Vote: Your Health Depends On It

Earlier this month, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine took the unprecedented step of publishing a political position paper in the name of the entire editorial board. Entitled “Dying in a Leadership Vacuum,” the journal urged Americans to vote out our “current leaders.” They based their argument on the mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic by America’s political leaders, naming no names but asserting that “when it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.”

While the disastrous handling of the pandemic is the most egregious failing of President Donald Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and others who could have made a difference, it is not the only area where our leaders promoted misguided health care policy—with disastrous consequences. I argued in an earlier post that “Trump is Bad for Your Health.” Today, as we approach the end of election season, I am going to spell out why Trump, Pence, their appointees (such as Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services), their Republican supporters in the House and the Senate, and fellow travelers in state governments (both legislators and governors), will be bad for the health of all Americans, older Americans in particular. It’s not just the pandemic performance that’s the problem: it’s the limitations on access to insurance, the roll-back of regulations that protect the environment, and the attacks on Medicare and Medicaid. 

Limiting access to health insurance: One of the major “accomplishments” of the Trump administration and endorsed by Republican legislators is its relentless attacks on the Affordable Care Act. The administration eliminated the “mandate,” the tax penalty on those who do not purchase health insurance. The mandate is an important part of what allows the ACA to work without driving up the cost of insurance: the fundamental principle of insurance coverage is that it works by distributing the risk over a large population; if people can opt out, only those who are sick will remain insured, raising the cost for everyone. And indeed, with the end to the mandate, health care costs have risen—making this a leading issue for the electorate, young and old. 

Rollbacks of environmental regulations: As of October 15, according to the NY Times, the Trump administration has rolled back or is in the process of rolling back almost 100 environmental regulations. Twenty-one involve air pollutants (plus 5 in progress); six involve water pollution (plus 3 in progress); and six involve toxic substances and safety (plus 2 in progress). Estimates are that these changes will result in thousands of extra deaths per year, affecting older people as well as those who love and care for them.

Attacks on Medicare: just this month, Trump issued an executive order designed to promote the privatization of Medicare. Ostentatiously and misleadingly titled “Protecting and Improving Medicare for Our Nation’s Seniors,” the order calls for shifting costs to beneficiaries, limiting choice of providers, and moving more and more patients into the private sector by joining Medicare Advantage Plans. 

Limiting Medicaid: among the many ways in which the Trump administration has undermined the role played by Medicaid in providing health care is a rule allowing states to cap Medicaid spending for poor adults. Through its endorsement of what are essentially block grants, the federal government is enabling states to reduce health benefits for those who gained coverage to Medicaid thanks to the ACA. In 2018, 12.2 million people were dually eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid. In addition to opting to cut back benefits under Medicaid, states have the option of refusing to allow Medicaid expansion. This is an approach authorized by the ACA that enables the near-poor to receive health insurance through Medicaid. To date, the governors and legislatures of 39 states (and the District of Columbia) have accepted Medicaid expansion; 12 states have not.

Regardless of where you stand on issues such as taxes, immigration, and reproductive rights, whatever your views on foreign policy, your health and that of your children and grandchildren is too important to allow supporters of Trumpian policies to remain in office. Whether they are found in the federal government (as senators, representatives, or in the executive branch) or state government (as legislators or governors), vote them out. Do it now. 

Reforming Medicare: Enhancement or Evisceration?

Recent reports indicate that Congress will try to slash Medicare in order to balance the budget—making older people and disabled people shoulder the cost of its enormous tax cuts. The proposed plan, according to the Washington Post, would extract $537 billion dollars from the Medicare program over the next decade. At the same time, the budget passed by Congress and signed into law by the president in February created CHRONIC (Creating High Quality Results and Outcomes Necessary to Improve Chronic Care Act) which, the NY Times suggests, is a hidden jewel buried in the voluminous budget bill. Which is it? Is Medicare headed for enhancement or for evisceration?

Thus far, the cuts are theoretical (it’s not clear that the House Budget Committee will get very far with its recommendations) whereas the reforms are real—or will be when they go into effect in 2020. CHRONIC is to be lauded for accomplishing several important goals. 

First, the act recognizes that good outcomes among people with chronic conditions are contingent on what are not strictly medical services—as well as access to physicians, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices. Wheelchair ramps and grab bars, as well as other products that lie outside the traditional definition of “durable medical equipment,” can in the future be paid for by Medicare—at least by Medicare Advantage plans that opt to offer them. This strategy does not go as far as the National Health Service did in the UK with its “personal health budgets” that allowed patients or their representatives to decide in concert with their physicians how to spend their share of the health care pie. The result—and the program, despite some vocal protests, has been so successful that it was recently expanded—is that patients with early dementia can choose, for example, to spend NHS money on creating a garden that will keep them engaged, potentially obviating the need either for medication to control symptoms of agitation or for institutionalization in a nursing home. Nor does the US strategy apply to traditional Medicare: in an effort to make Medicare Advantage plans, which currently have 19 million members, even more attractive (furthering the Republican goal of privatizing Medicare), only MA plans will be allowed to reimburse for these new supportive services. 

