Insuring You Have Insurance

It was really outrageous. It sheds light on our crazy health insurance system—and it is a warning to anyone considering going without health insurance or who thinks mandatory insurance is unnecessary. Here’s what happened:

A family member recently received an “explanation of benefits” from his insurer. He had had had a CT scan for which the hospital performing the test charged $1717. Leave aside for a moment that this is a preposterous fee. He was billed $237.21. Why the difference? The difference was due to the “discount” he received because his insurer had negotiated a rate with the hospital that was 14% of the rate the hospital wanted to charge. The insurer didn’t actually pay a cent—my relative has a “high deductible plan” and has to pay all medical fees until he his family has spent $5000 in a given year. But because he has insurance, he had to pay $237, not $1717. Put differently, if my relative didn’t have health insurance, he would have been charged the full $1717 for exactly the same test.

The system is a bit like scalpers charging extraordinarily high rates for tickets to popular shows or sports events. As long as the system of multiple private insurers is in place, where each insurer negotiates its own deals with “providers,” it’s terribly important to have insurance. If you don’t, you’ll be scalped.

With the Affordable Care Act once again under siege, it is critical to remind everyone why having health insurance matters. This is important for the over-65 population even though virtually everyone over 65 qualifies for health insurance in the form of Medicare. It’s important to older people because their caregivers tend to be under 65: if they get sick and don’t seek treatment because they lack insurance, they won’t be able to serve as caregivers. And it’s important because if those who are not quite old enough for Medicare don’t have private insurance, they may opt to defer taking care of medical problems until they reach 65. This then puts a significant strain on Medicare when they do enroll, potentially raising the cost of the program and putting it in jeopardy.

Mandating that everyone have health insurance makes sense because insurance is only viable if low-risk individuals subscribe along with those at high risk. If sick people are the only ones who buy health insurance, it will become inordinately expensive. Imagine, for example, that nobody bought car insurance until after they had a car accident—and then they expected the insurance to kick in immediately. Then the only people paying a premium would be those who filed claims. The insurance company would have to charge rates that were high enough to make good on all the claims—which means you would probably end up paying the same amount for your policy as you would have paid to fix your car—or to cover the costs of medical care for anyone injured—after an accident.  In the case of health and disease, insurers can get around this problem by deciding that if people wait until they get sick to buy insurance, they won’t be covered for precisely the condition that led to their deciding to insure!

Just keep in mind, that in addition to all these reasons for everyone having health insurance, there’s one more. As long as we have a system of private insurers that negotiate rates with health care “providers” (hospitals, physician groups, etc.), you will pay much less for medical care if you have insurance than if you don’t, even if your insurer pays nothing at all. If this seems absurd, it is, but that is how the system works.

Now, there are other ways to address this problem other than exhorting or requiring everyone to purchase health insurance. We could give everyone health insurance—as is done with Medicare Part A for people over 65—and use tax revenues to pay for the policy.  Medicare sets rates (as long as it has a monopoly, it doesn’t have to negotiate with each provider individually) and in many states, providers are required to “accept assignment.” That means your doctor cannot turn around and bill you the difference between what they charge and what Medicare pays them. But in the current world, you go without health insurance at your own peril.

How We Die

The data are out: in 2017, the opioid epidemic took even more American lives than in any previous year: a record 72,000 people died of an opioid overdose. As we struggle to figure out how to deal with this problem, it seems more important than ever to remember that opioids--morphine and its cousins--when used appropriately, can also be life giving. This is particularly true near the end of life, and one setting where people often receive such opioids is hospice care. Why are opioids beneficial in this setting and how can abuse be avoided?

For starters, we need to recognize that not everyone who is in the last phase of life needs opioids. Patients enrolled in hospice, for example, who typically have a prognosis of six months or less (the commonly used eligibility criterion) have a wide variety of diagnoses.  Of the 1.43 million Medicare patients enrolled in hospice in 2016 (only 5% of hospice patients are under age 65), 27% had cancer as their principal diagnosis. The remainder suffered primarily from cardiac disease, dementia or any of a number of other conditions. Some of the non-cancer patients experienced pain, but many suffered chiefly from other symptoms such as nausea, confusion, or fatigue, most of which are not treated with opioids. 

