Once again, the US trails rich countries in health care -- except in cost! Why do we tolerate it?

Sometimes the news is good, sometimes it is bad (too much of the latter!!). Sometimes it is surprising, and sometimes it is not. Often it is more of the same, and sometimes this is surprising because we had thought or hoped that it had changed, preferably for the better, and sometimes it is not surprising because we knew it had not.

A good example of this is international health rankings, in which the US consistently and continually ranks at the bottom of the wealthy nations and has a health status that is in the middle of what are known as “middle income countries”. These are called middle-income because they are better off than the really poor countries, but compared to the US and similar countries, they are poor.  In 2000, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a ranking of health system performance in their member nations, based on 1997 data, in which the US ranked #37 in the world, between Costa Rica and Slovenia, on overall performance. When many were aghast that the US could be like Slovenia, the prime minister of that nation took offense and pointed out that his country had been making significant advances. In the area of Disability Adjusted Life Expectancy (DALE) the US in fact ranked #72! I had reproduced these tables in  US Health Rankings remain low and #Trumpcare will make them worse!, June 18, 2017, and do so again now.

Of course, 1997 is a long time ago. Maybe, since then, we, like Slovenia, have gotten better. Except we haven’t. This is the sadly non-surprising part of the news.

While the WHO has not redone that 2000 survey, in 2017 Bloomberg published its Global Health Index, and, as I said then,

Now, we have new rankings to refer to, the Bloomberg Global HealthIndex from 2017. It would be nice to be able to say that the US had moved up from the 2000 WHO report, but now, at #34 (and still just behind Costa Rica) the change is really insignificant. Slovenia, it might be noted, has moved up, to #27, so maybe their efforts are paying off!

For an ongoing comparison, the Commonwealth Fund publishes a report every few years called “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall” comparing US health outcomes and cost to other high-income countries. I have cited it, in its various editions, on many occasions (Mirror on the Wall: Commonwealth Fund report continues to show US has poor outcomes at high cost, June 26, 2010, ACA: Where are we? And where should we go?, July 27, 2014, US Health Rankings remain low and #Trumpcare will make them worse!, June 18, 2017, Our health system: Not equitable, not effective, and not even efficient. Bad business!, March 24, 2022), and address it in detail in my 2015 book “Health, Medicine and Justice: Designing a fair and equitable health system” (Copernicus). The relative performance and ranking of the other countries varies a bit over the years, but the position of the US at the bottom of the heap, #1 only (and consistently) in cost, and worst in performance, is unchanging. The most recent report, “Mirror, Mirror 2024: A portrait of a failing US health system” has just come out, and the title provides the answer: not good. Not better. Failing. And, probably, failing worse. The study’s conclusion, in the Summary, is:

The U.S. continues to be in a class by itself in the underperformance of its health care sector. While the other nine countries differ in the details of their systems and in their performance on domains, unlike the U.S., they all have found a way to meet their residents’ most basic health care needs, including universal coverage.

Here is the table of rankings:

And, if you prefer a visual portrayal about how much worse the US health system is performing:

But we do lead in spending:

And, logically, trail the pack by a lot in value for dollar spent:

This is the non-surprising non-news. But, while not surprising, it should be very concerning. It’s not getting better, and there is little reason to think that it will, if past performance is a predictor of future performance. And we’re talking more than two decades of consistent past performance. It is not a question of what the fact are, of what is true, no longer if it ever was. The US health system performs terribly as a health (or even medical care) system. Costs are enormously high, outcomes are consistently poor, and we dramatically underperform every other country that has in any way comparable resources (and many, many with far fewer resources). It is incredibly inequitable. See, for example, some of the countries grouped around the US in the 2017 Bloomberg rankings, such as Qatar, Brunei, and Bahrain – countries with money and inequitable distribution. So, the question is why are we not doing anything about it?

