Author Archives: The Century Foundation

New CDC Report: The Nail in the Coffin for Health Care Myths

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On Monday the CDC released a landmark, and in many ways devastating, report on health care in the U.S. The report contains a wealth of data that, while not surprising to some, should help silence the dwindling few who insist that America’s health care system is doing just fine. As a public service, I thought it’d be helpful to list some of the myths that the report demolishes (with some help from other sources as needed).

Myth: If people don’t have health insurance or get medical care, it’s because they don’t want it.

Reality: Actually, the big issue with access is cost. According to the CDC report, more than 40 million Americans—almost one in five Americans over the age of 18—have foregone one of the following in the past year because they couldn’t afford it: medical care, prescription medicines, mental health care, dental care, or eyeglasses.

It’s not that uninsured people don’t understand the value of coverage. Last year a study from the Urban Institute found that less than 3 percent of uninsured adults and children have never had insurance or report having no need for insurance. That same report also found that the high cost of coverage alone explained over 50 percent of those cases where people are uninsured 

And even when the uninsured cite job-related difficulties as the reason why they can’t access employer sponsored coverage, the problem isn’t just that they can’t get it through work—it’s also that they can’t afford individual policies. (Individual policies are much more expensive than group policies, and in many states private insurers can charge individuals astronomical premiums if individuals have any “pre-existing conditions.)  According to the Urban Institute, for 79 percent of adults and 74 percent of children who are uninsured because of job-related problems, the high cost of individual insurance is a major problem.

Myth: The American system relies mostly, if not exclusively, on private enterprise to support health care.

Reality: Yes and no. While the U.S. does have the biggest private sector share of health expenditures in the world, making up 55 percent of our funding, personal health care expenditures (i.e. spending on actual patient care) is mostly public. The CDC reports that in 2005 the federal government and state and local governments combined paid 45 percent of personal health care expenditures; private insurers only paid 36 percent, with 15 percent coming from out-of-pocket payments. So much for the libertarian utopia.

There’s also a bigger public sector coverage presence than many would like to admit. Though two-thirds of insurance policyholders have private coverage, a Census bureau report from earlier this year noted that more than one quarter of Americans (about 27 percent) are covered by government insurance. The American model is much more of a private-public mix than some pundits—and candidates—are willing to admit.

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Healthcare IT Is Not a Done Deal—Even in Theory

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In a previous post, I briefly mentioned how the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has started developing regional networks of electronic health information. Eventually, these networks will merge into a “network of networks,” thus working toward a nationwide, compatible system of electronic health records by 2014.

Unfortunately this “network of networks” approach of regional heath information organizations (RHIOs) has some serious faults. And the alternative system currently favored by many, health record data banks, still poses a lot of unanswered questions.

According to an October report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), the major problem with RHIOs is coordination: “multiple, heterogeneous databases” require “the extensive use of middleware—that is, software used to interface between incompatible databases and data formats.” Otherwise it’s like trying to run Mac software on a PC. Other coordination challenges include accurate patient identification (is John Smith in the Bronx the same as John Q. Smith in Cleveland?) and ensuring comparable service quality—each network needs to be as fast and secure as its peers.

With all of these inefficiencies, the ITIF study notes that RHIOs don’t make a very compelling business case to the health care providers who are expected to implement and operate the networks. Most of the system’s savings go to patients (because they can expect better care) and insurers (because mistakes can be avoided) rather than hospitals and doctors, who incur all the costs of transitioning to a new IT platform—a fact of which they’re well aware. A 2006 JAMA study showed that health care providers are worried about IT transitions primarily because of start-up costs (installation, consultation, training, etc), ongoing costs (such as compliance with privacy laws—no small matter, given the ambiguity of HIPPA) and the potential loss of productivity as employees learn the new system.

In lieu of RHIOs, ITIF recommends health record data banks (HRDBs), a model that has gotten a lot of buzz over recent months—including its own bill in Congress last year.

The simplest way to explain HRDBs is via analogy: think of how you engage with a commercial bank account, and you’re on the right track. Just as you choose a bank from a competitive marketplace of financial institutions, so would you pick an HRDB provider from many vying for your business; just as you open a bank account, so would you start a medical record account; and just as you log in to access financial information, make transactions, and monitor your activity with a bank, so would the HRDB service let you sign in online to access to your medical history, test results, and so on.

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Is State-Level Health Care Reform Doomed?

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It’s a waste of breath to say that health reform is a big issue in the states. But is it also the case that health reform in the states is a waste of time?

