Tag: Healthcare

The Chicken and Egg Problem of Mental Health Issues and Homelessness

The Chicken and Egg Problem of Mental Health Issues and Homelessness

Posted on by jabittan
I recently wrote about the challenges of mental health and homelessness, and how sometimes homelessness itself causes mental health disorders in individuals. In general, we assume that people become homeless because they have mental health disorders, not that homelessness causes people to have mental health disorders. Elliot Liebow looks at the issue with a much more careful eye in his book Tell Them Who I Am. Liebow writes,
“Mental health problems and homelessness stood in a chicken-and-egg relationship to one another. Homelessness was seen as a cause of mental health problems just as often as mental health problems were seen as a cause of homelessness. Indeed, it was not uncommon for the women to use their homelessness to explain their sometimes ungenerous behavior.”
Being homeless is stressful. Homeless individuals cannot maintain many basic possessions. They face uncertainty with meals, where they will sleep, how they will go to the bathroom, and whether they will be in danger from weather, animals, or other people. They don’t have a lot of people, besides other homeless individuals, to speak to and get support from. Liebow writes about the ways this stress can boil over for the homeless, and how sometimes the women he profiled for his book would lash out or act irrationally and blame it on the stress of homelessness. With no safe places, shelters that impose rules and ask prying questions, and with little to keep one’s mind engaged and hopeful for a better future, it is not hard to imagine how the stress of homelessness could become overwhelming and spark mental health problems.
At the end of the day, however, this chicken-and-egg relationship should be encouraging. Not all the people who end up homeless have mental health problems – at least not when they initially experience homelessness. This means that early interventions and support can help keep people from developing worse mental health problems that prevent them from rejoining society. It also means that providing stable housing and shelter can help reduce some of the mental health problems that the homeless face, easing their potential reintegration into society. We can also look at the relationship between mental health and homelessness to see that providing more mental healthcare to people currently working and maintaining jobs may support them and keep them from becoming homeless. Preventative mental health care can prevent stress and anxiety worsening to drive someone into homeless where their mental health could further deteriorate. The key idea is that we shouldn’t dismiss the homeless as helpless crazy people. We should see investments in mental healthcare at all levels of society as a beneficial preventative measure to reduce and address homelessness.
Risk literacy and Reduced Healthcare Costs - Joe Abittan

Risk Literacy & Reduced Healthcare Costs

Posted on by jabittan
Gerd Gigerenzer argues that risk literacy and reduced healthcare costs go together in his book Risk Savvy. By increasing risk literacy we will help both doctors and patients better understand how behaviors contribute to overall health, how screenings may or may not reveal dangerous medical conditions, and whether medications will or will not make a difference for an individual’s long-term well being. Having both doctors and patients better understand and better discuss the risks and benefits of procedures, drugs, and lifestyle changes can help us use our healthcare resources more wisely, ultimately bringing costs down.
Gigerenzer argues that much of the modern healthcare system, not just the US system but the global healthcare system, has been designed to sell more drugs and more technology. Increasing the number of people using medications, getting more doctors to order more tests with new high-tech diagnostic machines, and driving more procedures became more of a goal than actually helping to improve people’s health. Globally, health and the quality of healthcare has improved, but healthcare is often criticized as a low productivity sector, with relatively low gains in health or efficiency for the investments we make.
I don’t know that I am cynical enough to accept all of Gigerenzer’s argument at face value, but the story of opioids, the fact that we invest much larger sums of money in cancer research versus parasitic disease research, and the ubiquitous use of MRIs in our healthcare landscape do favor Gigerenzer’s argument. There hasn’t been as much focus on improving doctor and patient statistical reasoning, and we haven’t put forward the same effort and funding to remove lead from public parks compared to the funding put forward for cancer treatments. We see medicine as treating diseases after they have popped up with fancy new technologies and drugs. We don’t see medicine as improving risk and health literacy or as helping improve the environment before people get sick.
This poor vision of healthcare that we have lived with for so long, Gigerenzer goes on to argue, has blinded us to the real possibilities within healthcare. Gigerenzer writes, “calls for better health care have been usually countered by claims that this implies one of two alternatives, which nobody wants: raising taxes or rationing care. I argue that there is a third option: by promoting health literacy of doctors and patients, we can get better care for less money.”
Improving risk and health literacy means that doctors can better understand and better communicate which medications, which tests, and which procedures  are most likely to help patients. It will also help patients better understand why certain recommendations have been made and will help them push back against the feeling that they always need the newest drugs, the most cutting edge surgery, and the most expensive diagnostic screenings. Regardless of whether we raise taxes or try to ration care, we have to help people truly understand their options in new ways that incorporate tools to improve risk literacy and reduce healthcare costs. By better understanding the system, our own care, and our systemic health, we can better utilize our healthcare resources, and hopefully bring down costs by moving our spending into higher productivity healthcare spaces.
On The Opportunity To Profit From Uninformed Patients

