Medicare at Fifty

The Medicare program will turn 50 this year, as a short piece in the New England Journal of Medicine reminds us. Well, not exactly—Lyndon Johnson signed the legislation into law in July, 1965, but the program didn’t actually go into effect until 1966. So I guess we have two years for the festivities. There’s a lot to celebrate—but also a lot of work to do. Maybe just as we customarily make New Year’s resolutions every January, we need to make new semicentennial resolutions for the Medicare program.

What has Medicare done right and what has it done wrong? And why should it matter so much to people over 65? How about to everyone else?

To start with the question of mattering, Medicare matters to older people because 98% of people 65 and older have health insurance coverage, thanks to Medicare. In 1962, before the institution of Medicare, only 48% of older people had medical coverage, and many of them had policies that were inadequate for their needs. It’s also important to realize that in addition to the 43.5 million older people enrolled in Medicare, 8.8 million younger individuals who are disabled are also covered by Medicare. 

But Medicare matters to everyone in the US, not just those who are elderly or disabled. It matters because Medicare spending constituted 17% of federal revenues in 2014 and with the projected growth of both the older population and the program, this is expected to reach 27% by 2050. Without substantive payment reform or changes in coverage, Medicare spending by the federal government will approach 40% of its revenues by the end of the century. This means less money for everything else that the federal government spends money on, ranging from infrastructure to education to defense.

Medicare also matters to everyone because it is a trailblazer: most private insurers follow Medicare’s lead in all sorts of critically important areas. For example, when Medicare started paying hospitals based on diagnosis-related groups in 1983, when it went from a retrospective system that essentially meant paying hospitals whatever they charged to a prospective system that paid hospitals a standard amount for a given condition, private insurance companies adopted the same strategy. When Medicare modified the way it paid physicians by going with a relative value scale, private payers followed its lead. Today, Medicare is increasingly paying for performance rather than just for services; so, too, are many private insurers. Medicare is increasingly interested in improving the quality of care, not just assuring access; the private insurers are adopting the same model.

So if Medicare is so important, what does it do well and what does it do poorly? Medicare gets a lot right, it also gets some important things wrong. Medicare fails to recognize that certain technologies such as glasses and hearing aids are as essential to optimal functioning as is the durable medical equipment (walkers, wheelchairs, commodes) that Medicare currently covers. Because Medicare covers certain things such as short term rehabilitative care in a Skilled Nursing Facility, while Medicaid covers long term residential care in a Skilled Nursing Facility, the two programs have an incentive to cost shift instead of providing seamless, integrated care.  The Medicare program is further fragmented by having separate benefits for hospital care, physician care, and medications (Medicare Part A, Medicare Part B, and Medicare Part D)—except if patients enroll in a Medicare Advantage plan (Medicare Part C), which combines all three.

Fixing what Medicare gets wrong is obviously important to the program’s beneficiaries. But it's also important to everyone else with health insurance (which, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, is an increasingly large share of the population.) There will be growing emphasis on reforming Medicare to control costs. Looked at in terms of GDP rather than federal revenues, spending on Medicare has gone from 0.5% of GDP shortly after it was introduced in 1966 to 3.5% in 2012, with projections that it will grow to 4.3% by 2022. Although the rate of rise has fallen in the last couple of years, variously attributed to the recession and to the Affordable Care Act, total spending will continue to grow in part because of the dramatic rise in the number of people over age 65. The drive to modify Medicare gives us an unprecedented opportunity: to make the program both better and leaner. We can do this, as I suggested in last week's post, by making smart tradeoffs and by introducing a new benefit midway between conventional Medicare and hospice. What better time than Medicare's 50th anniversary to make a new year's resolution--and stick to it.

Happy Birthday, Medicare!

It's Medicare's 50th birthday! Read what we have to celebrate in Sunday's blog post.