With health reform experimentation popping up across the nation, conventional wisdom has become, as Massachusetts State Senator Richard T. Moore put it in a blog post for the Commonwealth Fund, that states are “critical laboratories for quality and innovation.”

Yet while Moore is right to say that “common elements of success will serve as a useful learning experience for other states and national leaders in considering more comprehensive health care reform,” there’s another side of the issue to consider: there may be some states that can’t sustain universal coverage without more comprehensive federal reform—no matter how insurance programs are designed. There’s also a danger that failure at the state level could be used to argue that comprehensive health reform is simply an impossible goal.

Among the biggest problems with universal coverage is cost: how can we afford to insure everybody? One answer is to require that everyone buy coverage.  By mandating insurance, a state can spread the cost across a larger pool of people that includes low-risk individuals who can help share the burden of insuring high-risk individuals.

Without a mandate, no one would buy insurance until they were sick or elderly; the pool would be made up of people who are expensive to insure, and soon coverage would become unaffordable. The only alternative would be to pass laws saying that if you don’t sign up before you become sick, insurers have the right to refuse to cover you –or to charge you five times what they would charge a healthy person. This is what happens in many states today, which is why one serious illness can send a family into bankruptcy. If we want to say that insurers can’t leave anyone out in the cold—even if they are very sick –then we also have to say that everyone must participate in the system.

The question remains:  will mandates work at the state level?

Consider Maine. In 2005, Maine launched the nation’s first experiment
in universal health coverage through the “Dirigo Health Act,” named
after Maine’s state motto, “Dirigo,” Latin for “I lead.” Dirigo is
entirely voluntary, and as a result only 18,800 people (most of which
already had private sector insurance) have signed up for DirigoChoice,
the main arm of the program devoted to small businesses and
individuals. Meanwhile, some 130,000 Maine residents remain uninsured.

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The Unhappy Legacy of Medicaid

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In September, the non-profit organization Public Citizen (PC) issued a report comparing Medicaid and Medicare payments to doctors in 10 states and Washington D.C. The results underline the fact that Medicaid has been designed, from day one, to give states an easy  cop-out when it comes to health care for the poor.

The study highlights cases where the disparities between what different states pay a doctor to care for a Medicaid patient are greatest: “In New York, doctors are paid $20 for an hour-long consultation with a Medicaid patient, while in higher-paying states, doctors receive an average of $157.92 for the same service – a difference of greater than sevenfold. The difference within a state between what Medicaid pays [a physician to treat a patient who is poor enough to qualify for Medicaid] and what Medicare [pays a doctor to care for an elderly patient] is just as dramatic. For this hour-long consultation, a physician in New York could earn $196.47 from Medicare, almost 10 times more than from Medicaid.”

Last month the AMA posted a chart of these and other disparities on its medical news website, and seen side-by-side, the comparisons are startling: a physician in New Jersey or Pennsylvania gets, on average, about one quarter as much for seeing a Medicaid patient as a Medicare patient; in New York and Rhode Island, less than a third; and in the nation’s capital less than half as much. Other states lie at the other end of the spectrum. Alaska, Wyoming, Delaware, and North Carolina all pay more for Medicaid than Medicare.

Is there any rhyme or reason to how states reimburse Medicaid care? Looking at Alaska (which pays more for Medicaid, relative to Medicare, than any other state) and New Jersey (which pays the least) it initially seems that poverty rates may factor into disparities. Alaska’s poverty rate is the 7th highest in the nation, so it would make sense that it would want to encourage health care for the poor. New Jersey, on the other hand, is almost last in the nation when it comes to poverty rates (no. 47 on the list) so the state may not feel as strongly about the need to ensure care for the poor.

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Conditional Cash Transfers: An Interim Model for Health Care Reform?

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This past September, New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg welcomed 5,000 families into the pilot program of Opportunity NYC– the nation’s first conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. Based on a Mexican program called Oportunidades, CCT programs like Opportunity NYC (ONYC) provide financial incentives for poor households to “meet specific targets” in three areas: education, employment/training, and health.

I recently spoke with Héctor Salazar-Salame, Advisor to the Center for Economic Opportunity, which operates ONYC, about the health components of the program. I wanted to get an idea of the aims and strategy behind ONYC—and also to learn more about CCT as a potential model for thinking strategically about health care reform. 

According to the city’s press release, ONYC’s health incentives will be offered “to maintain adequate health coverage for all children and adults in participant households as well as age-appropriate medical and dental visits for each family member.” In terms of coverage, families can earn “$20 or $50 per adult per month for maintaining health insurance and $20 or $50 for maintaining health insurance for all the children in the family.”

