United Airlines, health care, and a system designed to privilege the powerful

The spectacle of Chicago Department of Aviation security officers beating and dragging a passenger off of a United Airlines flight was recorded by other passengers and quickly went viral on the Internet, generating outrage across the country (and internationally, particularly in China, where the fact that the passenger was Asian was a source of fury). A series of statements from United and its CEO, Oscar Muñoz escalated from tone-deaf explanation (essentially “well, we told him to get off first”) to most recently apparent contrition, saying it should never, ever, happen to anyone and that United would never, ever, have local police board its planes to take off a legitimate, paying customer.

It is unlikely that this too-little too-late response is going to appease anyone, and it is profoundly to be hoped that United suffers severe financial repercussions; the passenger, who suffered a broken nose and lost teeth, almost certainly will sue. It is not clear how to make this happen to the Chicago Aviation Department. The fury of the public is almost certainly increased by the personal experience of (coach) airline passengers. It also is not limited to either United or to airline travel, as Helaine Olen articulately describes in her NY Times op-ed “United Airlines is not alone”, on April 12, 2017. Ms. Olen goes through the list of issues that were raised by this incident, including not only the concerns about racism (would it have been worse if he were black?), but about the militarization of our police response to relatively minor issues. Although the officers involved were from Aviation Security and not the Police Department, it is understandable that a friend from Chicago posted the question “Was anyone surprised that the Chicago PD used such violence?” on Facebook, given that department’s history of “overreaction” and use of military-type tactics.

But Olen’s main point is that this event (if not necessarily the attendant violence) reflects the vast disparity in treatment provided, not only by United and other airlines but across our society, of people in different socioeconomic situations. She goes through the multiple enhancements to the first class cabins (sleepable seats with Saks 5^th Avenue bedding, better meals, etc.) and compares them to the growing level of discomforts and indignities inflicted on coach passengers, with no food, increased crowding, baggage fees, and the like. The crowding is worse than on a bus, and Greyhound doesn’t charge for baggage. Full-fare first class passengers are a big profit center, but most people in first class are not the 1%ers who can pay these fares, they are business travelers whose companies have bought coach tickets and upgraded to first based on miles earned through an airlines loyalty program. And airlines love that, because it means they will keep flying with them. The rest of us, tough. And don’t believe that they “need” to stay so lean; Olen notes that United made $2.3 Billion in profit last year.

Olen also makes the connection to health, observing that

In a study published in 2014, Martin Gilens at Princeton University and Benjamin Page at Northwestern University found government policy and actions rarely reflected majority sentiment, but instead favored corporate interests and the wealthiest Americans. When congressional Republicans offered up a health insurance reform package earlier this year that would have covered fewer people than the Affordable Care Act, Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, initially defended it by claiming Americans needed to choose between spending on necessary medical care or buying an iPhone. Meantime, the fabled 1 percent would have received an average tax cut totaling $37,000 if the legislation were fully enacted.

And if anyone doubts that this is how the health system functions (although I doubt that many readers of this blog do), I recommend the new book “An American Sickness: how healthcare became big business and how you can take it back”, by Elisabeth Rosenthal (Penguin Random House, 2017). Rosenthal, a former New York Times reporter whose fantastic series “Paying till it hurts” ran in the Times a couple of years ago, is now the editor-in-chief of Kaiser Health News. I have cited her reporting frequently in this blog and in my 2015 book “Health, Medicine and Justice: designing a fair and equitable healthcare system” (Copernicus Healthcare). Indeed, “An American Sickness” overlaps considerably with my book, but is by a much better-known figure, and hopefully will be widely read. Rosenthal, a physician, pulls few punches in this work, saying unequivocally that the US health system is designed and functions to maximize the income and profit of providers (especially hospitals), insurance companies, and pharmaceutical and device manufacturers. (An excellent review of the book by Jacob Hacker, Professor of Political Science at Yale, can be found here.) Rosenthal identifies the ten “Economic rules of the dysfunctional medical market” (which I have reproduced in the figure); all are important but #10, “Prices will rise to whatever the market will bear” is particularly critical, and reflects that the health system bears little or no relationship to a true market, and does not play by Adam Smith’s rules.

