Guidance Toward High Value Care

Guidance Toward High Value Care

Posted on by jabittan
In his book The Elephant in the Brain, Robin Hanson explains that a lot of medical care and healthcare services are more about signaling than about the value they bring to the patient in terms of improved health and effective management or treatment of a given condition. Healthcare has a lot of signaling, showing others that we make enough money that we can go do something for our health, pushing others to get care to show how much we value having them be healthy, and giving us or others a chance to show how much we know and understand the human body. However, not a lot of what we push people toward really demonstrates that it adds a lot of value.

 

This is a problem that Dave Chase thinks is a big contributor to our nation’s healthcare woes in his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call. Chase is critical of unnecessary services and a medical system that pushes people toward care, without providing means to ensure that the care we push people toward is actually valuable. He recounts a conversation he had with Dr. Martin Sepulveda, “indiscriminate provision of health care services – absent efforts to help people understand how to use those services – leads to voracious appetites from both patients and providers for services that add little value but add a lot of cost to the individual, company, and society.”

 

When a child runs to their mother for a kiss on a bruised knee, the kiss doesn’t actually add any value in terms of helping heal the child’s bruise. But the care provided by the mother does signal her love for her child, signals to the child that they are valuable and important, and signals to others that the child has allies who will aid them during a time of need. The example is extreme, but if you look close enough, you will see some of the same aspects at play in many of our healthcare interactions.

 

Increasing access to healthcare without helping people understand what care they should seek, without helping people understand what options they really have, and without guidance toward high value care, means that we will use healthcare in a wasteful manner. Paying providers just by the number of procedures they do, and not by how much they help patients, encourages unnecessary medical procedures. Telling patients that if they value themselves they will go to the doctor every time they feel a little off will lead to patients overusing primary care. And pushing people to the emergency room every time they say they don’t feel well could crowd our ERs and delay care for those who really need it. The problem is difficult to solve, and I want to acknowledge that it is hard to know what care is really appropriate and what is wasteful signaling. That is the point that Chase makes. Without more transparency and clarity in the system, we won’t really know what medical services we should and should not pursue, and we (along with providers) will likely overindulge in high-signaling low-value care rather than medical treatments that are really useful and meaningful.
Steel, Coffee Beans, and Healthcare

Steel, Coffee Beans, & Healthcare

Posted on by jabittan
“GM spends more on health care than steel, just as starbucks spends more on health care than coffee beans.” Dave Chase writes in his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call. “For most companies, health care is the second largest expense after payroll. This puts you in the health care business.”

 

It is incredible to think that major companies like Starbucks and GM spend more on healthcare than on the products they produce that make them stand out. It feels incredibly troubling and a bit counter to our American pro-business narrative for our companies to spend so much on something that is not a key part of their business and that is not part of their core competency. But as a quote from Warran Buffett that Chase uses to open the 11th chapter of his book says, “GM is a health and benefits company with an auto company attached.” 

 

I am among those who think that one of the greatest failures in America’s healthcare past was to allow businesses to provide health benefits with a tax break for the company. Rather than paying employees more money, which would come with higher tax rates, companies have been allowed to provide health benefits, which instead come with tax breaks. This is how we have fallen into a system where the quality of care, the structure of access to healthcare, and what you pay is largely determined by how well your employer does with navigating the complex healthcare landscape. You might work for someone like Harris Rosen who has figured out how to provide large amounts of preventative services with low costs, or you might work for a cash strapped organization with a random HR person trying to make healthcare plan decisions while also dealing with that employee who won’t take down the inappropriate calendar in their office and is simultaneously trying to review several applications for a new position.

 

The reality of healthcare spending by companies shows us that they cannot reasonably expect to have an inexperienced HR person handle healthcare benefits. The spending is too high for someone who is not completely focused on industry trends and changes, someone who doesn’t understand how insurance companies and PBMs work, and someone who has multiple other responsibilities to manage. If we want to keep private health insurance tied to our jobs, then we need to demand better from our employers and our public policy.