The answer simply requires a little re-framing of the data presented above. I, and likely you, see the incredible cost/performance ratio as a negative, something to be addressed and fixed. But all that money that is being spent is going somewhere, and certainly a large amount of it is not going to provide high-quality healthcare. It is going to profits for insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies and the Wall St. investors that own them, and for enormous salaries for the C-suite executives who run them, as well as those in the ostensibly non-profit sector (see Why many nonprofit (wink, wink) hospitals are rolling in money by Elisabeth Rosenthal (Washington Post, July 29, 2024). For them the current system is working very well, thank you, they are getting very rich. Your problem, and mine, is that we think that this system should be about providing high-quality and cost-effective care for the American people, at which it is obviously failing. But if we understand it as a cash-cow for these corporations, as a method for transferring money from the rest of the economy to them, it is working great. And, because it is working so well and they are making so much money and spending a great deal of it contributing to politicians, it is unlikely to change.

Unless YOU make it change.  There is, and has been for decades, a loud and effective rant from the corporations and individuals profiting from your health care dollars and their employees (or shall we say “beneficiaries of their largess”) in the legislative, think tank, and punditry arenas, that the Democratic party, and particularly its progressive wing, are radical socialists who are anti-American. This has been very successful. See above, we have kept to the unique American way of doing things. The one that takes money from you in premiums, co-pays, and deductibles and provides you with poor outcomes. That every other wealthy capitalist country has found a way of delivering higher quality for less money is the evidence that it is possible and will not destroy the country. But it will destroy the conveyor belt that takes your money and puts it into their pockets, and this is a terrifying thought, so that they will do anything to prevent it.

Their tactics include both painting mainstream Democrats who merely want to tinker around the edges of the system as flaming radicals, and funding organizations such as the Heritage Foundation to come up with truly radical proposals like Project 2025 (pdf of the health section here) that would institutionalize the worst, most anti-human practices going on today. The strategy is that if they can get half the country to support politicians who support those policies (whether those voters actually support those policies or not), it moves the center of the discussion to the “right” and means compromise will be much less threatening to them. But much more threatening to you.

People want good healthcare for themselves, for their families, and for their friends. They don’t want to pay ever-more for health insurance only to have the insurers deny their care, often as a matter of routine, when they need it. They deserve, as do the people of other countries, a health system that is intrinsically structured to provide the best possible health care for our people and not to make money for Wall St., big corporations, insurance companies and health systems. We know it can be done as it has been done everywhere else.

Make it the thing you vote for and let your representatives know it; you want health care, as the old saying goes, for people and not for profit!

Continuity of care? Hospitalists? Who calls the family?: Corporate control makes health care worse.

I was recently talking with a friend who was still (justifiably, IMO) furious at her local hospital. Last year her husband, 90, was admitted for an attack of diverticulitis. While hospitalized, he suffered a heart attack on a Sunday morning and was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit. The treatment was fine – indeed now, at 91, he is quite improved – but her complaint was that no one called to tell her! She found out when she went to visit him in the hospital that afternoon. I am sure that virtually any adult presented with this scenario would say “of course, as soon as possible, call the family!” Can you imagine that they didn’t?

Sadly, I can. It reflects a lot of issues in the medical care system. One that my friend identified was the hospitalist system, where the doctor who is responsible for the care of a person in the hospital is not their regular physician, but someone employed by the hospital (usually an internist or sometimes a family doctor). In itself this can be an issue, which I will discuss below, but the bigger problem she identified was the frequent change in who this responsible physician was, different on the weekends, and at night, and almost impossible for her to get to know. Indeed, she was not certain if the doctor she talked to later that day, the one who told her, not apologetically, that they were “trying to figure out what to do with him” (as if this was an excuse for not calling the wife of an 90-year-old patient to tell her that he had a heart attack) was the actual hospitalist or a resident working with them. If you don’t know the attending physician du jour, or even know who they are, it is hard to be sure. I might add that my friend is a highly educated and well-insured person. When they suffer such indignities, and they do, it is certainly far worse and more frequent for people who are not.