ECONOMIC RULES OF THE DYSFUNCTIONAL MEDICAL MARKET

(E. Rosenthal, “An American Sickness”)

1.      More treatment is always better. Default to the most expensive option.

2.      A lifetime of treatment is preferable to a cure.

3.      Amenities and marketing matter more than good care.

4.      As technologies age, prices can rise rather than fall.

5.      There is no free choice. Patients are stuck. And they’re stuck with buying American.

6.      More competitors vying for business doesn’t mean better prices; it can drive prices up, not down.

7.      Economies of scale don’t translate to lower prices. With their market power, big providers can simply demand more.

8.      There is no such thing as a fixed price for a procedure or test. And the uninsured pay the highest prices of all.

9.      There are no standards for billing. There’s money to be made in billing for anything and everything.

10.   Prices will rise to whatever the market will bear.

Rosenthal supports each of these rules with data and examples. Regarding rules #8 and #9, in an NPR interview with Terry Gross on “Fresh Air” ,she emphasizes the importance of getting an itemized bill from the hospital and going through it line by line, citing a person who found $70,000 in outpatient surgery charges for an inpatient hospitalization, and others billed for circumcisions their newborn sons did not have. But it is not always easy; in the book she tells of a person who demanded an itemized bill rather than the one she received, where the total of $45,000 was simply labeled “Miscellaneous”! The hospital never sent it, despite it being her legal right, but did send her to a collection agency! Rosenthal says we would never tolerate shopping at a supermarket with no prices where they just sent us a $2000 bill every week. We should not tolerate this in healthcare.  Every single service must have a listed, easily accessible public price. It may be fine to discount it for some insurers, and even more for some than for others, but the list price must be as clear as we expect it to be for anything else that we buy.

I learned some things from Rosenthal that had not even occurred to me; for example, the ACA’s 85% limit on “medical loss ratio” (i.e., the percent of premiums that insurers actually have to spend on medical care) ironically helps encourage them to be willing to pay higher prices to providers. Why would they pay $130,000 for a treatment that cost $19,000 only 15 blocks south (the opening example in the book)? Well, they get to keep 15%. And 15% of a bigger number is more in their pockets. And they just pass on the cost as higher premiums! Rosenthal discusses an important conservative health economist who is known for saying the high cost of US healthcare is overblown, but (amazingly) sings a very different tune when confronting the hospital bill for his father!

“Dysfunctional” is the wrong word for our health non-system. It functions just fine to make lots of money for the biggest corporate (including ostensibly “non-profit”) players. For the rest of us, it doesn’t always provide the best, or even adequate care, and it drains our individual and collective pockets, significantly contributing to individual bankruptcies and bad health outcomes when folks go without care. It also results in governments at federal, state, and local levels not having funds for other social programs that might actually improve health more.

Yes, we can change it but it will require resolve and a lot of work, because the opponents of change are rich, powerful, and entrenched. We cannot accept any excuses from our bought-off politicians or “pragmatists” who are the ones who suffer the least. We are least able to fight when we are sick and need care, just as we are least able to object to our conditions when we have a ticket and are on a plane bound for where we need to go. But just as we can fight the latter, we can fight the former; the social media response to United is an example of a good start.

But it is going to take more than a good start to get the thieves and profiteers out of healthcare, and get a system that benefits us all. It is going to take a long fight with a lot of hard work. Up for it?

Trump's "bad doctors": mostly greedy and bad for the public's health

My recent post, Doctors and health reform: maybe they do stand for health!, March 25, 2017, lauded the positions of many medical organizations, including the American Medical Association (AMA) for their positions in opposition to the American Health Care Act (AHCA), the Trump-Ryan bill that never even got to a vote, and apparently was never even available to House members to read before the vote was scheduled.  But I also pointed out some “bad” doctors, defined as those who advocate policies that are bad for the health of the American people. They argue that they are really for health, but this means mostly health care, especially medical care, for those who can afford it. There is no small tinge of racism as well as classism in these positions, because poor people and minorities are those most likely to be left out, and because, well, these perpetrators don’t care.