 

When we discuss the costs of healthcare in our nation, and when we consider whether a single entity (the Federal Government) should provide health insurance versus having everyone either buy private insurance through individual markets or receive health insurance through their employer, we need to consider the reality of business spending on healthcare. We need to ask whether GM should be producing cars and accountable to so many employees for their basic health needs. Maybe there is still a space for GM to be involved with the health of their workforce, but should they be the entire determining factor, spending more on healthcare than the steel that goes into the cars they produce? These are the questions I would like to focus on when we think about how we should access and pay for the care we receive.
Data Liquidity

Data Liquidity in Healthcare

Posted on by jabittan
Another piece of Dave Chase’s Fair Trade for Health Care as outlined in his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call is what he calls Data Liquidity. It is the idea that you can access your data, see it, contribute to it, and take it someplace else if you want. The idea that you have control over your data – the data you produce in the world, the data which is about you – is a new and growing idea in the world.

 

Data Liquidity is a problem with all of tech right now, but it is especially important in the healthcare industry. Chase writes, “Care teams do their best work when they have the most complete view of a patient’s health status. Anything less comes with an increased risk of harm. Likewise, your employees should have easy access to their own information in a secure patient-controlled data repository  – including the right to contribute their own data or take it elsewhere.”

 

In the world of social media, people (at least in Europe) have demanded to have the right to see their data and have it completely removed from a company’s server if they desire. In the world of finance, there is increasing pressure on the big three credit rating companies to be more transparent in how they determine an individual’s credit score, and some lawmakers want to push the companies to change what they consider and evaluate when generating a credit score. Within healthcare, the debate is on who owns a patient’s medical records. Does the medical provider own the records? Does the patient own the records? What records does the insurance company own?

 

Chase argues that patients need to own their medical records and have access to and control over them. Since most people get their insurance through their employers, Chase argues that it is up to businesses and companies to demand data liquidity and transparency within the contracts they establish with insurers and healthcare systems. It is up to the businesses which contract with employers or health systems to set fair rules related to data that give employees data power and the ability to ensure all of their providers have access to all of their pertinent records.

 

From tech to finance to healthcare, people are starting to see the importance of controlling data, and Chase is hopeful that this revolution will improve healthcare quality, reduce unnecessary procedures, and reduce healthcare costs.
Transparent Price Bundles

Transparent Price Bundles

Posted on by jabittan
One of the items that Dave Chase calls for in his Fair Trade for Health Care Plan in his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call is bundled prices. He wants pricing to be transparent and up-front so that patients know what services they are receiving, and he wants prices to be bundled for any procedures that we undergo.

 

As chase writes, “Imagine buying a car and getting a bill for the transmission six months later. You’d be livid, yet this sort of thing happens all the time in the healthcare industry.” If you have ever gone to an emergency room or had a surgery, you likely have experienced what Chase is talking about. You were probably billed for the procedure and the doctor who saw you, but then you might receive a separate facility bill some time later, or you might receive a separate bill from the anesthesiologist months after you thought you had finished paying everything from the procedure or emergency room visit that you had.

 

The amount of additional bills that keep rolling in from a single procedure can be frustrating and overwhelming. You likely get an explanation of benefits that to an ordinary person doesn’t explain much of anything, and then you get multiple bills from multiple entities with no clear explanation of why you are receiving another bill. The confusion can easily frustrated patients and prevent them from being able to contest what many see as unreasonable charges.

 

In Chase’s Fair Trade for Health Care, providers would have to be up front about any costs that patients are going to incur before a procedure or encounter. This would include bundling all prices together ahead of time to reduce surprise billing. A patient can try to anticipate charges, but if they can’t anticipate who will be billing them, they cannot truly have a sense of what a procedure will cost them. This is an unfair practice from healthcare providers and drives up costs for everyone.
Rationing Care

Rationing Care

Posted on by jabittan
A fear in the United States is that moving toward a universal healthcare system would mean that we would have to ration care. At this point, our doctors and nurses are already overwhelmed by the number of patients under their care. They already have packed waiting rooms and some specialties are booking out months and months in advance. Big cities have primary care providers with full practices, and rural towns don’t have enough doctors, especially specialists, for their population. Opening up the healthcare system to make sure everyone has affordable access means that the system will become even more backlogged, and care will have to be rationed to prevent it from being overwhelmed by a sudden flood of people scheduling appointments.