On The Opportunity To Profit From Uninformed Patients

Posted on by jabittan
The American Medical System is in a difficult and dangerous place right now. Healthcare services have become incredibly expensive, and the entire system has become so complex that few people fully understand it and even fewer can successfully navigate the system to get appropriate care that they can reasonably afford. My experience is that many people don’t see value in much of the care they receive or with many of the actors connected with their care. They know they need insurance to afford their care, but they really can’t see what value their insurance provides – it often appears to be more of a frustration than something most people appreciate. The same can be true for primary care, anesthesiologists, and the variety of healthcare benefits that employers may offer to their patients. There seem to be lots of people ready to profit from healthcare, but not a lot of people ready to provide real value to the people who need it.
 
These sentiments are all generalizations, and of course many people really do see value in at least some of their healthcare and are grateful for the care they receive. However, the complexity, the lack of transparency, and the ever climbing costs of care have people questioning the entire system, especially at a moral and ethical level. I think a great deal of support for Medicare for All, or universal healthcare coverage, comes from people thinking that profit within medicine may be unethical and from a lack of trust that stems from an inability to see anything other than a profit motive in many healthcare actors and services.
 
Gerd Gigerenzer writes about this idea in his book Risk Savvy. In the book he doesn’t look at healthcare specifically, but uses healthcare to show the importance of being risk literate in today’s complex world. Medical health screening in particular is a good space to demonstrate the harms that can come from misinformed patients and doctors. A failure to understand and communicate risk can harm patients, and it can actually create perverse incentives for healthcare systems by providing them the opportunity to profit from uninformed patients. Gigerenzer quotes Dr. Otis Brawley who had been Director of the Georgia Cancer Center at Emory in Atlanta.
 
In Dr. Brawley’s quote, he discusses how Emory could have screened 1,000 men at a mall for prostate cancer and how the hospital could have made $4.9 million in billing for the tests. Additionally the hospital would have profited from future services when men returned for other unrelated healthcare concerns as established patients. In Dr. Brawley’s experience, the hospital could tell him how much they could profit from the tests, but could not tell him whether screening 1,000 men early for prostate cancer would have actually saved any lives among the 1,000 men screened. Dr. Brawley knew that screening many men would lead to false positive tests, and unnecessary stress and further medical diagnostic care for those false positives – again medical care that Emory would profit from. The screenings would also identify men with prostate cancer that was unlikely to impact their future health, but would nevertheless lead to treatment that would make the men impotent or potentially incontinent. The hospital would profit, but their patients would be worse off than if they had not been screened. Dr. Brawley’s experience was that the hospital could identify avenues for profit, but could not identify avenues to provide real value in the healthcare services they offer.
 
Gigerenzer found this deeply troubling. A failure to understand and communicate the risks of prostate cancer (which is more complex than I can write about here) presents an opportunity for healthcare providers to profit by pushing unnecessary medical screening and treatment onto patients. Gigerenzer also notes that profiting from uninformed patients is not just limited to cancer screening. Doctors who are not risk literate cannot adequately explain risks and benefits of treatment to patients, and their patients cannot make the best decisions for themselves. This is a situation that needs to change if hospitals want to keep the trust of their patients and avoid being a hated entity that fails to demonstrate value. They will go the way of health insurance companies, with frustrated patients wanting to eliminate them altogether.
 