The prime example I cited was Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price, who, as a representative from a wealthy suburban Atlanta House district, continuously railed against the Affordable Care Act (ACA), as well as, in fact, Medicare. Dr. Price is an orthopedic surgeon, and my essay noted that this specialty is over-represented in the cohort of opponents of expansion of access, possibly because their high average income puts them in an elite economic group, and many are more concerned with their self-interest than the health of the overall population. Price was not the only bad doctor I mentioned; I also cited the “tone-deaf” comments of Rep. Roger Marshall of Kansas, an obstetrician-gynecologist. “Tone deaf”, of course, is a mild and polite term for his racist, classist comments, summarized as “the poor just don’t want health care”. Tone deaf, by the way, is also the term commonly used to describe the demeaning commercialization of the Black Lives Matter protest movement evident in Pepsi’s commercial featuring Kendall Jenner, now mercifully withdrawn. That was a result of the strong and sustained protest of a large number of people, especially on social media.

Price and Marshall are abetted by the non-physician politicians in Congress and the administration who also would deny health care to a lot of people, and even, through changes in Medicare and Medicaid, make the coverage of many people who now feel moderately secure in their insurance status greatly at risk and much more expensive. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Vice President Mike Pence met with the “Freedom” Caucus of the House to discuss just how regressive a health care bill would have to be to get their support. Pretty bad, it turns out. Its chairman, Rep. Mark Meadows of NC, is quoted by the NY Times as saying “Lower premiums have to be our first and only priority. By repealing community rating and the essential health benefits, it allows for lower premiums across the board.” Well, lower premiums are something everyone wants (except probably insurance companies) but there are different ways to get there. “Repealing community rating” means that insurers would no longer have to cover people who have chronic disease and are often older (and, ironically, often Trump and Freedom Caucus voters) at the same rates as less sick people. Those people would not have lower premiums; their premiums would either be fantastically higher, as they were before the ACA passed (and when many of them were without coverage) or be altogether unavailable. This is not something that the vast majority of Americans want. Similarly, “essential health benefits” are, well, essential. Like, for example, maternity care, and preventive health care. The fact that Rep. Meadows used that word and didn’t replace it with some euphemism, illustrates how tone-deaf he is.

But not all doctors who I would characterize as “bad” are reactionaries who are trying to figure out how to deny health care to the American people. Some are just traditionally greedy, seeking to fill their own pockets with as much money as possible. This is not a problem limited to the right; even folks who are progressive on social policies can be guilty of “going where the money is”. An excellent example is Trump’s nominee to head the FDA, Dr. Scott Gottlieb. Gottlieb, like many researchers, has been highly paid (at least on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars) by drug manufacturers. Gottlieb assures us that this will not affect his decision making at FDA, and that he can be trusted, as in the title of the NY Times article of April 5, 2017, in which he “deflected” criticism. While some Democrats, like Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, noted that he had ‘“unprecedented financial entanglements with the industries he would regulate,”’ Republicans like Lamar Alexander of Tennessee agreed with Dr. Gottlieb that “his experience with the pharmaceutical industry would be an asset in regulating it.” This is terrific tortured fox-guarding-the-henhouse logic, like having Goldman Sachs financiers regulating Wall Street, or petroleum company flaks running EPA (which we, in fact, have). This concept worked fine on “It Takes a Thief”, but not so much in real life.

Taking huge amounts of money from drug companies may be morally reprehensible (or not, depending on your view; in mine it is), but more concerning are the positions that Gottlieb has taken. While he is open (he says now) to lowering drug prices by importing drugs from Canada, something Trump has occasionally voiced support for, he has previously written against it (when he was in the pay of the drug companies). The issue is what the policies pursued by the FDA, HHS, CMS, and the overall Trump administration and Congress regarding the people’s health will be. Disrespect for preventive care (“essential services”) and environmental pollution bodes very poorly for public health, as the core principle of “cut benefits” does for medical care. And, as always, the most vulnerable – from poverty, age, illness, geographic region – will suffer the most.  It would be really good if we could count on doctors like Price, Marshall and Gottlieb to protect the health of the people, but don’t count on it. We are going to need huge public protest, at least as big as those that ending up canceling the Pepsi commercial.

Well, it could be worse. Another physician, Dr. Bashar al-Assad, is gassing his own people with chemical weapons. And there was also Dr. Josef Mengele. So far, none of Trump’s nominees are in that league.