Act Now!

        This time “repeal and replace” is just repeal. And because it’s tucked away in the massive tax cut bill rather than being labelled as health care reform, Congress is hoping Americans won’t notice. Or that we’re suffering from protest fatigue. But quite apart from the concern I expressed last week that passage of the proposed tax bill will lead to enormous cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, the only plausible way to begin to pay for the planned handouts to corporations and the wealthy, there’s another issue: basic access to health care. Medicare, for all its imperfections, has for fifty years assured that people over 65 have access to medical care. Out-of-pocket expenditures have been rising as co-payments and drug prices have gone up, but the big-ticket items such as hospitalization are covered. The Affordable Care Act was intended to provide comparable access to medical care for the 47 million Americans without health insurance. While there are still millions without insurance today, the ACA has cut that number of 47 in half. The tax bill that will go to both chambers of Congress next week would eviscerate the ACA by removing the mandate to buy health insurance. The way that insurance works is by spreading the risk; if healthy people can opt out of sharing in the risk, the system collapses. Health care is no different.

            The access to health insurance, and by inference to medical care, that is at stake is primarily an issue for people under age 65. But it affects those over 65 as well—if fifty-year-olds don’t have health insurance and get sick, they won’t be able to serve as the support system for their parents and grandparents. And the 62-year olds who were laid off and are unemployable because of their age will soon, if they can hang in there just a few more years, enroll in Medicare. If they've been uninsured for several years, they will likely enter Medicare in less than vigorous health. The effect will be an influx of sicker people into the Medicare program—placing a further stress on Medicare resources. So don’t let protest fatigue sink in—contact Susan Collins and John McCain and Lisa Murkowski and any other senator who isn’t ready to repeal the ACA, now, before it’s too late.

Is Medicare Entering the 21st Century?

       The do-nothing Congress may be doing something. In the immediate aftermath of the Senate’s third and hopefully final failure to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, the Senate actually passed a health care bill unanimously. With little public fanfare, it approved CHRONIC (the Creating High Quality Results and Outcomes Necessary to Improve Chronic Care Act of 2017). This bill, if it is not eviscerated or rejected by the House, takes a few important steps in the right direction.

         As a useful summary in the Health Affairs blog explains, the bill supports changes in four domains: home based care, managed care, telehealth, and accountability. In the arena of home based care, the law extends the successful “independence at home” demonstration project for two years, increasing the number of participants from 10,000 to 15,000. This is a relatively small modest program that does something critically important for some of our sickest and most complex patients—it moves the nexus of care from the hospital and the office into the home.

         In the area of managed care, the law does something quite remarkable. It incentivizes further use of Medicare Advantage programs, a long-standing Republican objective since they see Medicare Advantage as a way of privatizing Medicare. But one of the ways it does this is to allow programs to expand benefits to include social supports and help with activities of daily living. It’s a tiny wedge that could signal the beginning of a recognition that social factors contribute to health. This is the message of the book, The American Health Care Paradox by Elizabeth Bradley and Lauren Taylor  in which they argue that the reason Americans spend so much more per capita on health care than any other developed nation—and achieve poorer results—is that we substitute medical benefits for social benefits, to the detriment of well-being. We are a long way from allowing federal money to be used to pay for gardening supplies, say, so that a person with dementia would be happy puttering around at home and not become agitated and restless, perhaps triggering pharmacological treatment or even nursing home care, as has happened in the UK. But it’s a start.

         The telehealth expansion is another one of those strategies, such as electronic medical records, that on the surface is very appealing, but for which the evidence of effectiveness is mixed. It feeds nicely into the conviction that there are technical fixes to the American health care system, rather than major structural problems that must be addressed. Probably not the best use of scarce resources, but not a terrible idea.

         Finally, the Act mandates that the GAO carry out three investigations to assess the consequences of various strategies that have been piloted or proposed. One of these is a special reimbursement code for physicians to formulate a comprehensive care plan for patients with certain serious conditions. Another is whether Medicare Part D should lift its ban on drugs that help patients lose weight. The GAO is usually thorough and unbiased in its evaluations. All sound efforts at systematic evaluation—as opposed to wholesale, uncritical adoption of policies and programs—should be supported.

