US Health Rankings remain low and #Trumpcare will make them worse!

On many occasions this blog has made the point that, despite frequently-repeated claims that the US has “the best healthcare in the world”, we do not. This point is also made by dozens of other sources, recently including Kaiser Health News (KHN) editor-in-chief Elisabeth Rosenthal in her book “American Sickness”. In my book, “Health, Medicine and Justice: Designing a fair and equitable health care system”, and in many lectures I have given to physicians and students, I have cited the “37^th in the world”  ranking the US achieved in the comprehensive World Health Organization (WHO) report of 2000. The report’s Table 10, available as a pdf at that site, indeed lists the US as #37 in Overall Performance, just below Costa Rica and just above Slovenia. On an equally telling scale, Performance on Health Level (measured by Disability-Adjusted Life Expectancy, DALE) the US ranked #72, between Argentina and Bhutan. When many US news media led their stories with “Just ahead of Slovenia!”, the Slovenian ambassador took exception, noting that his country was working hard to improve their people's health status.

But, as I also pointed out in my lectures, this table is old, based on 1997 data, and I use it because it is the last time that WHO released such rankings. I supplement it with newer data, such as the Commonwealth Fund’s “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall” from 2014. This compares fewer countries, albeit appropriate, developed, wealthy, OECD countries. In this study, the US also ranks last overall and in many subscales; I have published this graphic before as well.  

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!

Given the recalcitrance of US health status to improvement, it is obviously important to look at the ”why” as well as the “what could be done?”. This is especially now, given that these ranking do not yet reflect any negative impact that may happen through the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and its replacement by a a Republican plan (#Trumpcare). The contents of the bill that the Senate is currently working on, and which Majority Leader McConnell hopes to bring to a vote by July 4, remain secret not only to the public but also, apparently, to many or most senators. Therefore, the bill passed by the House of Representatives, the American Health Care Act (AHCA) remains our best guide to what the final plan may look like.

And it is not encouraging; the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that 23 million Americans willlose health insurance, about equally from loss of Medicaid expansion and from  cuts to support for the health insurance exchanges set up by ACA. This will unquestionably mean that the overall health status of Americans will go down, both in absolute terms and relative to other nations. Without health insurance, people will not access health care, especially for prevention and “minor” problems (or problems that are not really minor but so far not, or minimally, symptomatic). This means that by the time that their health is so bad that they seek care, they are less likely to survive or do well, and also that the cost of their care will be far higher. This is not a plan to most efficiently use healthcare dollars to maximize the health of the American people.

So what is going on? In a recent blog post (“Pre-existing conditions and profit-taking: the causes of our healthcare problems, May 29, 2017)  I wrote “The AHCA is basically a tax-cut-for-the-1% bill, with the money coming from the health care coverage for the rest of us.” That is true, but the question that still needs to be answered is “why”? Ultimately, it is a question of values: if the goal was to have the best possible health status for the American people, rich or poor, white or black, native born or immigrant, rural or urban, this would not be the system that we have and #Trumpcare would be designed to fix the problems with the ACA, not to exacerbate them. President Trump and the GOP have emphasized, in the campaign and since, that for many the ACA has not made insurance accessible because the premiums are too high. This is a good point, and a solution would be great; unfortunately, the AHCA would make them higher, and price out far more people. The values of the Republican leadership are clearly to maximize tax cuts and other financial benefits to the richest American people and corporations, and this AHCA will do. The perpetrators are not among those at the margins; even those congresspersons and pundits who are not truly wealthy have outstanding health insurance for life, and are certain that they will not be in the marginalized group, and that they will be able to access the “best health care in the world”.

Of course, even when you have great insurance and access to “everything”, it is not always better. Sometimes if you are too well-insured you get too much care, tests and procedures and drugs that can put you at risk of harm. And even in the “best” facilities things don’t always go well – medical errors are common, communication can be poor, and even when there are no screwups bad things can happen. Donald Berwick, head of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), and former interim head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) talks about the US perhaps having the best “rescue care” in the world. But even that is not so good; many IHI initiatives are focused on changing that system to work better, including improvement capability, patient safety, and population health. Anyone who has been sick, or in the hospital, or had a close friend or relative in such a situation recently, can testify to the failings of our health care delivery system even for the well-insured.