Why would doctors not want to call the family of a person in the hospital, especially but not only if they are old and frail and suffer a particular acute life-threatening event, as soon as possible? Is it imaginable that they do not? Why would they not want – insist upon – the family knowing who the responsible physician is? Do they just want to be anonymous, not to be bothered?

Maybe, sometimes, but I do not think that this is the primary reason. Think about it. You are the “hospitalist”, a hospital-based physician tasked with responsibility for the care of lots of people (“patients”) who you didn’t know before they were admitted. On top of that, you are not the weekday hospitalist, but the one covering for them on the weekend, a weekendist if you prefer (I sure don’t!). Maybe you are even the nocturnist, the night-time hospitalist. In any case, you have a list of patients to see, and to get to know, and maybe you come into the hospital in the morning to see them all (which, of course, has to be one at a time, someone first, someone last) when all of a sudden you hear from the nurses that one of them has had a heart attack. Maybe someone you have seen already, maybe not, maybe it is the afternoon, and you have already left the hospital. You tell them, the nurses and the residents working with you, to begin their well-practiced routine of treating an acute myocardial infarction (MI, heart attack) and give other instructions, including to call cardiology, and tell them to call you back. Do you specifically instruct them to call the family? Do you think that would be obvious to them? Does it even occur to you? Is it someone else’s job? Whose?

In the “old days”, when someone’s family doctor took care of them even when they entered the hospital, it was almost certain the family would be called. The doctor knew the person, often had been seeing them for years, and knew the family. They knew, of course, that the family would want to know, and felt it to be their responsibility to inform them. This changed with the creation of hospitalists as a separate specialty, and has accelerated with the corporate takeover of medical care and the dramatic increase in physicians as employees of corporations (most often hospitals, sometimes physician-owned groups, sometimes for-profit, often owned by private equity). Different physician roles have been identified, such as caring for people in the office (and very rarely at home), in the hospital, in nursing homes. While these roles had always existed, often the same doctor filled the different roles for their patients; now different doctors would. The delivery system, which had been patient-focused (“I’m your doctor and take care of you wherever you need care”) became provider-focused (“We, as the providers of care, will develop a system that works efficiently for us; unfortunately for you, that means you will not have the same doctor all the time”).

Actually, there were many good reasons for this change. It is not easy, was never easy, to be a “full-spectrum” family doctor, to see people in the office both with appointments and as walk-ins, to do home visits for those who were ill and found it difficult (from age or disease) to get to the office, to see people in nursing homes and in the emergency room, and make “rounds” on and care for your patients in the hospital. And, often, get up in the middle of the night to deliver a baby. It was tough on the doctor, and tough on their families, as many books and films have depicted. In addition, these family doctors had (and have) much lower incomes than most specialists, including those who do shift work where they know exactly which hours they will work. Plus, as more and more things could be cared for in an outpatient setting (we will leave, for now, whether this was always a good idea), the people admitted to the hospital were sicker and often required more specialized knowledge that a physician who focused only on hospital medicine could better stay up on.

But there were also bad reasons, many of them stemming from the movement of physicians from self-employed to employees, increasingly working for hospitals and even for corporations that had no health professionals in charge. This corporate model, based on the industrial concept called “scientific management” or “Taylorism”, focused on increasing efficiency as the most effective way to generate maximum profit. It is more efficient to have some doctors who stay in the hospital all the time and some doctors who care for people in the outpatient setting (“ambulists”, another term that fortunately hasn’t caught on), and others who care for people in nursing home or even in their own homes. This not only reduces travel time, but allows more people to be scheduled (“speed up”) and provides the basis for further increasing the number of patients seen and concomitantly decreasing the time spent with each (see "Direct primary care" not the answer for our health system. Beware "Project 2025"!, July 9, 2024),

The problem is that this is not always the best for the patient. Yes, it is good to have people who are expert and current on the care of people in the hospital (“inpatients”) to take care of you, just as, when you need one, it is good to have experts in an organ (cardiologists, nephrologists, pulmonologists, etc., and various types of surgeons if you need surgery). But it is also good if the person taking care of you knows something about who you are, or at least your medical history. If they have never seen you before you show up in the hospital, they have nothing to compare your current situation with: are you worse? A lot worse? Better? About the same? And, by the way, if someone actually knows you – your family would almost certainly get a call!

