Yeah. What He Said.

Remember when everyone was talking about how awful healthcare.gov is?  Well, guess what?  At least 4 states are recommending that their citizens use the federal site because theirs are so bad.  That’s a nice about-face huh?  Here’s what the governor of one of those states, Oregon, says:

“I think their recommendation to use the federal website technology is the right call,” he said. “It is the most reliable and least costly way to ensure that we have a working website for the next enrollment period.”

Wait, what?  Healthcare.gov is the “most reliable”?  I love it.  I really do.  That is damning with faint praise if I ever heard it.  So, fine.  Those state’s residents can just go over to the federal site.  No harm, no foul.  Here’s the catch.  The government, the federal one, gave a whole bunch of money to those states to start their own exchanges.  Do we get our money back?

Now, whatever we may think about past and future hospital CEOs, sometimes they get it right.  Dear leader Brad Wright might think this is cheating, but I’m going to re-post a blog entry by a CEO who’s probably doing more for health policy now than he was when he was a CEO.  Here it is: (http://runningahospital.blogspot.com/2014/04/i-want-my-money-back.html)

“Like many people, I have been following the saga of the failed state health care exchanges, Massachusetts being one.  But a sentence in today’s New York Times Article about the Oregon exchange took my breath away:

Oregon has received $305 million in federal grants to build its exchange, according to the Congressional Research Service. 

The Census Bureau reports the number of households in Oregon as 1.5 million. So we (yes, we) have spent about $300 per family to produce nothing.

As we look at that CRS report we see that Massachusetts got $170 million for the same purpose and couldn’t get its act together.  Hawaii, $205 million.  Maryland, $171 million.  And, in addition, according to the Pioneer Institute report, “Failure at the Connector will cost Massachusetts taxpayers over $100 million dollars this year” because 160,000 Massachusetts residents are on temporary public Medicaid coverage even though they don’t qualify for MassHealth.

On Oregon, the Times reports:

[I]n February, the federal government delivered a devastating critique of the Oregon exchange, saying it had “no integrated project schedule” and no “overarching dedicated project manager” to keep work on track. Moreover, it said, the state did far too little to supervise its main information technology contractor, Oracle. 

I strongly support the goals and purposes of the Accountable Care Act, but this level of managerial incompetence is breathtaking.  Shouldn’t we as federal taxpayers ask for the failed states to return the US grants they received?  Perhaps, then, the states will have an incentive to recover the spent funds from the contractors they hired.”

Well said, Paul Levy.

 

Wonk Review Arrives With Suggestions In Hand

Louise of the Colorado Health Insurance Insider hosts the latest edition of the Health Wonk Review. This fortnight, we are presented with a range of options for improving the Affordable Care Act. See what everyone has to suggest here.

 

New Host Billy Wynne Brings A No-Nonsense Health Wonk Review

Sure, it came out on April 10th, but the April Fools’ Edition of Health Wonk Review hosted by Billy Wynne at the Healthcare Lighthouse Blog is nothing to joke about. Give it a look!

 

Let The Witch Hunt Begin

Well, the cat is out of the bag now.  All this time we’ve been told that Internal Medicine is a dying art, you can’t make a living at it, payments to physicians are too low, etc.  Now the New York Times is telling me that Internal Medicine is fifth on the list of best-paid doctors!  How can this be?

Here’s what has happened: Medicare has released the names and specialties of all the doctors it has paid in 2012.   That’s a lot of data.  It’s, well, Big Data.  It’s data on two things: 1) doctors; 2) money.  The healthcare reform debate in a nutshell.  So this will likely get a lot of press.  I haven’t seen the actual numbers yet, and I’m told it will take many weeks to go through all of it.  Since nobody pays me to write, I’ll have to keep my day job, and thus will have to leave the number crunching to others.

Thankfully, the New York Times has come to my rescue. (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/business/sliver-of-medicare-doctors-get-big-share-of-payouts.html?hp&_r=0).  According to the NYT, 880,000 practitioners and 77 billion dollars are covered in the report.  Twenty-five percent of that 77 billion seems to have gone to two percent of doctors: those in opthalmology, oncology, and cardiology.  Internal medicine is right behind, wouldn’t you know.  The article actually has a chart that they named “The best-paid 2 percent of doctors”.  Yep.  Those family doctors are really raking it in.

The paper singles out a specific opthalmology procedure as a prominent, and, it implies, therefore suspect, reason for big payouts.  In fact, the paper had to be asked (nicely) not to release the names of the actual doctors with the highest billing records, or to contact them, until all the data is released to the public.  I suspect a couple of eye-doctors are going to have a really bad day today.  The opthalmology data is a good illustration of how Big Data can be Limited Data.  And how it can be interpreted a number of ways.  The NYT is implying that because eye doctors’ billing is so high, and so much higher than other specialties, there must be some something criminal going on.  Either eye doctors are committing fraud, or they are doing unnecessary procedures, or they are using drugs that are too expensive.  The doctors must be wrong.

But the data doesn’t say that at all.  All it says it that Medicare, which sets it’s reimbursement rates at levels mandated by Congress, not doctors, pays more money to treat people with eye diseases than it does other diseases.  That’s it.  It says nothing about a doctor’s practice at all.  Nothing.

