Category Archives: Health Care Policy

“Slow Medicine”

Posted on by

Below, Kent Bottles, M.D. reflects on the difference between “slow medicine” and what he calls “UCLA medicine.” (For the full post, see “Kent Bottles’ Private Views” )

“I have been thinking about the difference between slow medicine and UCLA medicine. It has made me realize how complex and difficult it is to transform American health care so that we lower per-capita cost and increase the quality of our lives. And yet we must achieve these two goals.

“Slow medicine is practiced by a small, but growing subculture whose pioneer and spokesperson is Dr. Dennis McCullough, author of the book My Mother, Your Mother: Embracing ‘Slow Medicine,’ The Compassionate Approach to Caring for Your Aging Loved Ones. Slow medicine is a philosophy and set of practices that believes in a conservative medical approach to both acute and chronic care.

“McCullough describes slow medicine as ‘care that is more measured and reflective, and that actually stands back from rushed, in-hospital interventions and slows down to balance thoughtfully the separate, multiple and complex issues of late life.’ Shared decision-making, community and family involvement, and sophisticated knowledge of the American health care system are some of the slow medicine practices that sharply contrast with UCLA medicine.

“UCLA medicine is the status quo where the hospital is the center of the medical universe; where care is often uncoordinated and hurried, and where cure is the only acceptable outcome for both patient and physician. I call it UCLA medicine because the CEO of that well-regarded medical center was quoted in a New York Times Sunday Magazine article as saying, ‘If you come into this hospital, we’re not going to let you die.’   This is a statement that puzzles me as an old time anatomic pathologist.”

I would add that I find the UCLA CEO’s statement more than puzzling; I find it frightening.

I can’t help but think of the doctor who explained: “Once you’re in the hospital, you’re in ‘the system.’”  I imagine a prison door closing behind me. I am now in a place where people no longer ask me what I want.  Instead, they tell me:  “This is what we’re going to do.”

Of course, Bottles goes on to acknowledge that “there are times (serious acute illness correctly diagnosed where there is an evidence-based treatment that has a good chance of success) when I hope I am treated in UCLA’s ICU or operating room by UCLA specialists. However, there are also times as I get older that I hope I end up living in the Kendal-at-Hanover retirement community cared for by a wise and experienced geriatrician like Dennis McCullough and the community’s nurse practitioner; I want my providers to take things slowly and listen to what I want out of life.”

Post-Election Analysis–Expect Few Changes in Reform Legislation

Posted on by

Today, unemployment threatens the hopes and lives of millions of Americans. Recent graduates can’t find jobs. Families that need two paychecks are living on one. Households that depended on one paycheck have none. More than nine million Americans who need a full time job are working part-time.  Many who have jobs are “working scared.”  They haven’t had a raise for years, and don’t dare ask for one.  They live with the constant fear that, without warning, they will join the ranks of the unemployed. The economy remains sluggish; there is little hope that the private sector will begin to generate the jobs this country needs.

Over the past two years, many of us pinned our hopes on healthcare reform. If we could just manage that, it would be a sign that we, as a nation, were ready for the “transformative” change that President Obama promised. And, to the amazement of the chattering classes (a.k.a. “the pundits”), Congress did, in fact, pass the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)

Nevertheless, many remain wary.  Reform’s opponents claim that the legislation will lead to a loss of benefits for seniors, combined with sky-high premiums for everyone else. Deficit hawks argue that the pilot projects will never work, and that Medicare will push the nation into bankruptcy. And even those who embraced the legislation fear that as conservatives take over the House, a new Congress will dismantle the ACA by refusing to fund it.

None of this is true.

Continue reading →

Highlights from the Reconciliation Bill, and Maggie’s Comments on the Changes

Posted on by

Overall, the changes in the reconciliation bill will make the Senate
bill more progressive—and fairer.

My prediction: the bill will
pass. Those who oppose universal coverage are becoming
angrier, louder, more abusive, and more frantic. This is because they realize
that they are losing, and now they are just flailing about.

This
evening (Thursday) I heard Bart Stupak acknowledge, on “Hardball
with Chris Matthews”, that while the Democrats may not have the
votes today, by Sunday, they could well have them. On this, I agree
with Stupak.

Below, the details of the new bill, and my comments
in red.