Is it possible to have most of the good with little of the bad? The continuity (sometimes called “primary care”) clinician – family doc, internist, pediatrician, family or adult or pediatric NP – can delegate the key medical decisions to hospital experts but stay as the leader of the team. The leader, not the pain-in-the-neck “local doctor”. The professional who can fill their role as the one who cares for the whole person, not as the subspecialist for only one disease or organ. The one who cared for the patient before admission and will continue to do so afterward, not as the hospitalist for whom the patient was essentially born the day of admission and will disappear the day of discharge. Someone who can provide context and understanding and, believe it or not, continuity!

Of course, we’d need more primary care clinicians, not fewer as is the current direction in which we have been and continue to be heading (Incredible (Terrible) Shrinking Physician Supply, Health Justice Monitor, Sept 7, 2024). This would decrease efficiency, perhaps, but increase effectiveness. And while it might cost more money (thus lower profits for the corporations) it might actually save money for the overall system by having historical memory of the person when they go from home to hospital to home, and not change almost daily each time a new doctor is in charge.

Worth thinking about!

Pro tip: If you have to be admitted to the hospital, or have a heart attack, try to do it on Monday, or at least Tuesday. Do not wait for the weekend!

Insurers in trouble for the wrong reason: Wall St. wants them to rip you off for even MORE!

There is good news and bad news regarding health/medical insurance. Let’s start with the good:

In his Substack, “Health Care Uncovered” from August 8, 2024, Wendell Potter reports that “Wall St. is disenchanted with Medicare Advantage Plans”. This is good news in the sense that it is good when anyone is disenchanted with these plans, or any aspect of the for-profit health insurance industry. Potter notes that both CVS/Aetna and CIGNA disappointed Wall St. investors with inadequate (from their point of view) profits, compared to a year ago. I also am disenchanted, but for different reasons than Wall St. I am upset that these for-profit insurers continue to rake off such a huge amount of money that was intended, by the workers and employers who paid it, to be spend on actually delivering health care. Investors are upset that these health insurers are not raking in even more.

Potter notes that Aetna president Brian Kane resigned as a result, but appropriately writes:

I am much more concerned about the health and well-being of the 4.3 million people enrolled in CVS’s MA plans and the 6.2 million in Humana’s plans. Sadly, most will find they’re trapped in a circle of hell created by the insurance industry, unable to stay in their current Medicare Advantage plan but also unable to return to traditional Medicare because of what for them will be unaffordable Medicare supplemental policies (most of which are sold by the same big insurers that sell MA plans). Seniors have six months from the date they’re eligible for Medicare to buy a supplemental (Medigap) policy to cover out-of-pocket expenses. If they’ve been enrolled in an MA plan longer than six months, they’ll have to go through medical underwriting. That means that if they’re being treated for much of anything or, God forbid, have a “preexisting condition,” they’ll have to pay an arm and a leg for Medigap policy.

A similar piece of good news is not particularly about Medicare Advantage plans, but the overall health insurance industry/scam, in a story about data-analytics firm MultiPlan (‘Revenues Down and Stock Battered as Data Firm Faces Scrutiny’, NY Times, August 16, 2024). This one is a little harder to understand than the CVS/Aetna and CIGNA stories. They are about the fact that while they are making beaucoup bucks, it is not as much as investors would like. In the MultiPlan case, we have a company that worked for insurers to get reimbursements down (that is, to pay doctors and other healthcare providers less) and made money from it. For example, if a doctor billed $100 and MultiPlan told the insurer to only pay $50, that’s more money for the insurer (and MultiPlan), and the patient can be on the hook for the other $50. (Of course, it’s never only $100, or $50.) Since they do this mainly for “out of network” care the amount that you (the patient) can get stuck with having to pay can be – a great deal. (This can happen even when you choose an “in-network” doctor and hospital, since other doctors – like in the ER, or radiology, or even the “assistant surgeon” – can be out of network. And the ambulance almost always is).