Second, CHRONIC permanently authorizes Medicare Special Needs Plans (SNPs) that cater to the highest risk Medicare beneficiaries including those living in institutions. These are special types of Medicare Advantage plans that offer enhanced integration and coordination of care, a critical feature for this complex population. 

Finally, CHRONIC extends its support of non-traditional forms of care, of which the allowance for grab bars was one example, to telemedicine (particularly relevant for homebound patients and in rural communities) and to home care (expanding the Independence at Home Program 50 percent from 10,000 enrollees to 15,000). 

So, what’s not to like? Two cautionary notes. First cautionary note: CHRONIC focuses overwhelmingly on Medicare Advantage plans (which currently cover 32 percent of Medicare beneficiaries), not on traditional Medicare (which covers the other 68 percent). This is no surprise, as the Republican Congress, which is interested in privatizing Medicare, sees shifting to the MA model as a route to achieving this goal. In principle, I don’t have any problem with expanding the number of MA plans (currently there are 3300, according to MedPAC, the Medicare advisory council) as they offer great potential for the coordination of care so essential to frail elders, but it will be essential to maintain the regulatory oversight of CMS if these plans are to be guaranteed to provide quality care. Moreover, we need to begin collecting detailed data on the utilization and outcomes of MA members. Right now, almost all of the voluminous data gathering by the federal government exclusively deals with fee-for-service enrollees so no granular analysis of the performance of MA plans is possible. 

Second cautionary note: while some of the provisions of CHRONIC appear to address programs, in fact the legislation is often grounded in how the programs are to be reimbursed. And the underlying philosophy is that the way forward lies with “value-based” care. I’ve blogged about this before, most recently in my post “V is for Value.” My concern about this approach is that it assumes that better and less costly medical care can be obtained simply through tweaking reimbursement. It’s the triumph of the economists’ view of health care as an industry subject to manipulation like other industries. The trouble with this insistence that VBP is key to all our problems, aside from the fact that so far value-based reimbursement systems such as pay-for-performance have not succeeded, is that it discounts the role of culture, advertising, and popular expectations. It is these factors, and not just payments to physicians, for example, that shape the enthusiasm for technology manifested by patients, corporations, and physicians alike.

CHRONIC is an admirable piece of legislation—for what it includes. What should concern us, however, is what it leaves out.

Money Down the Drain

This month, the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that supports independent research on the health care system, released a report on just how much Medicare beneficiaries pay out of pocket for health care. The news is sobering: on average, they spend $3,024 and that doesn’t include what they pay for premiums.

I’m not sure why premiums are considered separately, but they’re pricey, too. While Medicare part A (hospital coverage) is free for almost everyone over age 65, Medicare part B (doctors’ fees, outpatient care, and lab tests) costs $134 per person per month. That is, if you’re single and earned less than $85,000 in 2015, or married and jointly earned no more than $170,000. After those thresholds, the premium rises steeply, first to $187 per person per month (for joint incomes of up to $214,000) and then on up to a maximum of $429 for the most affluent. Then there’s part D for medications. The average monthly cost for a drug plan this year is $42 per person. And finally, there are Medigap plans if people want coverage for their deductibles and co-pays—the national average for those plans is $183 per person per month.

Looking at averages is not terribly enlightening, but fortunately, the report delves far deeper. It turns out that among  people with three or more chronic medical conditions (30 million of the 56 million people enrolled in Medicare), 29 percent spent at least 20 percent of their incomes on out-of-pocket medical care plus premiums. Among the nearly 14 million people with a serious physical and/or cognitive impairment, 38 percent spent at least 20 percent of their incomes on out-of-pocket medical care plus premiums. The poorest people are particularly hard hit: among the 17 million people with three or more chronic conditions or functional limitations whose incomes is less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level, 42 percent spend at least 20 percent on medical expenses.

After reading the report, I had two questions. First, how do Medicare beneficiaries in Medicare Advantage plans fare compared to those in conventional, fee-for-service Medicare? They pay part B premiums plus a part C premium—which is instead of Part D but also includes more comprehensive coverage with fewer co-pays and deductibles. The actual part C premiums vary tremendously, both within a given insurance company (in Massachusetts, for example, Blue Cross offers 6 different Medicare Advantage plans, with monthly premiums ranging from 0 to $295 per person; a middle-of-the-road plan costs $79 per month) and across companies. My suspicion is that people with multiple chronic conditions or functional impairment are less likely than their healthier peers to choose Medicare Advantage—but that they would have lower out-of-pocket costs if they did. Someone should do the analysis.