So the situation in the US was not good up until now, and will almost certainly get worse with #Trumpcare. Many of the people who will suffer most are those who voted for the President and the GOP members of Congress. Maybe they think that the bad things will not happen to them and their families, but only to “others”.  But they will, and we need to move up in the rankings, to be closer to other OECD countries.

Maybe the solution for the US is not to mimic France, or Italy, or Canada. But whatever the solution is, it has to pass the empiric “does it make our people’s health better?” test. And clearly #Trumpcare will not.

Pre-existing conditions and profit-taking: the causes of our healthcare problems

Elisabeth Rosenthal, the editor-in-chief of Kaiser Health News and author of “An American Sickness” (discussed in this blog on April 15, 2017, United Airlines, health care, and a system designed to privilege the powerful) has an op-ed in her old newspaper, the New York Times, on May 29, 2017 titled “We all have pre-existing conditions”. That is a good and accurate title, but a little different from the print title “The cost of pre-existing conditions”.  That cost is high, to the people with those conditions, and less obviously, to the overall society. This includes their families and friends, of course, but also their employers. When a potentially treatable condition excludes you from having health insurance, you are less likely to get it treated, and more likely to get sick and miss work. The spectrum of conditions that insurance companies used in the pre-ACA era to exclude people was broad. Rosenthal notes specific examples including having had an abnormal Pap smear, a history of being on anti-depressants, a history of taking thyroid medication, and being on post-menopausal hormone treatment. Of course, once you are excluded and have no insurance, you don’t seek care for other conditions either, either pre-existing or those that develop later or might have not been recognized. Not only could insurers exclude you for having a pre-existing condition, but there was no regulation of what or how significant that condition had to be. We have heard stories of people being denied treatment for cancer because, on signing up, they had “failed to report” a pre-existing history of treatment for things as minor as an ingrown toenail or acne!

The ACA, also known as Obamacare, changed that. It eliminated the ability of insurance companies to exclude people based on their pre-existing conditions, thus rendering moot the question of what conditions could be excluded. It also prevented those insurance companies from charging more money to people with those pre-existing conditions by requiring “community rating”; they had to set their rates based upon the overall actuarial risk of the entire community in which they sell insurance. The same principle is why those of us who receive our health insurance via employers, especially large employers, usually have lower rates for better coverage – because the risk pool is everyone who works for that company, and while many are sick, many more are younger and healthier (after all, this excludes all the people who are not working). Thus, the requirement that the individual policies sold under ACA had to be based on the community rating was critical for many Americans to be able to get even close to affordable health insurance.

For many, the cost on the individual marketplace was still too high. For those whose pre-existing conditions had previously made them unable to get insurance, it was often still a boon. For those who were younger and healthier, though, who had had cheaper policies or gone without coverage altogether, they now had to pay more. After all, community rating means an average, so those at lower risk will pay more than they would have with individual rating, and certainly more than with no insurance since the ACA had the “individual mandate” requiring them to get coverage. The bigger problem is that in some geographic areas, many (or most or in some cases all) insurers decided that the benefit of offering insurance (i.e., making money) was not worth the risk of paying out for actual medical care. This is especially true in rural areas, where low population density and a higher proportion of older and therefore sicker people make for a poor risk/return ratio.

The problem, of course, for those younger and healthier people who chose to forgo coverage or, after the individual mandate, to buy the cheapest and crappiest policies, is that they can get sick. They can discover that they have cancer, whatever their age. Or get into a car accident, requiring many surgeries and long treatment and rehabilitation (did they have car insurance?). Or be burned in a fire started by smoking (did they have homeowner’s insurance? Did they opt to not pay the higher premiums that they can legally be charged for being smokers?) Or they can have a premature baby that needs treatment in a neonatal ICU.  Or, particularly for the older group who knew they had a problem like hypertension, diabetes, or arthritis but were hoping they’d stay relatively asymptomatic, they can have a downturn – have a stroke or a heart attack or a serious infection or pain so bad that they can no longer work. And then they find that the “affordable” (i.e., crappy) health insurance that they bought is almost as bad as none.

