; because they are big and provide the whole range of healthcare services (or most of it), and because many of them employ physicians, they should be able to take advantage of the efficiencies of scale, as well as understand their comprehensive costs. Many of them are; Kaiser, especially on the West Coast, and other early-adopters of this comprehensive model. Other payers are following Medicare’s lead, such as Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Massachusetts.

Still, it’s hard to change your business model. When your health system has been designed for decades to maximize income from fee-for-service by hiring lots of specialists who provide services (often procedures) that bring in a lot of money and supplying them with the expensive facilities and equipment to do them, it is scary to think that this entire investment could move from being a profit center to a cost center, where each of these procedures just chips off money already received in capitation rather than generating new revenue. Plus APMs create incentives to spend less overall, and you have spent decades gearing up to spend more – with the expectation and assumption that reimbursement would more than cover this investment.

And if you are not on a coast, but in the part of the country where such changes are happening more slowly, and in fact are mostly still in the future and you’re still making money the old way, it is a very scary and risky proposition to change your business model completely. The analogy of when it is time to put your second foot in a canoe is an apt one. The dock is a stable place to be, comfortable and familiar, but the canoe can take you off to new, and maybe wonderful, places. But there is only a limited amount of time that you can keep one foot on the dock and one in the canoe before the canoe moves off and you end up falling in the lake.

One of the big concerns confronting such health systems is the degree to which they should invest in expanding primary care capacity. The argument for doing so, put forward by most consultants and experts, is that it ensures a patient base loyal to their system and referring in to their hospital(s) and specialists and providing a more comprehensive ability to manage the spectrum of care. The other option is to “double down” and be providers of only high-end, high-cost (and hopefully high-profit) care, with the assumption that the community’s primary and secondary care providers will see you as a beacon for their complex problems and refer their patients to you. This latter position is especially popular among academic medical centers, hospitals tied to a medical school and a faculty practice group, and is much closer to the advice given by the University Health Consortium, the organization of such hospitals.

Along with this is the question of how income might be distributed. Most of the incentives in MACRA and prospective payment are for primary care; in addition to direct reimbursements for primary care providers, the shared savings come from a higher percent of conditions being managed by primary care and not subspecialists, fewer hospitalizations resulting from greater continuity of care, and fewer referrals for imaging (x-rays and the like) of questionable necessity but easy availability (because the capacity for doing them has been overbuilt). Kocher and Chigurupati discuss these issues in their July 14 piece in the New England Journal of Medicine, “The Coming Battle over Shared Savings — Primary Care: Physicians versus Specialists”.[1]The main point of the piece is how specialty physicians will respond to their incomes decreasing – they suggest the options are defensive (fight it and keep doing what they are doing) or offensive (sell themselves as more able to contain costs especially for certain disease conditions). Of course, what works for some specialists may harm others; if, say, a pulmonologist caring for chronic obstructive lung disease is very efficient and their patients need less imaging and fewer admissions, it can hurt others.

The average American is not going to have great sympathy for loss of income for such specialists. The authors cite the mean income for primary care doctors as $195,000, about 4 times the average US household income, and average for specialists $284,000, significantly more but deceptive in that many specialist make 2, 3, or more times that. Thus a $35,000 reduction in income, which is what the authors use in their example, is likely to mostly concern these doctors. The authors also note that primary care physicians “…account directly for a small percentage of health care costs. Yet they substantially influence the total cost of care through referrals and directing of their patients’ subsequent care.” They are, or could be, cost effective, provided that there is not pressure from the system to increase referrals – something that has usually been the norm, and even touted by primary care physician groups who talk about “downstream revenue” generated.

Of course, nowhere in these discussions is the question of what is best for the health of the American people. Implicitly, MACRA and the ACA before it (with its creation of accountable care organizations or ACOs), are intended to increase both access to care and its quality (two legs of the “triple aim”), but arguably have been put forward by both the federal government (Medicare) and adopted by other insurers to achieve the third leg – lower cost. And for insurers, including Medicare, the concern is lower cost to them. The issues addressed heretofore in this piece and by Kocher and Chigurupati and by consultants such as the Advisory Board and organizations like UHS, are how healthcare providers (healthcare systems, academic and otherwise, physicians and other individual providers) can most effectively respond to keep from losing money, from having the cost savings for insurers come at a big cost to them.