The Benefit of Medicare and the Medicare Benefit

When Congress first introduced a hospice benefit into the Medicare program in 1982, it did so out of the recognition that patients who are very near the end of life need special treatment. Conventional medical care doesn’t work well for them; another type of care, focused intensively on symptom management and delivered principally in the home, tends to be far more beneficial. The problem—aside from the psychological issue of both patients' and doctors’ reluctance to acknowledge the imminence of the end of life—was how to pay for this kind of labor-intensive care. The legislation, introduced on a trial basis at first and then on a permanent basis in 1986, instituted an approach to payment that offered patients a trade: either Medicare paid for what was assumed to be life-prolonging care (for example, hospitalization and chemotherapy) or Medicare paid for what was assumed to be exclusively comfort-oriented care (for example, home nursing and medications such as morphine). The nice clean boundaries between life-prolongation and comfort-maximization turned out to be rather fuzzy: sometimes palliative care prolongs life more than does aggressive, high-tech medicine and sometimes the treatments that are thought of as life-prolonging, such as radiation therapy, are the best way to maximize comfort. But leaving aside the issue of whether we should decide what counts as life-prolonging on a case-by-case basis rather than by category (ie viewing all chemotherapy as life-prolonging), the fundamental principle remains—health insurance benefit packages necessarily involve both inclusions and exclusions.

The trouble with the structure of Medicare is that it provides well for the extremes, for people who are very vigorous or who are imminently dying, but it doesn’t provide well for those who are in between. To be fair, Medicare has evolved over the past ten years and pays far more attention than previously to people with chronic diseases and increasingly greater attention to people with multiple chronic diseases. It has introduced disease management programs, typically involving nurses who help patients adjust their own medications for diseases such as diabetes or heart failure. But patients who are frail or who have moderate to severe dementia benefit from many of the same intensive home care services as dying patients. They also often want to avail themselves of many of the same kinds of high-tech care as robust older patients. Medicare rightly balks at the prospect of paying for everything—it’s just too expensive. So what people with frailty and advancing dementia need is their own special Medicare benefit that is midway between conventional Medicare and the hospice benefit. They need what I call intermediate care; the way to pay for intermediate care is through a new benefit tier.

The comprehensive package—sandwiched between the intensive package and the palliative package—would be modeled on the Program of All-Inclusive Care for Elders (PACE), a very successful program in which only a very small number of patients have enrolled, providing integrated, multidisciplinary care outside the hospital or nursing home. Unlike PACE, it would not focus on the adult day health center (many older people don’t want to go to “daycare,” where lots of the PACE services are delivered) and it would not require that patients change physicians (an impediment to joining PACE as currently conceived). In exchange for the enhanced home services, the intermediate care benefit package would exclude a variety of high tech, high expense medical care that is seldom useful for frail or very demented patients. It would not cover ICU care. It would not cover surgery for devices such as the Left Ventricular Assist Device, a kind of partial artificial heart. It would exclude dialysis, which doesn’t prolong life in frail elders. What the intermediate care benefit would provide is a coordinated, integrated approach to care, with plans in place for what to do in the most likely scenarios for a given patient—what to do when the patient with advanced heart failure develops pulmonary edema, when the patient with advanced emphysema develops pneumonia, or when the patient with moderately severe dementia develops a fever. These plans would involve intensive home treatment or transfer to a skilled nursing facility, but not the current approach of emergency room—hospital—rehab—home. It would look similar to another variant of Medicare than has been proposed, called MediCaring. 

Medicare is a great program but it needs substantial modification to truly benefit all those it is intended to serve: the robust, the frail and the demented, and the dying. Just as we don’t expect one antibiotic to treat all infections or a single chemotherapeutic agent to treat all types of cancer, we cannot expect one benefit package to make sense for all older patients. Offering three distinct packages, an intensive package, a comprehensive package, and a palliative package, as I argued in my book The Denial of Aging, would go a long way to making Medicare work for everyone.

Paying the Piper

What would a new benefit package for the frail, known as intermediate care, cost? How could we pay for it? See next blog post.