This article was a follow-up to an earlier exposé in the NY Times ‘Insurers Reap Hidden Fees by Slashing Payments. You May Get the Bill.,’ April 24, 2024, in which the amount the patient could get stuck having to pay was as much as $100,000 – or more. The good result of this first article was a lot of opprobrium aimed at MultiPlan, resulting in some insurers being more reluctant to use them (because of the bad publicity, not because they save them money; apparently they can use other less-notorious data analytics firms to save them money), so MultiPlan is in trouble as the more recent NY Times article documents. Good. I love to see them in trouble.

The bad news is that it is likely to be you and other regular people who are screwed. There is already evidence that the pressure from investors to go back to making not just great but obscene profit margins is affecting CIGNA, CVS/Aetna, and other insurers, who are denying more claims, making it even harder to get the care that you need. Potter notes that

Humana said last week it planned to jettison “a few hundred thousand” of its Medicare Advantage enrollees that have become unprofitable. CVS says it will get rid of about 10% of its MA enrollment, which would be around 430,000 of America’s seniors and disabled people.

That’s a lot of seniors who will lose their medical coverage. I have often been critical of Medicare Advantage plans (sometimes called, more accurately, Medicare Dis-Advantage), which are NOT Medicare but are private insurance plans, usually HMOs or PPOs, paid for by Medicare funds. One of the major reasons for my criticism is that because they are private insurance, they can (and often do) deny coverage for care even when the care is approved by Medicare. Recent legislation has required these MA plans to cover Medicare-approved care, but in fact they still often deny claims. Indeed, it is often the modus operandi for these companies. They may approve the claim if you appeal, but the vast majority of clients do not appeal, and probably don’t even know that they can. If fined by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) it becomes a “cost of doing business.”

But the “jettisoning” of hundreds of thousands that Potter refers to illustrates another big problem with MA. As with all insurance – not just medical – companies make money by collecting premiums and paying as few claims as possible (although medical insurance companies seem to have taken this to the extreme). One effective way to do this for healthcare is to insure healthy people. They, or their (usually former, if they’re on Medicare) employer pay the premiums but they don’t cost much money in claims. And they love getting free eyeglasses and hearing aids and gym memberships, which cost the insurance companies very little. The problem is that sometimes previously healthy people get sick, and this becomes more and more common as they age. Remember that in any given year approximately 5% of the people account for about 50% of healthcare costs, but they are not necessarily the same people the next year. Some folks get better, some folks get worse, and some really sick people die. MA plans have long “encouraged” their sickest (= most costly) patients to consider switching to traditional Medicare. Now they will be more than encouraging; they’ll drop those high-cost “losers”. Maybe you.

The MultiPlan case got good (that is, bad) coverage from the original April NY Times investigation, which resulted in it losing business as reported by that newspaper in August. But the insurers will get another data analytics firm to try to screw doctors and other providers, and the patient, you, will still be caught on the hook for many of those dollars. The system is not set up to help or protect you, and it has relatively few sanctions against companies whose business model is to find any way to screw you that will make them more money, and to use that money to hire lawyers and others to find the loopholes and to pay the politicians to ensure that they are not closed too tightly.

It’s kind of like a sport where one team able and willing to bring in ringers, violate the rules, commit all sorts of fouls and infractions, and at worst get a slap on the wrist for it. Not a fair game, but heck, that team’s owners are paying off the referees and the league.

There’s another way to do it. Absolutely strict regulation to ensure the interests of patients are the ones that are protected, and protecting the profits of the insurers is given zero weight. Penalties that are strictly enforced, and draconian and include going out of business. Even better: prohibiting profit making in any healthcare endeavor. In some countries, like Switzerland, there are private insurers, but they all have to offer the same comprehensive product, charge the same rates, and be non-profit. So how do they compete? Customer service, can you imagine!?