So we have a conundrum. To work, health insurance has to include everyone, the sick as well as the healthy. But the healthy, especially those with lower incomes, don’t want to pay what seems to be the unfairly high rates that they have to in order for the whole system to be fair. The older and less healthy may want health insurance, but still be dissuaded by the high premiums. The sick need the coverage, but again, without the healthier paying in, the cost for them is too high, and results in either their being unable to afford it or the insurers being unwilling to cover them even if it means leaving an entire market.

Let’s look at some facts:
1.      The US spends more on health care than any other county, by far.
2.      The US has, on a population basis, worse health outcomes than most other developed countries, far worse than many.

This is the true conundrum. How can we pay so much for so little? It is because we pay an enormous percent of our “health care” expenses for drug company (and drug “middlemen”, pharmacy benefits managers) profits, insurance company profits, and income for for-profit and function-like-for-profit non-profit hospitals. As documented by Eric Lipton and Katie Thomas in the May 29, 2017 Times (“Drug lobbyists’ battle cry over prices: blame the others”), there is plenty of blame to go around! In addition, the percent that is actually spent on health care on treatments (and sometimes cures) is primarily for far advanced disease, not prevention and early diagnosis and treatment. We spend almost nothing on public health and prevention.

We keep telling ourselves lies (our healthcare system is the best in the world, the ACA is the problem, drug companies need to charge so much because they spend so much on research and development, etc.) but fewer and fewer of us are believing it. Many of the people who are worst affected voted for Donald Trump and for Republican congressmen who have devised the AHCA (American Health Care Act) that will “solve” the problem by essentially eliminating health insurance coverage for 23 million Americans, 14 million in the first year alone, according to estimates by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The AHCA is basically a tax-cut-for-the-1% bill, with the money coming from the health care coverage for the rest of us.

Is there any way out of this conundrum? Yes. We have the money, obviously; we are spending it. Fifty percent of health care spending is already government, 60% if you include the lost taxes from the employer portion of health insurance. We make the community being rated everyone in the US. We all have one health plan. We are all covered. We all get all necessary services. We don’t lose coverage by leaving or jobs for any reason, from family needs to an entrepreneurial start-up. The old and vulnerable among us are covered and have their needs met, and the healthy among us win by staying healthy and having coverage when we need it. We pay for it by eliminating the profit centers, and not by cutting taxes on the wealthiest of us.

It can be done. It has been done. In every other developed country. We have the resources to do it here. We must need to stand up to the entrenched and powerful profiteers.

Doctors and health reform: maybe they do stand for health!

The new GOP health plan, the American Health Care Act (AHCA), aka “Trumpcare”, has crashed to defeat. The President, who pushed hard for it, looks like his greatest nightmare, a “loser”. It is worth thinking, however, about who opposed it. In Congress it was Democrats and (the few) moderate Republicans and very right-wing Republicans are against it, for different reasons. From outside government the response was pretty negative, with a 17% approval rating (amazing they could still think they could pass it!). Far-right “conservatives” thought that AHCA was too much like Obamacare in that it actually provides some federal support for some people, and  they don’t believe in the government ever helping anyone, except maybe themselves and their friends. (Oh, yes, and fabulously rich people. They deserve a lot of help.) The criticism from most of the rest of the universe (to say “the left” would be inaccurate, since it includes many quite a bit right of center, since, in fact, “Obamacare” started life as a Republican plan) was mostly because it would be a disaster for health coverage for Americans. Projections by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) were that 24 million people would lose their health insurance, that access to care would be more and more limited, especially for the middle class and poor, and that costs would rise for patients exponentially. Also that the public health and preventive health infrastructure would be gutted and many of our advances in those areas lost.