Doing the Right Thing

For the third time in a 50 years, it’s hip to talk about dying (except, perhaps, if you are in the middle of dying yourself). Interest seems to come in waves. First there was Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, whose book On Death and Dying, published in 1969, opened the curtains on life’s final act. Then came Sherwin Nuland in 1994, with How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter. And now we have Atul Gawande with Being Mortal: What Matters in the End, along with several other important books, ranging from the Institute of Medicine report, Dying in America and, most recently, Angelo Volandes’ The Conversation, with its overstated subtitle, A Revolutionary Plan for End-of-Life Care. It’s good that we are talking about care near the end of life, and maybe this time the interest won’t sputter out before we actually do something to assure that all patients die with a minimum of pain and distress, in their homes if that’s where they want to be, and without unwanted medical technology. But what of the months and sometimes years before death, when so many people are neither robust nor dying, but somewhere in between?

Patients and doctors alike seem to want a black and white world, where you either focus exclusively on prolonging life or you focus exclusively on being comfortable. It’s either the ICU or hospice. Even Susan Jacoby, in her trenchant book Never Say Die, advocates that doctors “do everything possible only if there is a realistic hope that I can emerge as a functioning, mostly competent human being. Then stop and let me die.” She moves the bar demarcating intensive medicine and comfort care—she thinks comfort care should begin before dying starts rather than after it has begun—but her world is still black and white. What I am interested in, by contrast, and why I write about people who are frail and people in the early and middle stages of dementia, is the gray zone.

In the gray zone, people are not dying in any conventional sense. They are still living and may continue to live for some time—in the case of people with Alzheimer’s disease, perhaps even 5 years—but they have begun the final phase of their lives. They are beginning their final descent, as airline pilots so helpfully tell you a good half hour before you reach your destination, but won’t actually land for some time, and even then it will be a while before you arrive at the gate and can take off your seatbelt.

Who is in the gray zone? Principally people with either physical frailty or cognitive frailty (dementia). People who have a serious, ultimately fatal illness such as congestive heart failure or kidney failure or a progressive neurologic disease such as Parkinson’s or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease). People who have a bad disease that will inevitably get worse and who have embarked on the spiral of relentless decline that will culminate in their death.

What approach to medical care makes sense for people in the gray zone? Not everybody wants the same thing, but it is my belief based on clinical experience, scientific evidence, and common sense that most people who are physically or cognitively frail favor what I call intermediate care. This is care that is focused on maintaining whatever functions the person still has—activities such as walking, talking, seeing, hearing, and thinking. Preserving functioning is the primary goal of care. It may not be the only goal of care: people in the gray zone will often wish to live longer, but only if the treatments intended to achieve this end do not further impair their functioning. People in the gray zone usually want to be comfortable (doesn’t everyone?), but they are willing to undergo some discomfort in exchange for the strong possibility of holding on to the functions they have.

What does intermediate care look like? We tend to talk more about what it excludes than what it includes. It excludes attempted CPR—because people who are frail almost never survive attempted CPR and if they do, it is likely to be in a state of far poorer functioning than before the cardiac arrest. It excludes treatments such as risky chemotherapy and treatment in the ICU for the same reason: these medical therapies are seldom effective in prolonging life in patients who are frail and if they succeed, the price is usually a decline in function. What intermediate care includes is treatments that are intended to maintain function, things such as cataract surgery or hip fracture repair. It includes life-prolonging treatments such as antibiotics for pneumonia or transfusions for gastrointestinal bleeding if they can be accomplished with only a small risk of deterioration in the person’s ability to function. That means it may well include hospital treatment, up to a point. The distinguishing features of intermediate care are both the benefits it is likely to confer (better functioning, possibly longer life) and the burdens it is likely to avoid (decline in precisely those areas that the patient values most, whether mobility or cognition or some other domain of daily functioning). Intermediate care can be high tech or low tech: the issue is not the complexity or the cost of the treatment, but its effects.

We need to let patients know they have entered the gray zone—if they mistakenly believe they will get better or they fail to realize they are dying, they will be unable to make wise choices about the kind of medical care that is right for them. We need to tell patients that there is such a thing as intermediate care and help them understand what it means in practice. 

The Grey Zone

The choices are not just between the ICU and hospice. There's a great deal in between. See post on Sunday for more.