Among hospice patients who do experience pain, hospice nurses, under the direction of a physician, arrange for medical treatment—and this commonly includes opioids. Opioids are also sometimes prescribed to ameliorate severe shortness of breath. This last claim sounds paradoxical—don’t opioids cause respiratory depression? In large doses or when rapidly escalating the dose they suppress respiration. Patients who are short of breath due to advanced heart or lung disease and whose underlying cause of the shortness of breath is no longer treatable often feel as though they are suffocating. They become tremendously anxious—which makes their breathing even worse. Low doses of opioids in this setting can make them less anxious, terminating this vicious cycle and providing a modicum of relief. 

Conventional wisdom in palliative care circles (palliative care is an interdisciplinary approach to advanced illness that encompasses but is not synonymous with hospice) is that with expert pain management, 90% of pain in serious illness can be well-controlled. This involves use of round the clock medication with supplementary doses for “breakthrough pain,” pain that develops before the next scheduled dose of medication. The medication is usually administered orally or via a patch on the skin; occasionally, a continuous intravenous infusion (“pump”) is needed and even more occasionally, a sophisticated method of providing pain relief will be provided by an anesthesiologist (for example, an epidural injection or a nerve block).

So perhaps quality of life can be improved in the hospice setting, but is it at the cost of shortening life?  What’s fascinating is that effective pain and other symptom management at the end of life may actually prolong life. This was demonstrated most dramatically in a widely cited study of patients with very advanced lung cancer. In this study, patients who got early palliative care alongside of traditional oncologic care had a median survival of 11.6 months compared to 8.9 months among controls who had usual care but did not receive palliative care. To put this in perspective, a differential survival of 1.7 months is substantial in the world of cancer. If a new chemotherapy drug resulted in an extra 1.7 months of life compared to conventional treatment, the new drug would get expedited approval by the FDA and be enthusiastically promoted by oncologists.

Maybe palliative care can prolong life, but palliative care does a great deal more than treat pain. Maybe the life prolongation that was found in the lung cancer patients is because their depression was treated or because they declined experimental chemotherapy that actually shortened life. What do we know about opioids themselves? Do they shorten life? This question is difficult to answer definitively because it’s not ethical to do a randomized study—taking two groups of people and assigning one group good pain management and another group inadequate pain management. We do know that among home care patients who received high or escalating doses of opioids, survival was the same as among similar home care patients who got low dose opioids. 

Perhaps opioids don’t shorten life on average, but you might think they precipitate death when used in actively dying patients. Once again, there are no good studies to address this question and there will never be any because we cannot ethically randomize dying patients to either receive doses of medicine that are adequate to relieve pain or to be left in pain. But after reviewing the available observational literature, physicians concluded that opioids prescribed in the palliative care setting for dying patients do not result in death. In fact, they argue that the “doctrine of double effect,” which is widely cited as justifying opioid-induced death by arguing the intent was pain-relief and not death, need rarely if ever be invoked.

Despite the data indicating that pain management near the end of life is tremendously beneficial and, in competent hands, is associated with minimal risk, pain in this setting continues to be under-treated. Contrary to the public perception that hospice nurses deliberately give high dose opioids to put patients out their misery, nurses tend to under-treat patients because they worry that opioids will cause harm. A recent position statement by the American Society for Pain Management Nursing and the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association exhorts its members to “advocate for humane and dignified care, promoting ethical, effective pain and symptom management without exception.” This is not an endorsement of either physician assisted suicide (legal in 7 states and the District of Columbia under highly specific circumstances) or euthanasia (illegal throughout the US). Rather, it is a ringing endorsement of the view that high-quality pain management improves quality of life until the very end—and can decrease the demand for interventions of last resort like physician assisted suicide.