Under the new reconciliation bill:

  • Low-income and middle-income families will have an easier time
    affording premiums.     The tax credits for health insurance premiums
    are more generous for individuals and families with incomes between 250%
    and 400% of the federal poverty level (FPL)—i.e.  individuals earning
    less than $41,500,  or a family of three earning less than $70,400. When
    compared to the Senate bill, the legislation also cuts cost-sharing for
    individuals and families with incomes between 100% and 250% FPL.

Comment:  Research shows  that when a low-income
family of four (for instance a family earning less than $22,000) is
required to share in health care costs, too often they delay needed
care.  For these families, even a $15 co-pay can be a barrier. Fifteen
dollars will buy groceries for two dinners for a family of four (e.g.
spaghetti with tomato sauce and bread).  Middle-income families who
don’t have help from an employer also need the higher subsidies that the
new bill provides.

  • Six months after the bill is enacted, all existing health
    insurance plans are prohibited from imposing life-time limits on payouts
    or refusing to cover children suffering from pre-existing conditions.      
    Excessive waiting periods before insurance kicks in also will be
    banned, and insurers will be required to provide coverage for
    non-dependent children up to age 26 on their parent’s polices.  (Parents
    will pay extra for the coverage, but adult children will get better
    deals than many would on their own.) Beginning in 2014, group health
    plans will no longer be able to exclude adults based on pre-existing
    conditions. Annual limits on how much an insurer will pay out will be
    restricted beginning six months after enactment, and prohibited starting
    in 2014.

Comment: Limits on how much insurers will pay out
annually or over a lifetime can condemn individuals to death. If you
have the bad luck to be diagnosed with a very expensive disease that
might require years of pricey treatments (MS for example, or childhood
cancers) your insurance can easily “max out”—even though treatment that
might cure you (in the case of some childhood cancers where we have been
making great progress)– or at least give you many additional years of
life.

  • The “Cadillac Tax” on expensive health insurance plans has been
    pushed back five years and won’t go into effect until 2018.     The
    thresholds also have been raised: the tax will apply only to individual
    plans that cost $10,200 or more (up from $8,500) or family plans that
    fetch $25,500 (up from $23,000). Dental and vision plans would not be
    included.  Under the new bill, there is no special deal for unions.

Comment:  In my view, this is a positive change.
As I have argued in the past, the Cadillac tax could hit middle-income
families.

  • While the Cadillac tax is rolled back, the Medicare tax for
    wealthy individuals earning over $200,000 and married couples who earn
    over $250,000 rises.      Today, they pay a 1.45% payroll tax on wages.
    The Senate bill would raise that tax to 2.35%. The reconciliation bill
    expands the tax to include investment income (dividends, capital gains,
    etc.) as well as earned income. It still applies only to individuals who
    show income over $200,000 and couples who report income over $250,000.

Comment:  This tax makes up for the cut-back and
push-back on the Cadillac tax. In contrast to the Cadillac tax , this
tax is limited to those at the very top of the income ladder. Unlike the
middle-class, those earning over $200,000  have  enjoyed significant
tax breaks and income hikes in recent years. They are in a much better
position to afford the increase. It’s worth noting that other countries
tax investment income to help fund healthcare.

Continue reading →

Pelosi Watch: The Final Mile

Posted on by

Today House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed that Congressional Democrats are inching "closer" to final votes on health care reform. She declared that Democrats will take   "whatever time is required" to get it finished.  “It won't be very long,” she said, “and we'll be making a real difference in the life of the American people.”

Pelosi has also made it clear that the public option will not be in the final legislation, adding “I’m quite sad that the public option is not in there.” Pelosi also noted that she has been for single payer for many years, long before many of the reporters in the room were born. 

Continue reading →

In the Wake of the Mass Massacre—Bipartisan Reform or the Senate Bill ?

Posted on by

Let’s begin by addressing  some of the myths:

First, the Massachusetts vote was not a “Massacre”: Brown won 51 percent of the vote.

Secondly, this was not a referendum which shows that the public opposes  health care reform. Among Massachusetts’ voters who said health care was their top issue, 53 percent voted for Democrat Martha Coakley reports JoAnne Kenen, over at the New America Foundation’s New Health Dialogue.

Continue reading →

How Soon Can We Expect National Health Reform?