The health of the people should be the measure. And it needs to be the health of all the people, the poorest and sickest and most vulnerable and most easily left off, not just the high-yield, high-profit generally healthy, well-insured person who needs a single procedure and has no complicating conditions. Indirect incentives that seek to modify behavior by not demanding that all necessary health needs be provided to all people and no unnecessary care be provided to anyone are all bound to fail. Societies are, or should be judged, not by how they care for their most privileged but by how they care for their most needy (see the FDR epigram at the top right of this page).

And nowhere is this more true than when it comes to the people’s health.

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[1] Kocher R, Chigurupati A, The Coming Battle over Shared Savings — Primary Care Physicians versus Specialists, NEJM 375(2):104-106, July 14, 2016

Good enough for government work: Quality, Cost, and Gaming the System (Part 4 of 4)

This is the fourth and final part of the 23rd Charles Odegaard Lecture, "Good enough for government work:Quality, cost and gaming the system. I will put the entire talk up as an attachment soon.

Is this really true? Aren’t some of our costs “our fault”, or at least “their fault”, that is other people? What about those folks who are “gaming the system”, by holding out on buying insurance until they get sick? Aren’t they driving up costs? Insurers like Aetna and Anthem make the accusation that people are misusing Special Enrollment Periods (SEPs) for this purpose. This is debunked by the evidence, cited by Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times, but even if they were, they’re poor people trying to get by! Wondering if they can put off buying health insurance so that they can pay the rent! Who is really in a position to develop and implement strategies to “game the system”? 

Unsurprisingly, as Hiltzik also reports, it is the insurance companies (as well as big health system providers) who are masters of these strategies. Besides, if we have concern about “buying to use” behavior, the best answer is to get rid of the jumble of insurance companies and enrollment periods and have one national health insurance plan that has, in the words of the recently deceased Quentin Young, “everybody in, nobody out”.

The most amazing thing about all of this, the way in which the system is gamed, is the way it transfers public money intended to provide healthcare for people into private pockets far in excess of the cost of providing that care. Himmelstein and Woolhandler provide us with data that shows that we already pay for a national health system, with over 50% of “health” costs being borne by government, far over 60% if we count the loss of revenue from employer contributions to insurance being tax deductible, but we still don’t come close to covering everyone, because our system is so inefficient, and so much boodle is being raked off.

Nowadays, when we hear the phrase “good enough for government work”, we tend to think of something that is poor quality, or only just meets the minimum standards set by government. The Urban Dictionary defines the phrase as “Probably not the best, but what the hell, at least we got the job done to minimally acceptable standards.” And, yet, when this phrase first came about it was a compliment; it meant that the government set minimum standards of quality that had to be met, and if you had someone (say a contractor) doing work that was “good enough for the government” it meant that it met those standards of quality, that they weren’t ripping you off by doing shoddy work. What we have now is our publicly-funded health system being cannibalized by profiteers, and enabled by a government that often seems to care more about cost than quality.

Charles Odegaard, the medieval historian and former University of Washington president after whom this lectureship is named was, and I quote from the Coastal Research website, “an impassioned proponent of the idea that every school within a university should be engaged in the advancement of society in the communities and regions that surrounded it. As a result of Dr Odegaard’s leadership, UW became a leader in the decentralization of medical education, including the unprecedented commitment to training physicians from and in the surrounding states of Alaska, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.” [1]