Tell Me A Story

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes. (Plato)

The story—from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace—is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind for the purpose of understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories. (Ursula Leguin)

In his new book, The Conversation, my friend and colleague, Angelo Volandes, makes the case for using videos to help patients and their families understand what lies in store for them as they approach life's end. He quotes one of his patients—a working class Irish-American with advanced brain cancer: “if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth hundreds of thousands.” And Angelo’s videos can be very helpful: they are designed to be clear, short and accurate, to show real patients with real diseases undergoing actual treatment for their illness. But the irony is that the power of this book, and it is powerful, is all in the words.

Joining the ranks of other prominent writer-physicians such as Abraham Verghese, Oliver Sacks, Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande, Volandes tells stories. His most engaging are those that are the most intensely personal: the wife of a professor he worked for as an undergraduate who terrified her husband—and the young student preparing meals for them—as she coughed up blood and struggled to breathe; and his own father, who decided after a series of debilitating cardiac events that he would not want to undergo attempted CPR. The stories illustrate with great poignancy the different ways that patients experience the final stage of their lives. His message is that it’s important to write your own story: whether you have a good ending or a bad one depends not so much on the path you follow as on whether you chose that path. As he puts it, “there are no right and wrong decisions about medical care at the end of life; rather, the value lies in making a fully informed choice.”

Really? Are all choices equally good? In The Conversation, we learn about 10 patients, among whom 6 make explicit decisions about what kind of medical treatment they want, and 4 are unable to make decisions so the care they receive is what their families or their doctors recommend. Most of the patients in the book who make their own choices, either after watching Angelo’s videos or after going on a guided tour of the ICU or dialysis unit to see what lies ahead (nobody in this book thought about their preferences any time before the end was imminent), choose to focus on comfort; only 2 persist in their wish that the doctors “do everything.” And the 4 patients who did not participate in the decision-making themselves, all of whom underwent aggressive, sometimes “brutal” treatment in their last weeks or months of life, are presumed to have gotten treatment that they couldn’t possibly have wanted, had they only been engaged in the process of deciding.

Consider the Italian matriarch who had a feeding tube and repeated courses of treatment for pneumonia after developing advanced dementia. She suffered mightily in her “last miserable weeks” of life, as did her family. Or take the elderly Ukrainian-American with lung cancer who underwent repeated attempts at CPR and assorted invasive procedures even though he had “one foot in the grave.” Young Angelo, the physician at the center of these resuscitative efforts, describes the treatments as putting “terminal cancer patients through torture.” The presumption is that if only these patients had known the truth about what modern high tech medicine does to dying patients, and if only they had then been asked what they wanted, they would have opted for comfort care.

So it’s not just that most patients don’t want treatment that has virtually no chance of doing anything for them other than causing extreme discomfort; it’s that no patients want this. The reason that any of Angelo’s patients opted for maximal medical treatment is that even though they understood what the treatment entailed, they didn’t fully  accept their own situation: they did not believe that they were dying. The husband of a young woman dying of metastatic breast cancer comments that “you never know what new chemo is on the way,” even though his wife has hours to live and no drug is going to descend from the lab deus ex machina to save her. The 79-year old African American with end-stage kidney disease says he’s “been through harsher things than this” and “God has given me a second chance before.”

Physicians cannot force patients to accept our diagnoses and prognoses, assessments made based on scientific training and clinical judgment. We cannot require them to accept our recommendations for treatment. Nor, in contemporary society, can we withhold what we believe to be futile treatment as long as we are not 100% certain that it cannot possibly prolong life, even by a few hours. But we can do a better job informing patients and families of the reality as we see it so that they can choose wisely. Videos can help, but above all, so can stories, stories that acknowledge our mortality and capture the realities of advanced illness.The real power and the beauty of The Conversation stem not from its exhortation to have a conversation about preferences for end of life care, and not from its discussion of videos that can jump start the conversation, but rather from the stories themselves.

Once Upon a Time...

A new book of stories, stories that will inform the way you write the last chapter of your own life.
See review on Sunday.

