Caregivers Redux

In a recent issue of JAMA Internal Medicine, Drs. Sterling and Shaw from Cornell Medical Center make a case for physicians to pay greater attention to caregivers, both informal (unpaid, typically family members) and professional (paid). They argue that physicians will do a better job caring for patients suffering from frailty, dementia, or disabilities if they include them in their visits. The authors highlight how helpful caregivers can be, both as a source of information and as an instrument for implementing a treatment plan. They are right: it is high time physicians acknowledged the importance of caregivers and expanded the sacred doctor/patient relationship to include them. To that end, the authors exhort physicians to list the names and contact information of caregivers in the medical record and to ask their patients for permission to incorporate them in health-related discussions. But they fail to grasp the extent to which caregiver involvement can transform their patients’ medical care.

It's not just that caregivers, whether a daughter or a home health aide, might whisper into the patient’s ear that she should mention she’s been having episodes of incontinence—an example cited in the paper. It’s not only that caregivers might report memory lapses that the patient does not admit or remember she has been having. The availability of an on-site caregiver may enable the physician to embark on a course of therapy that would be unthinkable without a reliable partner, someone who can try various strategies and report back on their effectiveness. Much as a visiting nurse can serve as the eyes and ears of a physician at home and thus amplify the available treatment options, so too can caregivers potentially administer medication and inform the physician of the results in real time. Caregivers don’t just manage medications, as the authors imply, by purchasing drugs at the pharmacy and perhaps putting them in pill dispensers. They can learn to adjust dosages, decreasing warfarin in the presence of antibiotics or cutting the insulin dose in the face of gastroenteritis, perhaps allowing for home instead of hospital care. And caregivers don’t just provide inputs to physicians and follow orders. They can also be valued and indeed invaluable participants in discussions about what approach to care makes sense for a given patient. Does Mrs. Jones want all possible medical treatment, however invasive and however unlikely to work, in an effort to prolong life? Or does she want, above all, to stay in her apartment and be comfortable? Or is her main concern the ability to read and to play the piano so she will accept whatever medical interventions and supportive strategies are conducive to achieving these ends. Not only can caregivers help elicit the patient’s goals of care, but they can also evaluate whether the community supports (family, paid caregivers, financial resources) are adequate to implement a given plan.

So yes, it’s time to acknowledge the existence and importance of caregivers. But letting them in the examining room is just the first step. Caregivers need to be integrated into the medical team. They have a crucial role to play, just as do social workers and nurses. They are the key to better medical care, with “better” implying care that is in line with the patient’s preferences and values, not merely care that accords with the physician’s idea of optimal care. If those preferences translate into home rather than hospital as the site of care, they may even mean less expensive care.

     For more on helping caregivers in their role as members of the medical team, see my forthcoming book: The Caregiver's Encyclopedia: A Compassionate Guide to Caring for Older Adults.

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.

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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A Piece of My Mind

Prescription medications cost more in the US than anywhere else in the world and costs have been skyrocketing each year for the past several years. To a growing extent, the burden of the high cost falls directly on consumers, either because their health plan has a tiered system for medications (charging ever larger co-pays for some drugs), because their health plan pays only a percentage of the charge for various drugs (and if the consumer has to pay 20 percent and it’s 20 percent of a very large number, that’s a major outlay), or because they have a high-deductible health plan and the insurer doesn’t pay anything until they have spent $3000—or $5000 or $10,000—on health care. 

By and large, pharmaceutical companies have been blamed for the high cost of medicines, with insurers shouldering some of the blame, thanks to complicated and ungenerous policies. Pharma has tried to justify its sometimes astronomical charges as necessary to support its research efforts, with the most recent industry-endorsed estimate for the cost of developing a new drug and bringing it to market now topping $2.6 billion. Other analyses attack the methodology used in this report to measure costs, arguing that it fails to take into account, for example, that NIH funds much of the research that goes into discovering a new drug, not the pharmaceutical industry. The result is a dramatic over-estimate of the cost borne by industry. Concerns about the role of drug companies and to some extent health insurers are entirely legitimate. But there has been little attention paid to the role of drug stores in contributing to the high cost of medicines.

I did a little bit of investigating today. I looked at what two commonly used medications would cost a family like mine who had exceeded the $4000 deductible for their health plan, what they cost today (given that it’s only early March and most people haven’t had the opportunity to spend $4000 on medical care this year), and what they would cost if they were obtained from a Canadian mail-order pharmacy. Here’s what I found for one of the medicines, the widely used nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug, Celecoxib.

Celecoxib is used as a treatment for arthritis in people with certain gastrointestinal conditions because it's a little less prone to exacerbate these problems than other anti-inflammatory drugs. It is available generically. The non-profit insurance company Harvard Pilgrim Health Care classifies generic Celecoxib as a “tier 1” drug. That means that the cost of a 3-month mail order supply of the medication (100 mg taken once a day) from Walgreen’s, the pharmacy with which Harvard Pilgrim has a contract, would be $10. But until the deductible is met, Harvard Pilgrim doesn’t pay for medications, so the cost would be a whopping $156.51 for 90 pills (which, incidentally, isn’t even quite a 3-month supply since last I looked, a year has 365 days, not 360 days). So I contacted a pharmacy in Canada, identifying one that is approved by CIPA, the Canadian association of licensed retailed pharmacies.  I found a drug store that will supply 120 pills for $25.99 (plus a small shipping charge). That comes out to $1.74 per pill at Walgreen’s compared to 22¢ at the Canadian competitor. Walgreen’s costs eight times as much as the Canadian pharmacy. And the medication isn’t manufactured in some shady country with questionable oversight. It’s made in the UK.

How can this be? Is Celecoxib a fluke? So I looked at another commonly prescribed medication, this time a drug classified as tier 3. I chose Vagifem, an estrogen suppository, used to treat post-menopausal atrophic vaginitis. The cost of a 3-month supply through the health plan—after using the entire $4000 deductible? $80. The mail order cost from Walgreen’s today, assuming the deductible hasn't been spent? $360. The cost from the Canadian pharmacy? $55. Made in the UK. Walgreen’s is 7 times more expensive.

What’s going on here? I’ll leave that to the policy wonks, but maybe they should look at the behavior of pharmacies as well as drug companies and health insurers. After all, this isn't just a case of generic drugs costing almost as much as their brand name equivalents, which is still another problem for consumers. Meanwhile, importing drugs from Canada is a valuable option. It's not legal to re-import medication for sale or to import restricted drugs such as opioids, but the law on medicines for personal use is a bit fuzzy, or at least its enforcement is. With consumers shouldering an ever increasing proportion of health care costs, and no prospect for relief in sight, there's a strong incentive to look north.