 

However, Dave Chase points out, in his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call, that we are already rationing care. He writes, “While some worry about rationing care, the volume-driven reimbursement system has always rationed choices by pushing us toward costly, invasive treatment options.”

 

In other words, we are already doing a poor job of allocating healthcare resources, and we are already rationing our healthcare in an inequitable manner. We are rationing it by price, shutting out those who cannot afford treatment and over-prescribing unnecessary treatment to those with the means to pay for it.

 

I think a big hesitation around universal healthcare in the United States is that we tie everything into deservingness. We have ideas of who deserves a raise, who deserves to have a nice car or a fancy office, and who deserves help and who doesn’t. Healthcare fits into that same system of deservingness, and giving healthcare to people for free means that we won’t be rationing care by the same system of deservingness. Suddenly, people who are wealthy who have been telling themselves and others how much they deserve their wealth and the things it brings would not be prioritized by the healthcare system, and priority would maybe be given to those with the most serious need or who had the greatest likelihood to benefit from medical intervention. This doesn’t seem to fit with our American story, and that is where the fears of rationing care may stem from. Like Chase said however, we are already rationing care, but not in the most effective and equitable manner.
Pharmacy Benefit Managers

Pharmacy Benefit Managers – Another Shadow Healthcare Actor

Posted on by jabittan
Unless you are a health policy person, I’m guessing you have not heard of pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs. The Commonwealth Fund describes a PBM as “a company that manages prescription drug benefits on behalf of health insurers, Medicare Part D, large employers and other payers … by negotiating with drug manufacturers and pharmacies to control drug spending.” I always thought that pharmacy prices were set directly by my insurance carrier, in contracts that they had worked out somewhere along the line. But it turns out it is more complicated than that, and if you are like me, you will probably understand that PBMs provide some value, but also feel as though they are another actor doing little but driving the cost of healthcare up. For me, it is probably a bit unreasonable, but I hate PBMs.

 

In his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call, Dave Chase explains how pharmacy benefit managers negotiate rebates with drug companies and insurance carriers for specific drugs. However, the rebates don’t actually get back to the patients. Usually the insurance carrier and PBM are the ones who benefit from the rebate, and specific medications are pushed toward patients so the PBM and insurer can get the rebate. PBMs operate way in the back, and don’t get the same scrutiny as health insurance companies. They are hidden and shielded from risk, which means they have little incentive to put patients first.

 

“PBMs are typically paid by the transaction or employee; it’s not their money, so its not their risk,” writes Chase. “They may strive to handle claims quickly and efficiently, but their defenses against fraud and abuse of prescription drugs are antiquated. The shared responsibilities of the employer or government agency and the PBM create situations in which neither can see the whole picture. Criminals exploit this weakness, leading to a flood of prescription opioids on the street. The American insurance system has allowed this distribution explosion to occur, doing little to nothing to halt its growth.“

 

The quote above highlights the misaligned incentives with PBMs, insurers, and governments or employers. PBMs that hide data, favor medications for unclear reasons, and don’t face a lot of direct risk have created lots of problems for the American healthcare system. I opened with a discussion of pricing problems brought on by PBMs, and Chase’s quote shows how they have also contributed to the abuse of prescription opioids. Chase’s book, with examples like the ones laid out in this post, paints a worrying picture of pharmacy benefit managers in the United States. It is partly the complexity they add in the system, and partly the shady behind the scenes deals they are a part of that make me dislike them so much. This type of confusing and apparently unethical role for PBMs is also part of the reason that a lot of people want a universal healthcare system that is able to negotiate drug prices and set specific limits on some costs. It might not save everyone a ton of money in the long run, but it might be more ethical and clarify some of the most confusing parts of the system.
Healthcare Brokers

A Hidden Obstacle in Controlling Healthcare Costs: Brokers

Posted on by jabittan
If you are a large company, you probably don’t have one person or department contacting various insurance agencies, hospitals, and pharmacies to get everything in place for the health insurance you provide to your employees. You likely work with a broker who is your agent in negotiating with insurance and healthcare companies. They help you understand the contract you sign with a carrier, and if you are going the self-insured route, they likely help navigate hospital and pharmacy contracts as well.