The main “positive” in the CBO’s projection was that it would reduce the federal deficit by $337 billion over 10 years. This was only because it shifted costs to others, to states and employers and individuals. Those who could not pay with money would pay with their health and sometimes their lives. While, as I have pointed out (‘We have a bill! The GOP's plan to cut taxes on the rich and health care for the rest of us, March 16, 2017) many would have lost their insurance because of cuts in subsidies through the exchanges, the biggest impact would have been through the loss of Medicaid. This is clearly explained by Dr. Daniel Derksen, a family physician and director of the University of Arizona’s Office of Rural Health in a video on MedPage Today.

Among the many groups criticizing the draconian cuts in health care (as well as taxes on the rich) are almost all of the major hospital associations (including the American Hospital Association, the Catholic Hospital Association, and others), and physicians’ groups, most notably the American Medical Association (AMA) as well as most specialty societies including the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), the American College of Physicians (ACP), as well as many others. They have been joined by the major nursing organizations and by patient advocacy groups. It should not be surprising, I suppose, that most of these groups would be critical of such a devastating attack on health care for Americans, but if it isn’t, it is at least a relief. The AMA is important in part because of its major role in opposing most historical expansions of health care access by the government, including President Truman’s attempt to get a national health insurance program (where they were successful) and President Johnson’s creation of Medicare and Medicaid (where they were not).

Of course, not all health providers and certainly not all physicians opposed the AHCA’s changes. MedPage Today published quotes from a number of physicians, and some were quite supportive; Darrell S. Rigel, a dermatologist at NYU, for example, said “It looks like it is a significant improvement over the ACA [the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare].” The most noteworthy physician advocate for the AHCA and Trumpcare was naturally Tom Price, MD, the Secretary of Health and Human services. As I discussed before his appointment (“Trump, Price, and Verma: Bad news for the health of Americans, including Trump voters, December 3, 2016), Secretary Price, as a congressman from Georgia was a leader in the Tea Party caucus and an opponent of ACA or any other program to expand health coverage to Americans. Another recent voice to both support AHCA and channel the administration and GOP’s contempt for regular people is Rep. Roger Marshall, an obstetrician from Great Bend, KS who is the Representative from Kansas’ “Big First” district. Dr. Marshall told the Washington Post that “the poor just don’t want health care”. He kind of walked back those remarks later, but his analysis is telling:

“Just like Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us,’ ” Marshall said in response to a question about Medicaid, which expanded under Obamacare to more than 30 states. “There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves.” He added that “morally, spiritually, socially,” the poor, including the homeless, “just don’t want health care….The Medicaid population, which is [on] a free credit card as a group, do probably the least preventive medicine and taking care of themselves and eating healthy and exercising. And I’m not judging; I’m just saying socially that’s where they are,” he told STAT, a website focused on health-care coverage. “So there’s a group of people that even with unlimited access to health care are only going to use the emergency room when their arm is chopped off or when their pneumonia is so bad they get brought [to] the ER.”

I may not be the best person to comment on his bizarre interpretation of the Gospel, but I can say that for many of us the challenges that poor people face in just getting through their lives are reasons why we need to make health care accessible, not reasons to just write them off. I also wish that I could say that, in my experience, physicians with attitudes like those of Price and Marshall are rare, but sadly they are not. To some degree, there are differences by specialty, with primary care physicians and psychiatrists more likely to support government-involved health care and even single payer plans than surgeons (including orthopedists). I am sure that at least in part this difference is driven by income; while all physicians have relatively high incomes compared to most Americans (top 10%), some specialties, including orthopedics (at the top), radiology, cardiology, surgery, and dermatology make much more; the mean reported income for orthopedists, about $467K (which seems low to me based on those I know) is about the cutoff for the top 1%. When a friend of mine (who later became a surgeon) was on his surgical rotation in medical school, he was impressed by all the talk in the surgeon’s lounge about the “Big Board” – until he found out they meant the stock market, not the board listing upcoming surgeries! And primary care doctors are not immune; when I lived in Texas one family physician regularly railed against the liberal government spending our money. One day, however, his attacks were on delays in payments to doctors from Medicare. Umm…