Posted on by

On this blog, we have debated how soon Americans will be ready for national health reform.  Many observers believe that we’ll only get reform when more people are uninsured—specifically when more middle-class and  upper-middle-class families find themselves “going naked.”

The chart below comes from a new Commonwealth Fund Report which shows that while two-thirds of low-income adults (earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty threshold) were uninsured or underinsured in 2006, just 17 percent of those earning more than 200 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) were either underinsured or uninsured at some point during the year.

 

Uninsuredandunderinsured_2

“Underinsured” is defined as someone who finds himself spending 10 percent or more of his income on out-of-pocket medical expenses. (For those earning less than 200 percent of FPL, the number is 5 percent.)

The report observes that employers are continuing to back away from offering health benefits:  “Between 2000 and 2005, the proportion of workers receiving employer-provided health insurance declined from 74.2 percent to 70.5 percent,” and again “middle- and lower-wage workers,” suffered most, with “the largest decreases” hitting this group.

Continue reading →

Are Americans Working Health Care into the Ground?

Posted on by

We Americans are proud of our work ethic. We work longer hours, and more productively, than any other nation. Our industriousness has long been cited as a source of strength of our economy—but it just might be a source of some of our health care woes as well. 

According to a just-released study from Wake Forest University, professional flexibility is an important contributor to better health. Employees at all levels who have, or feel they have, more job flexibility (e.g. the ability to work from home, choose their hours, etc.) engage in healthier behavior than those that don’t. The study found that employees with flexible schedules exercised more, attended more employer-sponsored health classes, were more likely to describe themselves as living a healthy lifestyle, and reported getting more sleep. When the researchers checked in a year later, they found that as job flexibility improved, so did healthy habits: more flexibility meant more sleep, more health classes, and a healthier lifestyle.

This study deserves attention. Changing behavior is the single most powerful way to prevent health problems. As experts from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation noted in a Health Affairs article earlier this year, “behavioral issues represent the greatest single domain of influence on the health of the U.S. population,” with 40 percent of early deaths in the U.S. due to behavioral patterns. Anything that promotes health behavior needs to be seriously considered as a strategy for making America healthier—and by extension, health care costs lower. 

Obviously, somehow ensuring that everyone in America had more flexible hours wouldn’t cut early deaths by 40 percent. And there’s no guarantee that more flexible hours will translate into better sleep, more exercise, or more education on a national scale. Any movement for universal job flexibility would have to be coupled with a concerted effort to translate free time into healthy time.

But this study gets us thinking about behavior as more than just the usual spate of no-nos like smoking or eating poorly. Work is behavior. Work is relevant to health—more so even, than the Wake Forest University study suggests. There’s an argument to be made that more job flexibility can translate into a shift away from medication in two big arenas: childhood disorders and depression.

Continue reading →

Pilots Use Checklists. Doctors Don’t. Why Not?

Posted on by

This is a question Dr. Atul Gawande explores in the December 10 issue of The New Yorker. “The Checklist” is a shocking story, it’s an important story—and it’s also very long. I, of course, would be the last person on earth to criticize someone for “writing long” but it occurs to me that many of HealthBeat’s readers may not have the time to peruse the full nine-page story, so I decided to offer a capsule summary here. (To read the story in its entirety, click here).

Gawande is the author of one of my favorite healthcare books, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science, and he writes wonderfully well. This piece begins with a riveting tale of a three-year-old who falls into in icy fishpond in a small Austrian town in the Alps. “She is lost beneath the surface for 30 minutes before her parents find her on the bottom of the pond and pull her up.” By then “she has a body temperature of 68 degrees—and no pulse.” A helicopter takes her to a near-by hospital. 
There a surgical team puts her on a heart-lung bypass machine. She now has been lifeless for an hour and a half. Gradually, the machine begins to work. After six hours, her core temperature reaches 98.6 degrees, but she is hardly out of the woods. Her lungs are too badly damaged to function, so the surgeons use a power saw to open her chest down the middle and sew lines to and from an artificial lung system into her aorta and beating heart. “Over the next two days, all of her organs recover except her brain. When a CT scan shows global brain swelling, the team drills a hole into her skull, threads in a probe to monitor cerebral pressure, and adjusts fluids and medications to keep her stable. “

Slowly, over two weeks, she comes back to life. “Her right leg and left arm [are] partially paralyzed.  Her speech [is] thick and slurry.  But by age five, after extensive outpatient therapy, she has recovered her faculties completely. She [is] like any little girl again.” 