There are great positives to decentralization, whether for education of doctors or for administration of social programs. It can decrease the cost of large, unresponsive central bureaucracies, and put control in local areas that are more knowledgeable about and responsive to the needs of their populations. There are, also, risks. Sometimes control at the local level is more about maintaining the power of one sector of the community at the expense of others; one just has to look at localities and states in the South in the Civil Rights era defying integration (or, perhaps, many states and localities more recently). More to the point of this talk, there is the risk that smaller, more decentralized activities can be more easily underfunded. Think about the deinstitutionalization of people with severe and persistent mental illness toward the end of the 20^thcentury. When I was in medical school, I was taught that 1 in 3 hospital beds was occupied by someone with schizophrenia. That is certainly not true today, because of deinstitutionalization. And so we do not have the horror of people with mental illness warehoused in enormous facilities, but we also do not have anywhere near the degree of community-based mental health services that would allow them to live successfully in the community. We have people with mental illness living on heating grates and under bridges and, according to a June 2015 article by Matt Ford in The Atlantic, our nation’s largest mental hospital is a jail (absolutely believable to anyone who has ever worked in one).[2]. It is only ok to decentralize when we can assure that necessary programs will be maintained and will be well funded. We have long since privatized the health care in most prisons, and there is a (to me) disturbing movement to privatizing prisons altogether. Cost, again, trumps quality. Especially, of course, if the prisoners are mostly “not us”. Seeing a trend?

So…is it possible to have quality and still reduce costs? Of course. Our system is not only financially inefficient, and the victim of massive skimming by the private companies, but it is one which is geared to care for individual patients rather than populations; where there is not rational allocation of resources to the areas where they will do the most good, but rather decisions made for each individual, often where the provider has a financial incentive to do more. Oregon’s CCOs, a kind of state-sponsored but decentralized (there are 15 in the state) ACO designed only for Medicaid patients, have provided some movement in this direction, but they are limited because they are, in fact, only for Medicaid patients. This permits skimming, as we see in recent data that shows that the places long touted for their efficiency and low cost for Medicare, like Grand Junction CO and Rochester MN, are among the most expensive for private insurance. The same characteristics, integrated health systems which control most of the care in a community, that allow them to be efficient with fixed Medicare funds, also allow them to raise the rates for private insurance. Gaming the system.

We could have a good health care system. It needs to be built upon quality, and quality has to be based on consensus, and has to apply to everyone, rich and poor, young or old. It cannot be segmented into different versions of quality for privately insured, Medicare, Medicaid, and uninsured people. The “how-to” is not hard; other countries have shown us how. The money is not hard, we are already spending excessive amounts. What we need is the will. 

 http://coastalresearch.org/2015/08/joshua-freeman-md-to-be-charles-odegaard-lecturer-at-27th-national-conference/

[2] (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/americas-largest-mental-hospital-is-a-jail/395012/

“Good enough for Government Work”: Quality, cost, and gaming the system, Part 2 (of 4 parts)

This is part two of the Charles Odegaard Lecture, delivered at the 27th National Conference on Primary Health Care Access, April 6, 2016

We have all heard the business mantra “do more with less”, which, on the face of it, is either absurd or, perhaps, a very cynical indictment of how much is currently being “wasted”, waste being differently defined depending upon the point the user wishes to make. I, for example, would consider “waste” to be money designated as “health care dollars” going to excessive profits for private corporations rather than actually being spent delivering health care; others, perhaps in the insurance industry, might consider “waste” to be an excessive “medical loss ratio”, their quaint term for the money that they actually have to spend delivering health care and don’t get to pocket. Politicians, of course, are more malleable; “waste” is whatever is being spent on what they don’t like, provided of course, it doesn’t get them into trouble with their constituents (like the VA scandal), in which case switching definitions is always an option.

What might be waste in the provision of health care? One is providing, and charging for, services that are unnecessary or possibly even harmful. A current example is the performance of pelvic examinations (as distinct from collecting Pap smears) in asymptomatic women (without pain, discharge, or bleeding) just to see what we can find. The American College of Physicians (ACP), the internists’ group, recommends against them. ACOG, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, recommends doing them, or at least leaving it up to the physician. Guess which group stands to lose more financially? ACOG’s position includes the statement that “…the College continues to firmly believe in the clinical value of pelvic examinations, through which gynecologists can recognize issues such as incontinence and sexual dysfunction. While not evidence-based, the use of pelvic exams is supported by the clinical experiences of gynecologists treating their patients.”![1]Hm. Maybe the best way to discover issues like incontinence or sexual dysfunction is not to put one’s hands inside a woman, but, perhaps, to ask her!