I like that approach!

Racism and lack of social services: The status of women's health care in the US

A recent publication from the Commonwealth Fund is the 2024 State Scorecard on Women’s Health and Reproductive Care in which they rank all the states (plus DC) for how well that care is provided and the health status of women that results. The map below gives an overall sense (darker is worse), and the entire ranked list can be found in an interactive table in the document. 

The first thing that we see is that there are no real surprises. Massachusetts is at the top and Mississippi is at the bottom. The other top and bottom states are the usual suspects for almost anything that is beneficial to people, with the Northeast doing best and the old Confederacy doing the worst. There are always some minor shifts within those groups, and in this ranking we see that Louisiana* and South Carolina are only “worse than average” not in the “bottom performing states”, while disappointing to me, Arizona and New Mexico are in the lowest group. The reasons are a little different in different states; the Arizona legislature is (narrowly; we hope to flip it this year) controlled by Republicans who are as mean and nasty as those in the deep south. New Mexico is controlled by Democrats, but it is very poor. Poor is a big component of health status, and its fingerprints are all over this data on women’s health.  ‘Despite a small rebound in women’s life expectancy in 2022, it remains at its lowest since 2006,’ says the report.

Abortion care – access to it and the quality of it – has dominated the national political discussion. I don’t want to minimize it; it is incredibly important that women can have abortions, it is a privacy issue, and it will hopefully have major negative repercussions for the party whose agenda is to limit it. That the greatest restrictions on abortion are in the same states that have the worst women’s health status is neither a coincidence nor a surprise; the people who control these states and are anti-abortion are also racists and are unwilling to provide funds to improve the health standards of people who are women, minority, or poor – and especially all three. But it goes far beyond abortion:

For health outcomes, we measured all-cause mortality, maternal and infant mortality, preterm birth rates, syphilis among women of reproductive age, infants born with congenital syphilis, self-reported health status, postpartum depression, breast and cervical cancer deaths, poor mental health, and intimate partner violence.

Abortion is not the major component of poor reproductive health status. Maternal mortality rates are shockingly high in the southeast, and worst in the Mississippi Delta. The US overall does not do very well in this area, especially as it is the richest country in the world. Data from the CIA (!) shows that in 2020, the US maternal mortality rate overall was 21/100,000, tied with Lebanon, Grenada, and Malaysia and just slightly worse than the West Bank or (pre-war) Gaza Strip. This was (and remains) much higher than Canada (11), UK (10), and most of Europe, including eastern Europe at 5 or less! (Note, showing the same dramatic racist differences as in the US, Israel is at 3). Of course, this overall rate in the US is driven by the states with the highest rates, with the worst states having a range of 34.1-51.7! While this is largely the result of excessively high rates in minority women, it is worth noting that the maternal mortality rate for white women in the US is over 19!

 

This is a good time to discuss the segmentation of results for maternal mortality (and all-cause mortality, and really most things) by race or ethnicity. In the bizarre, perverted, and of course racist excuse provided by many (racists) for why the US’ maternal mortality is so high compared to civilized countries, it is often said “it’s the minorities that drive the rate up”. In addition to ignoring the excessively high rate for US whites (19) it is scarcely an excuse; indeed, it is an indictment. It is not only that the US, unlike civilized countries, does not provide health care for everyone, essentially free of charge at the time of service (that is, paid for by tax revenues, as well as costing a lot less because of the elimination of the incredible profits extracted by middlemen such as insurance companies in the US). It also provides lousy social services of all kinds, not ensuring, as civilized countries do, housing, food, and education for everyone. These (the “social determinants of health”) are even more important than medical care in creating improved health status. And, while other countries do spend much more money than we do on providing them, the total cost per capita is probably less than what the US spends on health care alone! Of course, much of the spending (particularly on social services and health care for the poor, like Medicaid) is on a state basis; that is why there are such differences between the Massachusetts’ and Mississippi’s in this Commonwealth Fund study. And what are the practices that work? Again, no surprise:

In our scorecard, states with the lowest rates of maternal mortality had:

·       more maternity care providers (Vermont #2, Connecticut #3)

·       fewer women with no prenatal care (Vermont #1, California #3, Connecticut #5)

·       fewer women with no postpartum checkups (Vermont #1)

·       fewer uninsured women ages 19–64 (Vermont #3)

 

It cannot be stated too strongly that public funds should support a public social safety net, not bloat the profits of private companies as they do here in the US! This is most well-documented for the piggish pharmaceutical industry and the entirely unnecessary (indeed, far worse than unnecessary, destructive and evil) for-profit health insurance industry, which I have discussed many times. But it is also the other parts of the health care industry, particularly delivery systems (e.g., hospitals). Yes, the for-profits, hospitals and nursing homes and other facilities, especially those run by corporations. But it is also the ostensible “non-profits”, which do their best to emulate for-profits by doing everything possible to exclude patients without insurance or with Medicaid, pay their CEOs (and other C-suite executives) exorbitant salaries, and channel huge earnings into subsidiaries that actually own or invest in for-profit enterprises! This is documented in Why many nonprofit (wink, wink) hospitals are rolling in money by Elisabeth Rosenthal (Washington Post, July 29, 2024) and discussed by Don McCanne in Health Justice Monitor ‘Not-for-profit care begets profits’. Dr. McCanne cites a study by KFF showing even a program providing “street medicine”, healthcare for the homeless, in California is making money by getting huge amounts of Medicaid funds. Providing health care to homeless people is a good thing, something we need more of. If I had my druthers, I would rather see them making money than huge “non-profit” hospital systems (or of course straight for-profits, although those at least pay taxes), but they shouldn’t be either.

In health care, and in all social service, all the public money should go to providing direct care (OK, maybe with a 2% overhead, like Medicare – but NOT Medicare (Dis)Advantage – has). Zero dollars should go to profits (or “excess” income that can be invested for profit), bloated salaries, and the like.

We have too many people, women and others, dying because of the lack of such care.

 

*Louisiana just put the two drugs used for medication abortion, mifepristone and misoprostol, on its state’s controlled dangerous substances list, like narcotics. So look for LA’s ranking to drop!

"Direct primary care" not the answer for our health system. Beware "Project 2025"!

My last post (June 27, 2024) was about the shortage of primary care physicians (as well as NPs), and the reasons why. To save you the time of (re?)reading it, here is the bottom line: It’s the money, stupid! Primary care physicians – and NPs – get paid a lot less than those working in subspecialties, for what is indeed very hard work, encompassing breadth (everything), depth (everything), and time. I also suggested that there was a relatively simple way to address the income disparity between primary care and subspecialty practice: having Medicare revise the criteria for payment, which affects not just Medicare but also the rest of us as most insurance companies base their reimbursement rates on Medicare’s.

There have been other suggestions on how to “help” primary care. One of them, which has been seen in many places across the country for years, involves having people pay extra money (usually in an annual or monthly fee) to their primary care doctors to supplement their income and to make them more available to their patients. This phenomenon has many names -- “concierge care”, “boutique care”, “direct primary care” -- depending both on the way it is structured (and the amount of the additional fee) and how the user wants to spin it – are they portraying it as good or bad?

One place where it is portrayed as good is in the Project 2025 document issued in April by the Heritage Foundation and its allies, Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. This document outlines an ambitious, far-reaching, and horrifying vision for the future of the federal government once “conservatives” take the White House back. It systematically goes through every federal function, and many agencies, detailing what should be eliminated or scaled back (mostly) or expanded (rarely, mainly tax cuts for the rich). It manifests a vision of America where the corporations and the richest individuals are even richer and more powerful than they are now and the “poorest” (meaning not just the poor but working people and the majority of those who consider themselves “middle class”) are even worse off.