“What makes her recovery astounding,” Gawande writes, is “the idea that a group of people in an ordinary hospital could do something so enormously complex. To save this one child, scores of people had to carry out thousands of step correctly; placing the heart-pump tubing into her without letting in air bubbles, maintaining the sterility of her lines, her open chest, the burr hole in her skull; keeping a temperamental battery of machines up and running” all the while “orchestrating each of these steps in the right sequence, with nothing dropped . . .”

This, Gawande says, is what happens in intensive care units, every day of the year, all across the country. “Intensive care medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity—and a test of whether such complexity can, in fact, be humanly mastered.”

Continue reading →

Complaints about Medicare Advantage Mount…While Congress Contemplates Slashing Fees Traditional Medicare Pays Docs

Posted on by

Recently I argued that eliminating the private insurance industry would not suddenly make health care affordable. But this is no reason to gratuitously overpay private insurers to provide health care to Medicare patients—while simultaneously planning to slash the fees that Medicare pays physicians.

Begin with the insurers. When Congress created Medicare Advantage, the program that allows private insurers to offer Medicare to seniors, it agreed to pay for-profit insurers about 12 percent more per patient than traditional Medicare would spend if it were covering those patients directly.  Add up those extra payments and they amount to a $16-billion-a-year subsidy for the health insurance industry.

Why the sweetener?  Lobbyists argued that the government would have to pay more to persuade for-profit insurers to join the Advantage program.  Moreover, they promised that the insurers would use the $16 billion to offer patients extra benefits like acupuncture and eye exams that they would not receive under traditional Medicare.  And Congress agreed. Now, think about this for a minute: legislators agreed to use our tax dollars to help for-profit insurers draw customers away from a government program that most people liked—and that cost taxpayers less.  This is not about saving money by transferring Medicare to the supposedly more efficient private sector. This is about the conservative agenda: some politicians are determined to try to outsource government to for-profit corporations.

Predictably, private insurers structured their plans to siphon off the healthiest seniors.  In New York City, for example, Oxford included free memberships to some pretty posh gyms as part of the package. They called it the “Silver Sneakers” program. Unfortunately, a year after seniors signed up they discovered that the number of gyms involved in the program had suddenly shrunk. The options that remained weren’t nearly as tony, and most were no longer located in upper-middle-class residential neighborhoods. Is this “bait-and-switch”? You decide.

Continue reading →

The Academic Buzz around Health Care

Posted on by

Being a young whippersnapper, it never occurred to me that health care policy was a relatively new field of study within our universities. But when Health Beat reader Bradley Flansbaum passed along the  Reuters story below to Maggie (original here)  and she passed it on to me, I gained a new perspective on the issue. It turns out that until very recently, health care used to just mean medicine. But today, thinking about health care demands thinking about  a lot of different things, like public policy, public administration, economics, politics, and even sociology.

This mixed bag is reflected in the diverse academic offerings at colleges and universities—as well as the swell of students interested in them. The Reuters story below suggests that there are three main motivations for the increased student interest: fascination, idealism, and profit. That sounds about right. You can either be genuinely interested in the complexities of health care or the politics surrounding it; want to fix the system for the greater good; or want to learn as much as you can about the system to better navigate it for GlaxoSmithKline.

There’s obviously a lot of good to be had from generations growing up understanding more about our insanely complex and counter-productive health care system. Teaching college students about the system now might instill a long-term openness to reform and improvement that wasn’t present in generations who never knew about health care until they got sick.

But I can’t help but wonder about the faddishness of it all. After all, health care isn’t the only broken system that could use some attention. Consider the criminal justice system. Back in the day, law and order meant being a lawyer or a cop. But today there are criminology and criminal justice programs around the world that focus on issues like incarceration, community policing, cost, risk management, and more. Yet the buzz surrounding these issues hasn’t been comparable to the much louder debate about health care—even though one out of 32 Americans is currently in the corrections system and a black male is more likely to have served time in jail than have a college degree. This too is a crisis.

Continue reading →