The point is to encourage low-income families to enroll in health insurance plans. “Many families work for employers that offer insurance,” Salazar-Salame explains, but “many times the necessary employee contribution is quite high for low-income families. We’re providing an incentive for families to opt into their work-based, private health plan—and hoping that the incentives will help them offset the cost of the employee contribution.”

If parents are unemployed—or work for employers that don’t offer coverage—the family can still be eligible for health incentive rewards that keep them enrolled in Medicaid. “We know that to recertify for Medicaid can be a challenging yearly process that takes a lot of time,” says Salazar-Salame. (It’s worth keeping in mind that roughly 30 percent of parents who don’t manage to enroll or re-enroll their children in Medicaid have less than a high school education).  “We’re hoping the incentive will help them maintain the insurance that they’re eligible for,” Salazar-Salame explains.

Maintaining insurance is harder than it sounds. In October, Maggie wrote about  just how difficult it can be to stay enrolled in Medicaid and SCHIP, pointing to a Health Affairs article titled "Why Millions of Children Eligible for Medicaid and S-Chip Are Uninsured."

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ADHD and the Medication Feeding Frenzy in America

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CORRECTION: In the post below, I make mention that there has been no U.S. media coverage on the MTA report. But after some further digging, I found coverage from Investor’s Business Daily, along with popular sources the New York Post, and Fox News and technical/niche publications like Planet Chiropractic. So there is some American coverage.

But if you click around you can see that the American stories are much more brief than their international counterparts. Each of the stories in the mainstream outlets is more of a newswire dispatch than an actual article, where as the international stories are comprehensive. And while pretty much all of the news sources of record in the U.K. covered the story, the major U.S. outlets–like the WSJ, NYT, Time, Newsweek, etc–seem to have had nothing.

Given that the U.S. is 90 percent of the ADHD drug market, you’d think that MTA’s findings would make nation-wide headlines. But instead coverage is scattered and superficial. Stories are relegated to quasi-interest group literature (investors who may lose money on the drugs, chiropractors who have a professional interest in questioning medication), or to the News Corporation (which owns both the Post and Fox news)–a multinational company with a strong Australian and British component. There’s still no convincing evidence that the American media is, on the whole, ready to meaningfully cover MTA’s findings.

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Earlier this week the British press broke some startling news: the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD (MTA), has issued a report that claims there are no long-term benefits of ADHD medication for hyperactive children. Report co-author Professor William Pelham of the University of Buffalo, is quoted in the British press as concluding that ADHD medication is, in the long-term, all risk and no reward.

“The children [on ADHD medication] had a substantial decrease in their rate of growth so they weren’t growing as much as other kids both in terms of their height and in terms of their weight,” he says. “And…there were no beneficial effects – none.”

This is an about face from MTA’s benchmark report in 1999 that asserted with certainty that ADHD drugs were the best way to address ADHD in children. The 1999 study claimed that “combination treatments” (i.e. drugs and behavioral training) along with “medication-management alone” (i.e. drugs) are “both significantly superior” to other ADHD treatments that don’t include medication.

But, according to Pelham, “we exaggerated the beneficial impact of medication in the first study. We had thought that children medicated longer would have better outcomes. That didn’t happen to be the case.” So, according to Pelham, here’s the bottom line: “in the short run [medication] will help the child behave better, in the long run it won’t.”

To some, Pelham’s report might be unwelcome news. Thanks in part to the medical credibility that MTA and other studies have conferred on ADHD medications, global sales of ADHD drugs are predicted to be $4.3 billion by 2012. This ADHD boom is a recent phenomenon, largely a product of the 1990s. According to the US National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, the number of children who received a diagnosis of ADHD increased 250 percent from 1990 to 1998. A study from 1996 showed that from 1990-1995 child use of ADHD medication increased by a factor of 2.5 and drug production increased six-fold. The production of Ritalin (the most common ADHD medication) increased by 700 percent from 1990-1999.

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Your Yearly Physical Is a Waste of Time

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…or at least that’s what some experts have increasingly been suggesting. According to the American College of Physicians (ACP), instead of having an annual physical, “healthy adults should undergo a much-streamlined exam that’s focused on prevention every one to five years depending on a person’s age, sex and medical profile.”