 

The broker you choose can greatly influence how much your company is going to pay for the health insurance provided to employers, for the administration of a self-insured plan, and even for individual services with providers. Brokers often position themselves as buyers agents, that is as representatives of the company looking to purchase coverage or administration, however, many brokers are simultaneously working for hospitals or for insurance agencies. What’s more, the hospital or insurance agency might compensate the broker more than your company, making the broker more of sellers agent than a buyers agent. Dave Chase highlights and explains this in his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call:

 

“Your business is just one piece of the total, but keeping it with the same carrier can boost the broker’s total compensation by 50% or more. Because this compensation isn’t specific to you, status quo brokers will often claim they’ve disclosed fees and commissions. But they are actually only disclosing your account-specific fees and commissions that may not even be the most significant piece of their overall compensation.”

 

If a broker is getting paid by an insurance carrier to keep your company with that carrier, then your chances of shopping around to find better alternatives are slim. Your broker is likely to encourage you to stick with your current carrier and accept whatever fee increase they present you with for next year’s coverage.

 

Chase continues, “Forward-looking brokers have sent me letters from insurance carriers saying they’d be fired when they spoke the truth about egregious practices the carrier was inflicting on the broker’s clients. This makes it clear that the carriers view brokers as a quasi-employee they can fire at will. In other works, they are working for the carrier, not your organization.”

 

The company that Dave Chase runs can help you identify trustworthy and high quality brokers. If you select a broker at random or just because you have a good relationship with them, you run the risk of working with someone who is not as independent as you think. The connections and world of insurance carriers and brokers is complex, and navigating it successfully on your own is challenging.

 

At another point, when addressing brokers, Chase writes, “You should always ask your benefits broker or claims administrator if a local hospital is a client, as that is a clear conflict of interest, especially when the hospital itself owns the insurance carrier.”

 

It is clear to me that the healthcare industry has too many entities that are tied together in unclear ways. If we hope to change the system in the future to be more equitable, to reduce prices, and to actually provide quality services, these status quo relationships will have to be broken up. That might be a task the government can solve, but Chase would argue that companies have the tools to do that work as well, they often just don’t utilize the leverage that they have.
The Specter of Rationing Care

The Specter of Rationing Care

Posted on by jabittan
American’s fear having to wait for anything. We want to order things from the comfort of our own home and have them delivered in two days. We don’t want to wait behind more than three people in line at the grocery store, and we don’t want to wait for medical care (to be honest these are all examples from my own life – not picking on anyone who isn’t like me here). Our fear of waiting is used as a reason against universal health coverage. We are told about Canadians who cross to the United States to have surgeries that they would have to wait several months to have in Canada. We are told that we won’t be able to schedule an immediate primary care appointment if more people were to have access to health care. And we are told that the high costs of medical care stop unnecessary care from happening, preventing us from having to wait to see a doctor.

 

However, these fears of waiting and the specter of rationing care presented to us in these scenarios is overblown. It is true that some Canadians chose to get care in the United States for elective procedures, but presenting that fact to us in isolation is misleading and done in bad faith. The reality of our waiting for care is much more complex. Dave Chase does a good job of explaining it in his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call, “People often raise the specter of rationing care. In reality, it’s overuse (i.e., unnecessary and potentially harmful care) that leads to reduced access by squandering enormous financial resources that would be better used for individuals who actually need care and can’t get it.”

 

We act as though our healthcare system is following good market incentives to find a good balance between wait times and receiving the right care. But we often fail to acknowledge that our healthcare system isn’t performing like an ideal market, and that it often pushes people to too much of the wrong type of care. Chase details this in his book with unnecessary back surgeries. Those who have a legitimate need for a back surgery might have to wait, because primary care providers get a bonus when they refer patients to orthopedic surgeons who are paid to operate. The right path for a patient might be physical therapy, but the money for the providers is in the surgery.