Wrapping up the quote from Dr. Brawley, Gigerenzer writes, “profiting from uninformed patients is unethical. medicine should not be a money game.” I believe that Gigerenzer and Dr. Brawley are right, and I think that all healthcare actors need to clearly demonstrate their value, otherwise any profits they earn will make them look like money-first enterprises and not patient-first enterprises, frustrating the public and leading to distrust in the medical field. In the end, this is going to be harmful for everyone involved. Demonstrating real value in healthcare is crucial, and profiting from uniformed patients will diminish the value provided and hurt trust, making the entire healthcare system in our country even worse.

Risk Literacy Builds Trust

Risk Literacy Builds Trust

Posted on by jabittan

In his book Risk Savvy Gerd Gigerenzer writes about a private medical panel and lecture series that he participated in. Gigerenzer gave a presentation about the importance of risk literacy between doctors and their patients and how frequently both misinterpret medical statistics. Regarding the dangers this could pose for the medical industry, Gigerenzer wrote the following, recapping a discussion he had with the CEO of the organization hosting the lectures and panel:

“I asked the CEO whether his company would consider it an ethical responsibility to do something about this key problem. The CEO made it clear that his first responsibility is with the shareholders, not patients or doctors. I responded that the banks had also thought so before the subprime crisis. At some point in the future, patients will notice how often they are being misled instead of informed, just as bank customers eventually did. When this happens, the health industry may lose the trust of the public, as happened to the banking industry.”

I focus a lot on healthcare since that is the space where I started my career and where I focused most of my studies during graduate school. I think Gigerenzer is correct in noting that risk literacy builds trust, and that a lack of risk literacy can translate to a lack of trust. Patients trust doctors because health and medicine is complex, and doctors are viewed as learned individuals who can decipher the complexity to help others live well. However, modern medicine is continuing to move into more and more complex fields where statistics and risk play a more prominent role. Understanding genetic test results, knowing whether a given medicine will work for someone based on their microbiome, and using and interpreting AI tools requires proficient risk literacy. If doctors can’t build risk literacy skills, and if they cannot communicate risk to patients, then patients will feel misled, and the trust that doctors have will slowly diminish.

Gigerenzer did not feel that his warning at the panel was well received. “The rest of the panel discussion was about business plans, which really captured the emotions of the health insurers and politicians present. Risk-literate doctors and patients are not part of the business.”

Healthcare has to be patient centered, not shareholder centered. If healthcare is not about patients, then the important but not visible and not always profitable work that is necessary to build risk literacy and build trust won’t take place. Eventually, patients will recognize when they are placed behind shareholders in terms of importance to a hospital, company, or healthcare system, and the results will not be good for their health or for the shareholders.

Design Matters - Healthcare Systems Edition

Design Matters – Healthcare Edition

Posted on by jabittan
In his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call, Dave Chase quotes Dan Munro by writing, “The [healthcare] system was never broken, it was designed this way.”

 

I’m a fan of Debbie Millman’s podcast, Design Matters. When we are making something that other people will use and engage with, it is important to think about all the various aspects of how the thing will be used and how it can meet the needs and expectations of others. Whether what we are producing is art, a branding campaign, or a national healthcare system, design matters.

 

Unfortunately, the Untied State’s healthcare system wasn’t built on a design matters philosophy. We see inefficiencies everywhere, with some people getting care they don’t need while others can’t get routine basic care that could save their lives. Dan Munro says that the system was built this way, meaning that the inefficiencies, the inequalities, and the high costs were part of the system from the beginning, intentionally built in. The dysfunction we see in the system, according to Munro, is not so much a bug but rather a feature, helping someone make a profit or get priority access to the healthcare they want.