So what does that mean, exactly? According to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, doctors should focus on “interventions that help patients change health-impairing habits or that spotlight emerging illnesses for which reliable and effective treatments exist.”  These include “Pap smears, mammograms, cholesterol tests, blood-pressure checks, and counseling to stop smoking, lose weight, get more exercise and eat a healthier diet.” In other words, rather than just checking for everything, doctors should focus on interventions that can be substantively linked to treatments we know work. Currently, most check-ups are comprehensive run-throughs that seem to be administered  just for their own sake, regardless of how, or even if, they relate to meaningful treatments.

For many of us, the annual physical is a fixture of our health care
experience, something we assume to be both necessary and desirable.
Indeed, a study released last month found that 64 million Americans a
year get a physical or gynecological exam, costing a total of $7.8
billion.  Regular gynecological exams are important—they include Pap
smears that have made cervical cancer a rare disease. But the point of
the general physical is less clear.  More people get annual check ups
than visit doctors for respiratory conditions or high blood pressure,
and the price tag for yearly physicals closes in on the $8.1 billion
spent on breast cancer care.

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Online Doctors, Privacy, and the Almighty Dollar

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Last month a
slew of media outlets caught wind of Jay Parkinson, a 31 year old
Brooklyn-based M.D. who provides care for his patients through the Internet.
Here’s how it works: you get an initial in-person consultation at your home or
office. After that, you can ask Parkinson questions online through instant
message or video chat; e-mail him digital images of minor wounds, rashes, etc.,
that he can then diagnose; have him help contact, call ahead, and inform
specialists when you need their help; and generally fulfill most basic medical
consultation functions online.

Parkinson’s work raises a lot of questions, but first among them may be
this: how come my doctor isn’t
utilizing virtual communication to its fullest potential?

Part of doctors’ technophobia stems from their lack of incentives to engage
with the virtual world: they’re not reimbursed for virtual consultations that
may be deemed “self-management support activities,” or good old fashioned advice
about do-it-yourself care. As little as eight
percent of patients communicate with their doctors via e-mail—a shame,
considering in the latest issue of JAMA, Tom Delbanco from Harvard Medical
School estimated that 50 percent of visits to the physician are unnecessary and
could probably be dealt with online.

But there are other reasons why doctors are reluctant to take their practice
online. For most doctors, communicating sensitive patient information without
special, government-approved secure platforms is illegal under the Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). HIPAA, originally passed
in 1996, was revised in 2002 by the Bush Administration to incorporate a
privacy rule that came into effect in 2003. The privacy rule regulates the use
and disclosure of private health information (PHI),
which is information about “health status, provision of health care, or payment
for health care that can be linked to an individual.” It’s this privacy rule
that makes so many doctors computer-shy.

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Human Growth Hormone and The Business of Immortality

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Last week, James Forsythe, a prominent doctor in Reno, Nevada was acquitted by a federal jury after going to trial on allegations that he trafficked in human growth hormone (HGH). The decision came as a relief to the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M), because among other allegations, the doctor was accused of selling HGH as an anti-aging treatment, which is illegal in the U.S. A4M has a history of pushing for HGH-driven anti-aging treatments.

So what’s so special about HGH when it comes to aging? Beginning in your 40s, the pituitary gland slowly reduces the amount of hormone it produces, a fact that some feel is both responsible for the frailty of age and reversible through the introduction of synthetic growth hormones.

But there is little, if any, reliable scientific evidence about the anti-aging benefits of HGH. In fact, there are no double-blind placebo-controlled studies for most of the anti-aging miracle cures out there. Yet we do know for a fact that HGH can increase the risk of cancer—not to mention edema (retention of fluids), arthralgia (joint pain), carpal tunnel syndrome, diabetes, and gynecomastia (enlarged mammary glands in males).  Oh, and it might actually shorten life.

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The Genetic Effects of Loneliness

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In September, a UCLA study took the long-recognized connection between loneliness and poor health to a new level by uncovering the genetic consequences of loneliness (see the full text of the study here). Its results are compelling, both on their own and as an opening salvo in medicine’s new campaign to understand how perception, feelings, and interaction with others determines health. 

Measuring loneliness (referred to in the study as “social isolation”) through the UCLA loneliness scale, researchers found that “feelings of social isolation are linked to alterations in the activity of genes that drive inflammation, the first response of the immune system.” At the same time, “key gene sets were under-expressed”—in other words, were not as functional as you’d expect them to be–in lonely individuals, “including those involved in antiviral responses and antibody production.”

In other words, loneliness fundamentally alters our immune system. As one author put it, “…the biological impact of social isolation reaches down into some of our most basic internal processes …the activity of our genes; changes in immune cell gene expression  in [ways that are] specifically linked to the subjective experience of social distance.” This is important: it’s feeling alone that matters. 

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