Doctors are, of course, like other people. Their perspectives vary widely, with most being caring and some caring mostly for themselves. My family physician colleague’s self-centered view is not so different from that of those Trump voters who are now against the AHCA because they see that their benefits are being cut; see “Trump budget cuts put struggling Americans on edge”, NY Times March 18, 2017. The authors cite a retired nurse with lung cancer whose heat was cut off in the middle of the winter; she was rescued by a heating subsidy funded by the federal government and likely to be cut. “I understand what he’s trying to do, but I think he’s just not stopping to think that there are people caught in the middle he is really going to hurt,” she said. Somehow, I suppose, she thought that the cuts would only be to other people…

So, while it is true that doctors, like others, often share the perspectives of their class, and callously disregard or rationalize opposition to ensuring health care for everyone, they often do understand the situations their patients are in and serve as advocates for them. In 2001, the AMA passed its “Declaration of Professional Responsibility: Medicine’s Contract with Humanity”.  It includes the following “Advocate for social, economic, educational, and political changes that ameliorate suffering and contribute to human well-being.”  The AMA was on the right side of the AHCA fight. I hope that most doctors agree with, and even practice, that principle.

I hope Tom Price and Roger Marshall are aberrant exceptions.

We have a bill! The GOP's plan to cut taxes on the rich and health care for the rest of us

Every day it gets more difficult to write about the new “American Health Care Act” (AHCA) that has been introduced in the House of Representatives by Speaker Paul Ryan because every day there is so much more news about it, and so much more criticism of it that appears in the press. Even before its introduction, the bill was attacked for being likely to significantly increase the number of uninsured Americans while providing windfall tax cuts for the wealthiest.

It did not disappoint. Consistent with predictions, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that initially 14 million people will lose coverage, with the number rising to 24 million in 10 years. These estimates are discussed in detail, and clarified, in “Deciphering CBO estimates” at the Kaiser Health News site. The largest number of people who will lose coverage will do so because of the changes – but let’s call them what they are, “cuts” – to federal funding of Medicaid (discussed by the Health Affairs blog), which would shift costs to the states, most of which will be unable or unwilling to absorb these costs. The 31 states that have expanded Medicaid to all those under 138% of the federal poverty level  under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will be faced with having to fund a lot more from their own coffers; poor people in the states that have not expanded Medicaid eligibility will continue uncovered. The other group that will lose coverage will be those who have bought subsidized insurance on the ACA-created marketplaces and who will no longer be able to afford the premiums. Yes, the new GOP plan calls for tax credits to help pay premiums, but they will be far less than under the ACA and far from enough to cover the actual cost.

This change will have the biggest impact on the older, sicker poor who are not yet eligible for Medicare (and, while I we will not address it here, the GOP leadership certainly has plans for cutting Medicare!), whose premiums will go up because of two important changes the AHCA will make. It will end the “individual mandate” of ACA, so that those who feel that they do not need health insurance can pass on buying it, which means the pool of insured will lose those healthier people and have a pool more skewed to those who are sicker and will actually use health care. This will tend to drive premiums up for them, and the AHCA also allows insurers to charge 5 times as much to older people as younger. As reported by Thomas Kaplan and Robert Pear in the NY Times on March 13, 2017

Under current law, in 2026, a single 21-year-old earning $26,500 with an insurance policy that costs $5,100 a year would get a tax credit of $3,400 and would have to pay $1,700 of the premium. Under the Republican bill, that person’s share of the cost would drop to $1,450.

By contrast, a 64-year-old earning the same amount would fare much worse. That person’s $15,300 health plan would be offset by a $13,600 tax credit under current law, leaving the consumer responsible for $1,700. Under the Republican plan, health insurers would be free to charge older people more, raising that person’s premium to $19,500. But the tax credit would be only $4,900, and that person’s share of the premium would then be $14,600.