 

We should not raise the specter of rationing care when we are so wasteful with the care we provide through our current system. We waste a lot of money when we don’t have a concern about rationing care, and when we reward providers for doing more surgeries, prescribing more pills, and offering more treatment, even if the efficacy isn’t proven. In his book, Chase doesn’t advocate for a universal coverage system with healthcare covered by the federal government, but he does show how employers today can do more to ensure their patients get more of the good care (the effective PT and preventative check-ups) for free. This reduces the demand on the expensive and unproven treatments later on, and actually reduces the demand on the system for services that we are afraid of rationing.
Thoughts on Health Insurance Companies

Thoughts on Health Insurance Companies

Posted on by jabittan
Moving to a universal healthcare system with everything run by the Federal government might not solve all the problems in our healthcare system, and it might not really reduce all of our healthcare costs, but at least it would give us someone to hold accountable for rising costs, challenges with accessing care, and questionable quality of care. People across the United States are frustrated by healthcare providers and systems that seem to always be raising their costs and charging outrageous fees for basic medical care. Younger people today seem to find the idea of profiting on medical care to be slightly unethical, and health insurance company practices do a lot to increase people’s discontent with the current system and actors. In short, a lot of people probably just want to move to universal coverage provided by the government just to simplify the process and cut out insurance companies, especially when the average consumer can’t understand what benefit the insurance company provides.

 

These thoughts about our discontent with our current system came to mind this morning after reading the following passage that I highlighted in Dave Chase’s book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call. Chase writes, “If you’re a fully insured employer and have higher-than-expected claims in one year, your insurance carrier will work to get as much back as possible in subsequent years through larger premium increases.”

 

What Chase describes is something that not everyone is directly aware of or able to explain, but it is something many of us have a vague feeling of or intuitive expectation of. Rather than existing as organizations to help us be healthy, rather than trying to solve a problem, rather than caring about our health needs, many people simply see health insurance as stealing a few bucks from them, their employers, their providers, and from people who really need medical care. Insurance companies are seen as morally unethical, powerful government lobbiers, and as bureaucratic machines that treat everyone like numbers.

 

If you are not in favor of a public health insurance program, and if you think that private insurance is the way to go, ask yourself what the industry could do better to actually provide value to patients. If you are in a health insurance company and think you do provide value to your patients, ask yourself, why don’t people see it? Perhaps we only see the games that insurance plays to limit access to care, to increase premiums every year, and to squeeze hospitals and providers, causing us to misunderstand the benefits that insurance provides. If private health insurance really wants to survive in the future, the industry needs to do better at showing its value, and minimizing its greedy tricks, otherwise, you can’t blame the public for wanting to eliminate insurance companies and have an accountable government take on universal coverage.
Healthcare Stagnation

Healthcare Stagnation

Posted on by jabittan
We are facing a disastrous healthcare stagnation in the United States. Our hospitals are getting older, Medical providers are aging with too few young providers to replace them, and the quality of care that many of us experience is not getting much better. Despite this, the cost of healthcare has been soaring. Healthcare expenditures, including the costs of our deductibles, co-pays, and what our insurance pays out, has been going up at a rate reliably above inflation.

 

In The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call, Dave Chase writes the following about our healthcare stagnation, “Unlike virtually every other item in our economy, where the value proposition improves every year, the norm in health care for decades has been to pay more and get less. Also, unlike nearly every other industry, healthcare hasn’t had a productivity gain in 20 years.”

 

Productivity is how much we produce per unit of time spent on production. A factory that makes 5,000 widgets per hour is more productive than a factory that makes 1,000 widgets per hour. Automation and new technologies have helped factories and offices become more productive, but our healthcare stagnation is evidence that we are not seeing the same gains in healthcare. Technology has improved, but not in areas that seem to produce more healthy patients given the same amount of time and effort from our medical providers. We have some new technologies, but somehow those technologies have not translated into a healthcare system that supports the same number of people with fewer resources.

 

Chase continues, “In other words, for the last two decades, there has been a redistribution tax from the working and middle class and highly efficient industries to the least productive industry in America.” 

 

As your job has become more efficient and more productive, your healthcare costs have risen. Chase equates this healthcare stagnation price increase to a tax. Factories that can work with fewer employees, software engineers, and other employees form highly productive sectors are paying more in healthcare for services that haven’t kept the same pace as the industries of the patients they treat. This is the cost of healthcare stagnation that chase wants to push back against by demanding better systems and structures from healthcare providers, insurance companies, and benefits brokers. Chase believes we can find a way to improve our healthcare system and help people live healthier lives for less cost, if employers are willing to make real investments in their employees healthcare, and are willing to hold their brokers and insurance providers accountable for the value their products provide.