 

I think Munro is a little wrong. I think the system is a hodgepodge of pieces smashed together over the years. It is an incoherent patchwork of tools and players that has been haphazardly assembled over the years, with some working to truly do good, and others taking advantage of design flaws for their own aims. The system, in my argument, was never designed at all.

 

Design matters and what needed to happen decades ago was a real conversation about how the country would design a healthcare system that could innovate, that could meet the needs of citizens, that could ensure basic access to medical services, that could help provide preventative care rather than just emergency interventions, and that could be sustainable. Instead, doctors went about providing medical services, insurance companies popped up to help pay for some pieces here and there, and eventually businesses got in the mix and offered health insurance to employees. Each new step in healthcare in the Untied States has happened almost randomly, without a lot of deliberate planning.

 

Now the system is so large and complex that planning feels impossible. Legislation to address the challenges of the system is thousands of pages long, and because the most comprehensive law to restructure the program adopted the namesake of the nation’s first black president, a Democrat that became a polarizing figure, half the country derided the attempt to design something better. We can try to reshape bits and pieces of the system now, but design matters, and I understand why so many want to hit a restart button and rebuild a system from scratch.
Healthcare Profit and Subsidization

Healthcare Profit and Subsidization

Posted on by jabittan
Medicaid simply doesn’t pay enough for many medical providers to make a profit. The reimbursement rates often cover only fixed costs, and don’t really cover the full operating costs of a service. Medicare pays slightly better, usually covering operating costs and sometimes providing just enough for a small profit. Private insurance, however, pays a lot more than the two main public funding sources for health care in the United States. It is in private insurance that profit is to be made for medical providers.

 

As Dave Chase writes in his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call, “While employer and union health plans are roughly one-half of all health care spending, they likely represent over two-thirds of health care industry profits because they often wildly overpay for health care services.”

 

Think about who is most likely to need healthcare services: elderly and disabled individuals. Our system of Medicare pays just enough for providers to make a tiny profit, most of the time, for elderly patients. Our patchwork of state Medicaid systems, which many poor, minority, and often disabled individuals rely on for health care coverage, pays below operating rates for many procedures. While we have more elderly people utilizing the healthcare system and while we have more low income individuals with disabilities relying on healthcare, services for these two groups is not where profit is generated in healthcare. Instead, profit is generated from the reasonably healthy people who work steady jobs and heave employer provided insurance. The charges to private insurance companies are so high that even though their patients use less care, they provide a much greater percentage of the providers’ profit margins.

 

The first implication of this system that I want to highlight is the inequality in terms of access that arises within the system. If you rely on Medicaid, you may have trouble finding a provider who will take you. That is because the provider knows that while they will get paid for treating you, they might not actually break even for their time. There are other patients out there who offer more profit to the provider than what your Medicaid coverage will offer.  Because of the low reimbursement rates of Medicaid, many providers cap the number of Medicaid patients they see, making it harder for people on Medicaid to receive any services at all. For Medicaid patients, care is strictly rationed.

 

The second piece that I want to highlight is a way of framing the costs in this scenario. Providers lose money on Medicaid, maybe make money on Medicare, and jack up their prices for private insurance to ensure they make a profit at the end of the day. A lot of times providers will justify this approach by describing their high rates to private insurance patients as subsidizing the meager rates they receive from seeing patients covered by public plans. In a country that hates the idea of government redistribution and direct subsidizing of healthcare for the poor through taxes to support universal healthcare, we are already subsidizing the care of those who can’t afford care.

 

Most healthcare providers generally want to help people, it is usually a big part of what pulled them into their work in the first place. And even without Medicaid, many of them would likely still treat some people with no means to pay, writing off the free care they provided and potentially charging other patients more so they could afford to take on some charity cases. In a system built on empathy and care for the health and well-being of others, there is no way to avoid subsidizing other people’s care, at least a little bit.