The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), of course, makes no recommendations on whether to do a particular exam or procedure, as its recommendations are for or against screening for particular diseases (with, in that context, exams or procedures discussed). It recommends against (“D” recommendation) screening for ovarian cancer, a major “benefit” cited by some ob-gyns, because it is inadequately sensitive and specific and doesn’t save lives. In a recent survey of ACOG members, the “potential benefits” of pelvic examination in asymptomatic women were cited, but not the costs – in dollars or to patients in terms of discomfort and morbidity. 

This is relevant here because when costs, both potential for harm as well as dollars, are not considered, everything could be potentially of benefit. Another recent study showing mild benefit from the use of the diabetes drug pioglitazone to prevent strokes or TIAs in people who have previously had them shows some benefit, but at the cost of an increase in the number of fractures requiring surgery or hospitalization; the editorialist in Journal Watch General Medicine emphasizes the benefit rather than the risk of harm, but is a neurologist, not an orthopedist. Should we do an MRI on everyone every week, just to see what we can find? Certainly there could be some things found! What about CT scans for screening for lung cancer (USPSTF “B” rating)? The best study, from the US, shows absolute risk reduction for death in 6.5 years of 0.33%; some smaller recent studies from Italy and Denmark show no benefit for mortality, and even in the US the frequency being recommended is moving to less than annually.  Should we be on track to weekly MRIs?

So, I just wanted to be clear that it is not true that I am for anything that could improve quality whatever the cost. That is ridiculous. But there is a baseline of quality which not only can, but regularly is, compromised when there is a potential for financial benefit from doing so. 

More recently, and wildly popular in health care, is the Triple Aim. The idea is to improve quality, improve patient satisfaction, and cut costs, all at once. It is difficult to find anyone, regardless of political affiliation or medical specialty, politician, provider, or consumer advocate, who doesn’t think that this is a good idea. To some degree, even I think this is a good idea, but I also believe that, like a lot of good ideas, the devil is in the details, the proof is in the pudding, where the rubber meets the road, or whichever is your favorite saying. While I am certain that many well-meaning pundits and providers, such as the leaders of family medicine, the experts at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and others are serious about improving quality, the reality, as M. Gregg Bloche notes in his NEJM piece (see Part 1, ref #3), is that almost all of the rewards are for cost-cutting. Yes, ACA has given us some modest revenue enhancements for meeting quality goals, although in general they are either very broad or very precise, and in either case poor measures of actual quality, and thus of limited impact. But almost all of the rewards, on either side of the Atlantic, in the NHS, or the VA, or for the ACOs created by the ACA, are for reducing costs. And it is almost always in the public sector that the impact is the greatest.

For example, outside the VA, we have our RACs, the bounty hunters licensed by Medicare to come into hospitals to find “fraud and abuse”. This usually manifests as discovering that some Medicare patients have been “admitted” to the hospital, rather than placed on “observation” status, which costs Medicare less. We have been well-socialized by our institutions, prompted by Medicare, into ensuring that we have reason to believe a patient will be in for “two midnights” (a bizarre conception with regard to health, much easier to achieve when a patient is admitted at 11pm than at 1am!), but how many of us realize that it is our patients who pay, literally with dollars? The excess cost is because “observation” is officially outpatient and paid by Medicare Part B, which requires much higher co-pays than the Medicare Part A that covers admissions. I have to admit that it was only relatively recently, when I heard a cousin being admonished by a friend to “make sure that your mom is admitted, not put on observation, or she’ll go bankrupt”, that I realized this.

[part 3 next week: The VA, the private and public sector, and the profit motive]

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[1] http://www.acog.org/About-ACOG/News-Room/Practice-Advisories/ACOG-Practice-Advisory-on-Annual-Pelvic-Examination-Recommendations