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| The internets are melting down under the raging opportunistic #LuigiLARPerMerch wildfires. (Gotta love the fake "American Hero" pic photoshopped onto the plain t-shirt above.) |
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| Seen on a phone pole. |
UPDATES
The CEO of United Health Group (parent company of United Health Care), felt compelled to try to Make Nice in a NY Times OpEd, after the shooting.
Yeah, "let's fix it." But, we mustn't act precipitously, 'eh?
I was having the same "fix-it" thoughts 30 years ago in graduate school.
FROM MY 1994 ARGUMENT ANALYSIS SEMESTER PAPER (pdf)30 years ago. Let's just not get in any hurry (with Trump coming back, you can pretty much rest assured that we won't).
Overall Evaluation:
The following alternative courses of action are generally advanced in the health care debate:
1. Status quo: the system works fine, and normal incremental quality improvements at the provider level will suffice. Get a job.
2.Insurance reform: prohibit exclusion and enforce community rating to reduce the insurance premium stratification characteristic of the present system.
3. Expand existing public payer programs such as Medicare to cover the working poor and otherwise uninsurable.
4. Capitated managed competition, with “employer mandates” to provide choices and beneficiary of alliances for pooled coverage buying power, administered through the workplace.
5. Tax inducement programs such as the “Medi-Save” approach in which workers use pretax dollars to purchase catastrophic coverage and pay for routine health expenses themselves.
6. The public single payer system based more or less on the Canadian model.
No one can dispute that the healthcare industry can be improved. Any system can be improved. Problems such as lack of access, arbitrary and often wildly excessive pricing, inexplicable variations in clinical practice and outcomes are well documented and cry out for solution. That tends to rule out Option 1. The question is one of extent; has the case been made that the healthcare industry requires comprehensive national reform?
Option 2: many see the problem as an insurance reform issue rather than a health-care reform issue per se. The debate brings us face to face with fundamental questions about the nature of private insurance. Where do we draw the line on the freedom to assess and underwrite risk? Is health care insurance ethically different from ensuring cargo? Part of the image problem health insurers have is self-inflicted; arbitrary, unscientific risk assessment, payment denials and delays, and the financial imperative to “cherry pick” (attempting to only contract with those posing minimal risk” have made insurers objects of suspicion and resentment). Insurers uniformly bemoan their meager financial returns, yet even a cursory examination of their real estate furnishings portfolios and executive salaries (not to mention their highly visible and aggressive “Harry and Louise” lobbying against reform this past year) tends to discredit their apologies.
Option 3: US Representative Pete Stark proposed exactly this: it was called “Medicare, Part C” and would via Medicare expansion ensure the working poor who are neither eligible for Medicaid nor otherwise insurable. This option would extend more nearly universal coverage but would do nothing about the chronic cost shifting that is prevalent in healthcare financing. It would also fail to address the cost containment problems seen in the existing program. This proposal was seen by the insurance industry as a “Trojan Horse” for an eventual single-payer system, and, as such was successfully lobbied down.
Option 4 is exactly what comprised the Clinton legislative proposal for reform. It proved inscrutably complex. Having seen the 1,400-odd page text of the proposal I am skeptical of its Byzantine complexity. Those 1,400+ pages would have necessitated something on the order of millions of pages of implementing policy regulations, with all the potential for bureaucratic gridlock they might effect.
Option 5: “Medical IRAs” are a favorite of conservatives, and have considerable theoretical merit. The central idea is that, when people directly spend their own money, they tend to be smarter shoppers, and this would control prices. Third-party payment for health services tends to reduce the incentive to ride herd on costs. But healthcare encounters are not the psychological equivalent of shopping for a new VCR, and becoming an informed healthcare consumer is not at all easy. And finally, these may be saved accounts would do nothing for those without jobs (if they are to be funded via pretax employment compensation), or for those whose taxable incomes are so low as to nullify the tax incentive. The Medi-Save approach would have to be supplanted by additional programs or those it would not touch.
Option 6, single-payer: using the Canadian example as a model for US reform has a couple of liabilities. First the US population is roughly 10 times the size of Canada’s; we would be engineering and vastly larger institution, and there may well be unforeseen dis-economies of scale. Our record in the operation of large public bureaucracies is considerably less than stellar. Secondly, there is considerable reputable disagreement with respect to the relative virtues of the Canadian system. Many Canadians (and not only wealthy ones) routinely come to the US for treatment, and there are additional documented signals of increasing dissatisfaction in Canada. It is a more humane system in that it covers everyone by entitlement, but it does significantly impact the cost of living in Canada. There is reason to believe that same or worse would be the case here, at least in the relatively near term.
The envisioned unified computerized data system such an institution would require could well be a development nightmare that might be in many respects obsolete before it went online. The documented in adequacies of both the IRS and FAA computer systems stand as a warning. The sheer volume of health care data proposed for online storage and access is daunting. An article in the byte magazine earlier this year detailed the CPR system (computerized patient record) under development at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and revealed that the daily data storage requirement was approximately 3.5 GB! (3.5 billion bytes) Remember, this is for one institution. Constructing a single national healthcare data system would be fraught with a breadth of imposing technical and policy difficulties. It would require the latest hardware, the finest software development teams, and an unprecedented level of policy agreement and guidance.