That’s a bite! And, ironically, as pointed out by Noam Levey in the Los Angeles Times (March 12, 2017), it will hurt Trump/GOP voters more than Democratic voters, because those Trump voters – and the counties and states which went for Trump in which they live -- are more likely to be in this older, sicker, group. This group of Republican voters did not like Obamacare because the premiums, co-pays, and deductibles were going too high and the coverage was not always great, especially for the plans they could afford. Trump, and the GOP, promised them high-quality, affordable coverage. These folks believed them. They voted for them. And they are not going to get it, certainly not from the AHCA. Levey notes that “…In nearly 1,500 counties nationwide, such a person stands to lose more than $6,000 a year in federal insurance subsidies. Ninety percent of those counties backed Trump…[a]nd 68 of the 70 counties where these consumers would suffer the largest losses supported Trump in November.” What can you do. Politicians lie. This one was a whopper.

What is the reason for this? Many of Congress’ and Washington’s leading “conservatives” say that they believe that the role of government should be as close to zero as possible, and certainly think that the government has no business being involved in the insurance marketplace to ensure that people without resources have health coverage; to them, the AHCA is too much like the ACA in that it actually makes some effort to help some people, if weakly. There are a few of these “conservatives”, in and out of Congress, who really believe this and act on such beliefs. Uniformly, they are not poor, are not close to poor, and are not likely to be negatively affected. There is a much larger contingent that only believe government should not help most people. They support legislation that benefits rich people, like the AHCA, which uses the money it will save (and the CBO says that it will reduce the deficit over 10 years by $337 billion) to give tax cuts, not evenly distributed, but very much skewed to the highest incomes. This is where the [mean] rich people come in; they fund the Congresspersons, and this is what they want. Rep. Michael Burgess (R, TX), Chairman of the Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health, is quoted in the Times on March 11 (“The GOP’s high-risk strategy for health law repeal”) as saying “If you ask someone to give up something, there will be resentment,” and he is correct. That it is regular people who are being asked to give up something by Mr. Burgess and his colleagues, so that his rich patrons can save even more on their taxes, is something he doesn’t focus on.

One of the most iconic differences between ACA and AHCA focuses on equity: the subsidies (and tax credits for those who paid taxes) under ACA were tiered to income. The tax credits that replace subsidies under AHCA are tiered to age. Of course, as I have noted, older people are more likely to be sick, but they are not all of the same need; some older people have lots of money, and some have none. The same is true for younger people, including those with medical need. In any case, the tax credits in AHCA will not, as demonstrated above, be sufficient for those without significant other resources to buy health coverage, even if they are in the more-highly-subsidized older group. The Times’ Alan Rappeport reports on March 16, “One certainty in health bill: tax cuts for the wealthy”, with 40% of the cuts going to the top 1%, and the bill providing the necessary basis for further tax cuts for the rich. Rappeport quotes Mike Mulvaney, the White House budget director: “We promised at the outset that we were going to repeal all of the taxes. Who cares if someone else benefits?” Well, maybe the people who will suffer for their benefit? The same issue of the Times contains a brief and informative piece by Mr. Pear, “Putting Republicans’ plan on the Obamacare scale”, examining the criticisms of ACA and how the AHCA solves them (or not).

President Trump apparently feels conflicted; he promised the repeal of ACA, and the Congress wants to do that. He also knows that any plan that comes out that does this will be called “Trumpcare”, just as the ACA was called “Obamacare”. Enough Republican senators are concerned that the House’s AHCA will make it too hard for too many people to afford insurance that they might vote against it, so “Mr. Trump was left to strike a balance between siding with House Republicans while also distancing himself from the details, with top aides conceding that the legislation needed modifications before it could pass the full Congress,” (”G.O.P. Senators Suggest Changes for Health Care Bill Offered by House” NY Times, March 14).

For the rest of us, it is an impending disaster.