 

I think we should be honest with the fact that we are already subsidizing healthcare to a large extent through our private health insurance system and the charges from providers for patients with private health plans. The incredibly high charges to private health insurance means higher premiums for everyone on those plans. For some reason we hate the idea of having to pay higher taxes for free health care, but are willing to shove out unreasonable healthcare premiums for expensive health insurance.
Value in Healthcare

Value in Healthcare

Posted on by jabittan
A common complaint about healthcare in the United States is that it has traditionally operated on a fee for service (FFS) based model. It is a natural and easy to understand system, and generally the type of system that both patients and providers prefer. The idea is that you pay for the services you receive from a healthcare provider. So if you need a tooth extracted, you go and have the tooth extracted and pay for the extraction. If you need a skin check, you go and get a skin check and pay for it. However, this FFS model can encourage a lot of waste through unnecessary medical procedures, and the value in healthcare is sometimes lost when we wait until someone has a problem before we help them with their health.

 

A lot of government programs, employers, and insurance companies are making efforts to push against FFS in an effort to provide greater value in the healthcare services we pay for, but it is worth asking, what is value and how can healthcare systems provide it? Is value just better health? Is it services that a patient said they were happy about? Is it care that saves a life or can it just be care that makes a life somewhat more comfortable? Dave Chase helps explain one aspect of value in healthcare in his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call, “Value is defined as the ratio of quality to cost. Value increases as the quality of the care increases or the cost of care decreases.”

 

FFS encourages short appointments where doctors cram as much as they can bill for into the shortest possible time before moving on to the next patient to do the same. Value based models, on the other hand, seek to improve the quality of the care provided without adding more costs to the patient and their insurer. As opposed to simply cramming in more tests, treatments, and procedures to get more money, value based systems that increase quality focus on improving health outcomes while keeping costs stable.

 

Alternatively, value based models might seek to keep quality the same, but reduce overall costs. This can wade into territory we don’t necessarily want to support, such as cutting nurse management staff to keep overhead low, but it could also look like more comprehensive care to reduce costly re-admissions after a procedure. When we think about value and try to build systems around value, we ultimately have to think about quality and cost, and how those are related. We can cut pieces out of the system that are just meant for signaling and cut pieces out that might be unnecessary without diminishing quality. But at the same time, we really need to examine whether the pieces we want to cut really do help with the quality of the care, especially over the long run.

 

Thinking about value in healthcare isn’t entirely new, but it is receiving increased focus, which is important if we want to have a healthcare system that people actually trust and are willing to engage with when necessary.
Status Quo in Healthcare

Status Quo in Healthcare

Posted on by jabittan
How can we really make change to the United States healthcare system? Dave Chase, in his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call argues that changes to the system need to come from private businesses, because private businesses are responsible for the health insurance coverage for over 50% of American’s. If business don’t take action and demand changes, Chase argues, then the system will not have enough strength to push against the status quo of rising costs and stagnant productivity within healthcare.

 

A quote from Chase about changing the American healthcare system reveals something larger about public opinion and the status quo in American public policy in general. Chase writes, “This book focuses on non-legislative strategies since the politics of health care are fraught with pitfalls. As we know, the best way to perpetuate the status quo is to politicize a topic – and nothing is easier to politicize than health care.”

 

I think Chase is correct about politicization and the status quo in the United States. Our country has deeply internalized ideas of liberal and conservative and wedded those ideas to the Democratic and Republican parties. This means that if an idea is taken up by a party, if it is politicized and adopted by a party, then it instantly becomes an identity marker, and people who might not have had a strong reason to care about an issue, suddenly find it to be a maker of who they are and what groups they belong to. Politicizing an issue in this system virtually guarantees gridlock, preventing any legislative action on the issue.