In sum, the authors’ argument has many strengths, particularly in their exhaustively documented enumeration of the shortcomings of our present health care system – to the extent to which it can be characterized as a “system.” There is, however, a plausible alternative to a public national single-payer system that would meet many of the goals sought by these advocates, and it is not a theoretical one. Utah’s IHC (Intermountain Healthcare) organization is a private, vertically integrated healthcare Corporation serving Utah in western Wyoming residents. It is a large network of hospitals, clinics, physicians, and related operations such as home health services. IHC is essentially a managed care system with subscribers who pay set fees and minimal copayments. Unlike other HMO type operations in the state that typically experience subscriber turnover rates of approximately 15% per year, IHC’s turnover rate is less than 0.5% (that’s 0.005), at competitive prices. They accomplish this by an organization wide, enthusiastic, almost religious commitment to the very CQI principles outlined above. IHC quality improvement programs are directed by Dr. Brent James, a surgeon and nationally respected leader in health care CQI education. Having myself undergone their healthcare CQI training course over the period of the past six months as part of my work, I can attest that IHC, while not yet perfect, effectively applies nearly all of the recommendations cited in this article, albeit on a smaller scale (and that may indeed be a significant virtue). They are in essence a microcosmic single-payer system, but one successful in the private sector, driven not by publicly impose mandates, but by their own thorough knowledge of and dedication to CQI. It is difficult to see at this point whether the asserted advantages of a national public system would add net value beyond the type of operation that IHC represents.
To be fair, IHC operates in a fairly prosperous, culturally homogeneous region enjoying a great deal of social and political unity. Here in Nevada, by contrast, though we share a common border and similar population size and geography with Utah, the social mileau could not be more different. IHC might not encounter the same level of success in other regions, and their successes do not impact those who cannot obtain coverage – and the central issue of this article has been about the significant negative impact of such a deficit. The IHC example does, however, stand in stark relief to both the inadequate business-as-usual attitude, and the proposition advanced above that a national single-payer system is the best path to effective health care reform. Other examples exist around the nation also; one that comes to mind is Northwest Hospital in Seattle, whose presentation at the Annual Quality Congress of the American Society for Quality control this year reveals yet another organization deriving significant cost savings and quality improvement from diligent application of CQI methods.
Rule number one of CQI is “listen to the customer,” and thus far the customers are prohibitively wary of the idea of creating a huge new national program, and political reality that is unlikely to shift anytime soon. The argument provided by shift at Al takes into account an enormous amount of evidence and theory generated from within healthcare and the wider quality sciences, but serious questions remain unresolved with respect to the needs and concerns of health care consumers, whose overwhelming support would be needed to implement a single-payer health care system.
OK, let’s back up a couple years prior to that. The following is a snip from a 2008 blog post of mine, reflecting some QIO experience circa 1992:
THE U.S. "HEALTH CARE" "SYSTEM"?
I will by no means be the first to note that our medical industry is not really a "system," nor is it predominantly about "health care." It is more aptly described as a patchwork post hoc disease and injury management and remediation enterprise, one that is more or less "systematic" in any true sense only at the clinical level. Beyond that it comprises a confounding perplex of endlessly contending for-profit and not-for-profit entities acting far too often at ruinously expensive cross-purposes.
Another quick personal story:
During my first tenure (early 1990's) serving as an analyst for the Nevada/Utah Medicare Peer Review Agency (they're now called "QIO's" - Quality Improvement Organizations), in addition to our core Medicare oversight work, we had a number of small sidebar contracts, one of which involved ongoing analytical assessments of the Clark County Nevada self-funded employee health plan. One morning I accompanied my Sup, our Senior Analyst Dr. Moore, to a regular meeting of the plan's Executive Committee, wherein we would report on our latest plan utilization/outcomes evaluation.
A portion of the morning -- perhaps a half-hour, IIRC -- was always devoted to hearing claims denials appeals brought by Clark County employees. This day, two appeals were heard: one regarding an outpatient medical claim, the other concerning a dental encounter. The total sum at issue was about $350. Both appeals were denied, thereby "saving" the plan this nominal amount.
Bored by this administrative tedium, as I sat at the conference table, I did a quick, rough estimate back-of-the-envelope calculation. About a dozen executive/professional people consumed a half hour adjudicating these disputes, or, equivalently, 6 FTE hours. Assume a plausible blended G&A-multiplied cost estimate of the total compensation time for all these folks, plus all of the clerical/administrative time consumed in the processing (and subsequently denying) of these minor claims from the moment of their filing to this very hour.
Clark County easily spent well in excess of an additional $1,000 to "save" $350 at the expense of these two hapless employees, by my reckoning.
Similar scenarios -- public and private -- surely play out every day within our "health care system." Clark County would have been way ahead to have simply vetted the initial claims for fraud and then paid them! (This is one observation implicitly at the heart of the "Universal Coverage / Single Payer" model.)
But, as my Senior Medical Director was fond of pointing out, "every misspent dollar in our health care system goes into someone's paycheck."
"16% OF GDP"
And soon to rise to 20% and beyond, it is asserted -- lest we find the political will to rein in the nationally and personally eviscerating cost of "health care" in the U.S.
Question: in my foregoing Clark County Health Plan anecdote, beyond the two denied employee claims I cited that totaled about $350, is the extra thousand or so administrative outlay also placed on the "health care" expenditure ledger? So that what should have cost $350 (plus minimal initial clerical claim processing overhead) ended up as ~$1,350? (Note that the ~$350, while denied by Clark County, still had to be paid by the respective employees.)
We really have no clear picture regarding episodes such as this. And, we have no clear picture as to how prevalent are such ongoing wheel-spinning, sand-in-the-gears activities, and to what expense ledger they get posted...
I have lots more. Spanning decades. Addressing myriad aspects of the domain. e.g., a decade ago:
Stay tuned...
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