Second, how would the ACA-Repeal-and-Replace bill passed by the House of Representatives affect Medicare? The answer seems to be that it would only affect it indirectly, mainly by  cutting federal spending on Medicaid by $880 billion over ten years. This would profoundly impact the 11 million people who are currently enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid. It would also worsen the overall solvency of the Medicare program. The ACA levies an extra payroll tax of 0.9 percent on individuals earning over $200,000 a year ($250,000 for couples), a tax that is due to expire in 2018. The new bill would end the payroll tax a year early—thus ensuring that the Medicare trust fund, which pays for part A, will run out of money before 2025.

The take home message? Find out if there’s a good Medicare Advantage program available to you and what it costs. It just might be a better deal than regular Medicare. And lobby your senators to make sure that any new variant of repeal-and-replace doesn’t gut Medicaid or bankrupt Medicare.

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Advantage, (Medicare) Advantage

I said last week that I was a statistics junkie. A related penchant is for reports, especially government reports.  And few reports pull together more interesting facts about health care in the older population today than MedPAC, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. The Commission just sent its mandatory report on payment to Congress last month—it sends such a document every March, this most recent one totaling 483 pages. The report begins by telling us that total spending on health care in the US in 2015 was a stunning $3.2 trillion, or 17.8 percent of GDP. Of that, Medicare accounted for $642.2 billion, representing a rate of growth that has actually fallen in recent years. But the chapter I want to focus on today is the one on Medicare Advantage plans, those capitated, private plans that constitute an alternative to traditional Medicare.

My question is simply: how well do Medicare Advantage plans work? Do they save money? And most importantly, are they good for patients? How do clinical outcomes compare between Medicare Advantage (MA) plans and standard, fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare? What other benefits, if any, accrue to patients from enrollment in such plans?

It turns out I’ve been interested in this question for a long time because such plans have the opportunity to coordinate care, to mandate some services that are essential for the geriatric population (eg geriatric assessment for high risk patients), and to cover other important benefits (eg hearing aids and glasses). In fact, exactly 30 years ago I published an article in the Annals of Internal Medicine called, The Impact of Health Maintenance Organizations on  Geriatric Care. At that time, there were only 87 plans nation-wide (compared to 3500 today). Some were doing all right—as long as the patients they enrolled were all healthy older people. Others weren’t doing so well and several folded altogether. The challenge and, I suggested, the opportunity, was to decrease the rate of hospitalization among enrollees (the main way to cut costs), which in turn would require geriatric assessment in the ambulatory setting and geriatric consultation in the inpatient setting. It would work, I cautioned, only if HMOs provided case management, podiatry, and home physical therapy. They didn’t do those things and they never took off.

After two overhauls—the early capitated plans authorized by the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility ACT (TEFRA) in 1982 were reborn as “Medicare Plus Choice” thanks to the Balanced Budget Act (BBA) in 1997, and then christened “Medicare Advantage”  by the Medicare  Modernization Act of 2003—capitated plans are finally on the upswing. In 2016, 17.5 million Medicare beneficiaries (31 percent) enrolled in such a program. The appeal is to some degree simplicity: instead of having to purchase separate coverage for physician care (Part B Medicare) and for prescription drugs (Part D Medicare) on top of free hospital care (Part A Medicare) along with Medigap insurance to pay for most of what Parts A, B, and D do not cover, you could sign up for a Medicare Advantage Plan that does it all. In exchange for restricting which hospital(s) patients can be admitted to and which physicians they go to, MA plans also offer some of those extras I advocated years ago, such as case management, and basic vision and dental care. So how good are they?

MedPAC mainly pays attention to costs. But it does devote a few pages to quality. It relies on HEDIS measures (Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set) that plans are required to report as well as the quality measures that go into the star rating system of health plans used by CMS. And what it finds, over and over, is that FFS Medicare plans and MA plans are indistinguishable, whether in terms of objective measures (percent of enrollees who get flu shots) or subjective measures (percent of enrollees who say they can get an appointment quickly or who rate the quality as high).

I’d like to see the breakdown for individuals who are frail or who have advanced illness. I’d like to learn what services such as case management or palliative care consultation MA plans use (always, often, or sometimes) for this population. And I’d like to know whether seriously ill patients are apt to dis-enroll from MA plans once they become ill, as used to be the case, presumably because they were concerned about the limitations on choice of physicians they encountered. But in the meantime, at least for the average older patient, it seems that MA plans are an attractive alternative to conventional Medicare.