In his 2005 book, On the Take, former New England Journal of Medicine editor Jerome Kassirer inveighed against the influence that drug and device companies exerted over physicians. Through a variety of strategies, ranging from subsidizing elaborate meals at medical conferences to lucrative consulting arrangements to all-expenses-paid travel to exotic resorts in exchange for product endorsement, corporate America affected and sometimes determined physician behavior. In response, many academic medical centers have banned pharmaceutical sales reps, the “detail men” of yesteryear and put sometimes stringent conflict of interest policies into effect. The Sunshine provision of the Affordable Care Act requires drug companies and device manufacturers to reveal how much money they gave to doctors and to hospitals and to whom they gave it. As of September, 2014 this information is publicly available on a special website maintained by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Is this provision having an effect? Will it?

An article written by a health economist and a health lawyer predicted the law would be unlikely to have a direct effect on either patients (by dissuading them from seeing particular physicians) or on physicians (by shaming them into severing their relationship with drug or device manufacturers). It suggested there might nonetheless be a beneficial effect if what the authors called “learned intermediaries,” such as health insurance companies, begin discriminating against people or institutions that are the recipients of what they regard as excessive largesse.

Six states had already introduced legislation requiring disclosure of payments in the form of gifts, food, travel and fees long before the Sunshine Act was passed, and the results in those states give us a preview of what is to come. One study of the Massachusetts law, which went into effect in 2009, concluded that the disclosure requirements were associated with a fall in the total volume of prescriptions, a decrease in the use of brand name drugs, and a rise in the use of generic drugs. But it’s hard to tease out how much of the change was due to the law and how much due to other simultaneous changes in the culture of medicine.

It’s too soon to draw conclusions about the federal law, but some preliminary observations are raising red flags. According to an investigative journalism piece just published in the New York Times, the information available on OpenPayments, the CMS database, is incomplete and replete with errors. Some companies, whether intentionally or accidentally, misspell the names of their drugs and devices or use different names for the same drug in different sections of the database. All told, 40% of the records in the database are missing the names of the doctor or the hospital that received the payment. And indeed, when I checked this out by looking up a local academic hospital, I found that if I entered "Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital," the report said there were no conflicts entered for this facility, but when I entered "Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center," I found dozens of them.

Even if the reporting were accurate, the real question is whether transparency alone will have a significant effect. I’m doubtful. For some time, medical journals have had disclosure requirements for articles. The result is that the reader knows about consulting relationships, advisory board memberships, and other financial ties authors have with their sponsors. Perhaps the reader will take more seriously those papers in which the authors have no disclosures to make than those where they have a litany of them. But in either case, the article has passed muster: it has made it past the gauntlet of peer review, it has the journal’s stamp of approval. Does anyone seriously discredit a paper because of the author’s pedigree?

Does any of this matter? In particular, what does it have to do with medical care for older people? A great deal. Older patients comprise a huge part of the market for most drugs and most devices.  The average 65-year-old takes 4 prescription medications a day. The average nursing home resident takes closer to 9. In 2015, Medicare spending on Part D, the prescription drug benefit, is expected to account for 14% of total Medicare expenditures in 2015, or $76 billion.

And while the top ten prescription drugs dispensed to older people include such inexpensive generics as hydrochlorothiazine and atorvastatin, many ultra-expensive specialty drugs are used principally in older people. Some of these drugs are one-of-a-kind; many are life-saving. This is where the concern about undue influence of the manufacturer comes in. Precisely because older people take so many medications (and use so many devices) and precisely because they amount to such a big chunk of health care resources, we need to be concerned with what drugs doctors prescribe. Public disclosure of gifts from PhRMA is unlikely to make much of a difference in the all important power of the pen. 

If we want to assure the integrity of the prescribing process--and this is critical because of the number and cost of the medicines taken by older people--we need to prohibit certain kinds of corporate/physician interactions, and to give such bans teeth.

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine...

The Sunshine Act went into effect in September, 2014. It requires public disclosure of payments to hospitals and physicians by drug companies and device manufacturers. Is it working to limit inappropriate influence on physician behavior? Will it? See my blog posting this weekend.