How does this relate to primary care? One of their (many) plans for healthcare in this country, discussed in the Health Justice Monitor, is to “Remove barriers to direct primary care”. That the Heritage Foundation is for it should in itself be a warning. They like it because it is “free enterprise” and comes from a libertarian approach that basically maintains that it is good to sell (to people who can afford it) those basic things that everyone should have as a right. Also, like most (all?) things endorsed by these “conservatives” (who mainly wish to conserve privilege) it ignores the negative impact on those folks who cannot afford to buy it.

This is not to say that everything about direct primary care as it exists currently is bad. I know many doctors who chose it because it allows them to make a living, yes, but mostly because it permits them to more fully and completely practice the kind of medicine that they trained to do because they wanted to do it, manifesting the 4 C’s of primary care – comprehensive (more or less), first contact, caring, and continuous over time. Most of them had previous jobs where they worked for big health systems (and, increasingly, private equity companies) in which they were continuously pressured to work faster, see more patients for fewer minutes, and generate more income for their employers – a concept” familiar to manufacturing jobs called “speed up” that comes from literally increasing the rate of speed of an assembly line. By charging a (modest, in many cases – this is not about true concierge care where the charges can be $10,000/year or more) fee, they are able, they believe, to take care of most of their patients’ problems, do it compassionately, see them for long enough to do so, and be available to them when they need it. These are all good things, and like most of the doctors I know who are doing this, most of the people I know who go to them as patients appreciate it and think it is beneficial.

So, what is the problem? Well, obviously, it is not available to everyone, to those who can’t afford an extra fee, and already have a problem with their insurance premiums, deductibles, and co-pays. Note that when Project 2025 says “DPC has faced many challenges from government policymakers, including overly exuberant attempts at regulation and misclassification,” the solution they propose is to ensure that the payments for it are not paid by insurance or health savings accounts. That many, most, people can’t afford DPC is the big objection to it, but there are also other problems. DPC hearkens back to the days of the old GP, where for a small fee (or a chicken) avuncular Marcus Welby could take care of all of your problems (of course, old Marcus somehow managed to stay in practice with only one patient a week). But medicine is not like that anymore. While I am a huge advocate for primary care, for family medicine, for comprehensive practice, providing all the benefits that modern medicine has available often requires more than the one primary care doctor can do. It may require specialists, both knowledge-based and surgical. It may require imaging (x-rays, CT, MRI, PET). It often requires laboratory tests and medicines. It requires other people and other resources.

Moreover, as reported in (among many places) a succinct and accurately titled Medscape Medical News article, July 2, 2024, “Better Access for a Few Patients Disrupts Care for Many”. With so few doctors (and NPs) entering primary care, the impact of those entering DPC further decreases the number of providers for those who cannot afford it. Adam Leive, one of the authors of the article on which this report is based (“On resource allocation in health care: The case of concierge medicine” J Health Economics, July 2023) is quoted as saying “Concierge medicine potentially leads to disproportionately richer people being able to pay for the scarce resource of physician time and crowding out people who have lower incomes and are sicker". This is the key point. The Medscape article also adds that ‘Leive's research showed no decrease in mortality for concierge patients compared with similar patients who saw non-concierge physicians, suggesting concierge care may not notably improve some health outcomes.’

Let’s get this straight. The Heritage Foundation’s support for DPC, and indeed elite concierge care, is because they are right-wingers whose agenda is all about further privileging the privileged and ignoring the needy. The large insurance and private equity companies who sponsor versions of DPC are doing it to make money. The primary care doctors who are engaged in it are (mostly) trying to make a living and provide quality care in miserable healthcare system (although not yet as miserable as the one Project 2025 envisions). These doctors are basically engaged in a “work-around” that does help some people, if not everyone, to have better access if not health outcomes.

But we don’t need a “work around”. What we need is a well-designed, single payer, comprehensive, cover everything, no co-pay or deductible, no necessary services that are not covered, health system. Improved and expanded Medicare for All!