 

Private businesses, however, can make changes without relying on a 50% majority vote (or 2/3rds majority vote in congress). Throughout the book Chase presents economic and moral arguments for businesses to take the nation’s opioid crisis seriously, and uses it as a wake-up call to show businesses how our healthcare system is failing individuals, and ultimately failing the companies that hire those individuals and provide for much of the healthcare that individuals receive (or fail to receive). Public action is hard, so in many arenas, private action is the best chance for making the changes we want to see in the world.
Health Care Supply

Health Care Supply

Posted on by jabittan
Dave Chase makes an argument in his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call that healthcare has a substantial supply side drive, not just a demand side drive. This argument doesn’t align with standard pictures of healthcare, the idea that people seek care when they are sick, and don’t use care when they are well. Its troubling, but evidence does support the idea that the healthcare market is in some very important ways a supply driven market, meaning that as supply and capacity increases, demand also increases.

 

I’m not completely sure I understand this idea, but it is important for us to acknowledge and think about, especially if we live in growing cities, gentrifying regions of the country, and areas of the United States that have real opportunities for reinvention. When looking to the future of healthcare in the United States, Chase includes many elements from Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak’s book The New Localism and thinks there is an important role for new models of city and local government to play in shaping local healthcare ecosystems. He is also heavily influenced by Jim Clifton’s book The Coming Jobs War and the importance that local communities invest in sectors that are likely to be highly productive in the future. Chase writes,

 

“Sooner rather than later, we can expect other developments along the same 3.0 spectrum [More info on Economic Development 3.0 here]. Cities will incorporate true health needs into mater planning and review building permit applications with a deep understanding that health care is a supply-driven market. The more supply there is, the more demand will increase, with little regard for value and community well-being. Approving more health care build-out virtually guarantees a massive burden on local citizens.”

 

It is important that we think about what it is in healthcare that actually provides value. If simply adding more healthcare capacity will lead to greater demand and utilization, then we need to take steps to ensure that an uptick in services is actually accompanied by improvements in health. When communities are redeveloping and growing, they should be focused on upstream social determinants of health rather than just hospitals and healthcare service buildings. Designing communities that will have ample green space for outdoor activity, that will control noise, and will have well lit parks and outdoor areas will help build healthy communities. Plopping a hospital in a space that doesn’t include these elements might give people a place to go when they are stressed, overweight, and injured by debris in the streets, but it will not help people actually live healthier, it will capitalize on a broken environment that fails to support health.

 

I think that is part of the idea that Chase argues for. We should maintain the healthcare capacity and services which actually improve health, and we should be weary of systems that provide healthcare but fail to demonstrate real health improvements for citizens and communities.
Fiduciary Healthcare Responsibilities

More on Fiduciary Healthcare Responsibilities

Posted on by jabittan
Yesterday I wrote a little bit about the fiduciary healthcare responsibilities that employers hold given that companies invest our healthcare dollars in plans and structures that can be quite costly. In his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call, Dave Chase writes, “Given the wide cost differentials, CFOs and CEOs are failing in their fiduciary responsibility if they do not move to modern health care delivery models that are proven to save money while maintaining or improving health outcomes and patient satisfaction.”

 

Chase’s book is all about current structures and systems for healthcare coverage, delivery, and access that are within the control of employers. Healthcare is a complex field, and for years, employers have not had a hands-on role in shaping and creating the models they work through to provide health insurance to their employees. Chase argues that the result has been increasing costs without pressure on providers or insurers to make sure that the quality of care matched the costs.

 

Innovative and truly caring companies have shifted the status quo and shown that quality healthcare can be affordable. They have shown that preventative medicine can be supported and promoted by thoughtful employers, saving healthcare dollars and improving employee health in the long-term. Companies that ignore these models will effectively be wasting healthcare dollars and hindering the health of their workforce. This exposes companies to liability for not fulfilling their fiduciary healthcare responsibility.

 

When we talk about health policy and improving the healthcare system in the United States, we usually talk about government policy, about hospital charges, and about minimum standards for insurance and rising insurance premiums. Chase thinks we need to spend more time talking about our employers, and about what they can do to help improve the system, without requiring laws to be passed or companies to make policies that go against their own best interest. Employers have a lot of leverage if they take their fiduciary healthcare responsibility seriously.