Let’s take a couple of examples.  Opthalmology is a sub-specialized field.  A doctor who does cataracts doesn’t do Lasik, or he does Lasik but he doesn’t handle macular degeneration, etc.  A lot of specialties are getting like this.  Now, say a few doctors have specialized in this one procedure the NYT is all upset about.  Other doctors send their patients to these guys.  All of their practices becomes doing this procedure.  Because it’s their specialty.  So they bill Medicare for the procedure.  Medicare pays out what it decided to pay for this procedure.  How is this the doctor’s fault?  (By the way, funny story.  There’s a Lasik advertisement on the internet page with this article.)

Another example.  Say you are an oncologist.  You treat a lot of blood cancers, leukemia and such.  Other doctors send you their patients if they have leukemia.  There are a lot of types of leukemia, many of which are very expensive to treat and some which actually become chronic.  You bill Medicare for your treatments.  Medicare pays back what it decided to pay for these treatments.  It costs a lot to treat leukemia.  That’s what the data says.  That’s all it says.  It says nothing about quality of care, patient population, number of patients, or disease complexity.  It says nothing about variability in office visit time or the level of co-existing disease in a specific doctor’s patient population.

I am all for transparency.  I think having this data out there is fine, as long as we understand what we are getting.  And I’m not sure we do.  Specific doctors are going to be targeted for a lot of scrutiny because of this report.  Maybe they deserve to, maybe they don’t.  Fraud and over-treatment do exist.  But this data is far from telling the whole story.

 

 

What’s In a Number?

While the Obama Administration is still permitting people who experienced technical difficulties with the healthcare.gov website to sign-up for coverage until April 15th, the initial open enrollment period for the health insurance marketplaces ended on March 31st. As we now know, more than 7 million people signed up for coverage between October 1 and the end of March. Plenty of people are talking about whether or not this is a victory for the White House. Will this help Democrats in the midterm elections? Is the GOP still on track to take control of the Senate because of how much so many Americans dislike the ACA? There are plenty of angles from which to view the situation, but what I think gets lost in this whole discussion is the magnitude of a number like 7 million. So, in the spirit of trying to help that sink in for you, consider the following:

• If you had 7 million pennies, it would be worth $70,000.
• If you were able to stack all of those pennies up, they would reach more than 6.7 miles into the sky, despite each being merely 1.55 millimeters thick.
• If you had $7 million, you could buy your own brand new Learjet.
• If you traveled 7 million miles in that Learjet (laws of physics notwithstanding), you could fly to the moon and back nearly 15 times.
• If you built a colony on the moon and wanted to populate it with 7 million Americans, you could easily accommodate the entire population of both Los Angeles and Chicago.

The point is, 7 million is a really, really big number. And behind that really, really big number are people who now have health insurance–many of them for the first time in a long time–if ever. It bears repeating that we’re still just getting started, despite being 5 years into the ACA. It will take time for all of this to sort itself out, and it will happen even as everything around it in health care is changing. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the enormity of 7 million people signing up for health insurance. For those who support the ACA, this should be viewed as a step in the right direction, with a healthy respect for the fact that this is far short of the goal of universal coverage. For those who oppose the ACA, this should be viewed as an indication that, even if the policy to fix it is unpalatable, the problem itself is very large. Calls to repeal the ACA without putting something in its place will mean that these 7 million will be left in the lurch.

 

 

Profiles In Courage

The kerfuffle over the “doc fix” took a truly courageous turn yesterday in the United States House of Representatives.  I will review the general idea of the doc fix but Todd Zwilich today on NPR’s The Takeway gave a fantastic and hilarious take on the history of this money hole, also known as the SGR.  In 1997 Congress passed the balanced budget act, which required them to at least appear to be balancing the federal budget.  But they couldn’t really so the found a big expenditure, medicare, and did a sort of retro-accounting move.  They decided that sometime in the future, say, 2014, the medicare payment system would have to be reset and doctors would take a pay cut of, say, 24%.  The took the 24% and added it to the budget for 1997 and wallah!  Balanced budget.  Todd Zwilich calls this “the worst kind of shell game accounting” that Congress has ever come up with.  Tom Coburn (R, Oklahoma), who is a doctor himself, calls the whole thing “funny money”.

OK, so partisanship being what it is, the big push to “fix” the SGR, which is a bipartisan initiative, is going nowhere because the Rs and the Ds can’t decide on how to get the $180 billion it would take.  So they needed to pass a patch, a 1-2 year measure to postpone this big pay cut.  John Fleming (R, Louisiana), also an MD, acknowledged that “no one wanted to vote for it, and no one wanted to vote against it.”  So what did they do, these poor congressmen, so that no one had to come down on either side, thus endangering their chances for re-election?  I’ll paraphrase Zwilich:

Eric Cantor (R, Virginia), the House Majority Leader, literally ran out of an office, onto the floor of the House, up to Steny Hoyer (D, Maryland), had a quick conversation, and presto!  The bill was passed, without anyone having to soil their hands by voting for it.  When the Representatives got to the floor themselves, they were surprised to find the whole thing over with.  Now, I have no idea what murky vagaries of House Rules makes this possible, but I do know that our brave congressmen at least had the grace to look slightly embarrassed.

Now the bill (to pass the one year patch, in case I’ve lost you)  goes to the Senate.  The Senate must vote on it by Monday, which is when the last patch expires.  Docs, don’t make your boat payment quite yet.  Unless Senators are braver than Representatives, or have the same murky rules, you might be 24% in the hole by Tuesday.