          Will the House pass the bill? Will it discover the most interesting parts of the legislation, ie the provision that lets Medicare Advantage programs offer benefits that are not “medical” in the conventional sense? We shall see. Tell your representative that if s/he wants to take credit for something, this would be a good place to start.

Rescue and Reform

A new poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly 80 percent of Americans want Congress and the President to modify the Affordable Care Act to make it work. They don’t want repeal and replace. 
       The numbers are impressive: 95 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of Republicans favor a legislative fix to the current law. Even among Trump supporters, an absolute majority (51 percent) support such an approach. In fact only 17 percent of the public (although 40 percent of Republicans) believe the Trump administration should act to initiate the infamous “death spiral” by taking such steps as eliminating the universal mandate and withdrawing subsidies to poor people. Taking Medicare as a model of sweeping, comprehensive health care legislation, we can look at just how much the program was reformed by Congress in the first 15 years after the law went into effect.
       Passed by Congress in 1965, Medicare first became a reality on July 1, 1966. In 1972, Medicare eligibility was extended to people under age 65 with long-term disabilities as well as to those with end-stage renal disease. This was no minor tweaking of the program: today 9.1 million people out of the 55 million on Medicare are in the under-65-with-disabilities category. In the last year for which data are available, Medicare spent a whopping $30.9 billion on end-stage renal disease out of total expenditures of $646 billion. 
       In 1973, “Medicare HMOs” were introduced. The federal government established standards for what benefits had to be provided, but basically outsourced plan design, management and marketing to private insurance companies. The name of this program has evolved over time, from Medicare Choice + to the current Medicare Advantage plan, but the idea remains unchanged: instead of enrolling in Medicare Parts A, B, and now D with deductibles and co-pays, Medicare enrollees can opt for one-stop shopping. Today, a record 17 million people, or 31 percent of all Medicare beneficiaries, are enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan.
       Jumping ahead to 1980, the decision was made to broaden coverage of Medicare home health services, allowing more people to stay out of hospitals and nursing homes because they received physical therapy and occupational therapy, as well as visiting nurse services at home. At the same time, supplementary Medicare insurance plans (“Medigap”) for those people not enrolled in an HMO, came under federal oversight to cut down on all too common abuses found at the time. 
       And then in 1983, in what was perhaps the most far-reaching reform of the Medicare program ever instituted, prospective payment was introduced for hospital care. What this meant was that instead of hospitals charging whatever they wanted—with Medicare dutifully paying soaring bills—Medicare set rates that were based on the expected length of stay for a given condition. The hospital got paid that fixed amount (adjusted for co-morbid conditions and geographic variation in the cost of living) regardless of how long a patient was in the hospital. In other words, patients with an unusually long length of stay cost the hospital money and patients who were discharged unexpectedly early generated revenue for the institution. The result of this innovation, in addition to controlling how much money Medicare spent on hospitalizations, was to shorten length of stay, moving much “post-acute” to the home or the skilled nursing facility.
       Reforming Medicare didn’t stop in the 1980s. But my point is not to present an extensive history of the Medicare program (though if your interest is piqued, you might like my forthcoming book, Old and Sick in America: the Journey through the Health Care System); rather, it is to emphasize the complex, innovative, health care legislation seldom bursts onto the scene fully and impeccably formed. It usually needs to be fixed. The ACA is no exception.

       After chanting “repeal and replace” for so many years, the Republican majority needs to save face. But the way to do t do that is not to sabotage what we have, a compromise bill designed to save private health insurance rather than jettisoning the industry in favor of single payer coverage. The Republican Party should appropriate the idea behind the ACA as its own, acknowledging its true founding father, the extremely conservative Heritage Foundation. Maybe what’s needed is a new mantra. How about “rescue and reform?”

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