Healthcare and Public Health: Issues from 2024 will continue into 2025

As we end the year and begin a new one, what can we say was the most important health-related story of 2024, and what will be the biggest in 2025? Certainly, late in 2024 a huge story was the murder of Brian Thompson on the streets of New York. This was not in any way a random killing, but an assassination of someone the killer believed was responsible for hundreds or thousands of deaths in his role as CEO of UnitedHealthCare, the nation’s largest health insurer. As I discussed in my December 8, 2024 post ‘Murder of a Health Insurance CEO: People HATE the companies and the people who run them’, Thompson was guilty of presiding over a company whose role was to make money by collecting premiums and denying care. He also was guilty of having made this problem worse by bring in artificial intelligence algorithms, which had been shown to be wrong up to 90% of the time, to deny health care to his supposed customers – I say “supposed” because the only customers health insurance companies really have is their stockholders; the people they insure could be called “victims”. 

 Although much of the mainstream media tried hard to focus attention elsewhere – on the accused killer and his personality, on self-serving nonsensical essays like the one by Thompson’s boss, UnitedHealth Group’s CEO Andrew Witty run as a NY Times Op-Ed, etc. – the real story is the outpouring of fury at the health insurance industry from the great mass and majority of the American people. While most did not applaud the murder itself, virtually no one outside themselves and their paid punditry had anything good to say about US health insurance. Probably the overall public sentiment reflected that of Chris Rock: “He actually killed a family, a man with kids. I have condolences for the healthcare CEO. This is a real person, but sometimes drug dealers get shot.”

Another huge story, which will become even bigger in 2025, is the planned nomination by President-elect Donald Trump of profound enemies of public health to the positions responsible for ensuring that health. Foremost among these, of course, is Robert Kennedy, Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy is well-known as a vaccine “skeptic”, which essentially means vaccine opponent, and if he is confirmed as Secretary and is able to implement policies reflecting the positions he has long advocated, we will see the resurgence of many diseases long gone from American life with accompanying deaths, as I discussed on November 15, 2024 in ‘Raw milk, vaccines, and RFK, Jr: Some dates worth remembering’. Remember polio? Measles? I do, but most do not. Check out the numbers on this picture. This is an incredible threat to the public’s health.

But, ultimately, the real story of 2024 – and probably 2025, and sadly beyond – is the fact that the American people remain the only ones in the developed, rich or really even middle-income, world that do not have universal health insurance or care. This is what would prevent the crises, delays, denials, and deaths that the private health insurance industry heaps upon our population and that engenders the wrath of so many. Indeed, that wrath continues to grow because the people who are affected, either personally or through someone they love such as a family member, who realize the inexcusable evil that the actions of these companies inflict, grows over time. While only a small percent of the ostensibly insured will have a terrible event each year, with more years more people and families experience such terrible events. Also, of course, the practices of the health insurance companies become more restrictive and more draconian, leading to both more delays and denials and deaths and more out-of-pocket costs for more people. In other countries, this happens, essentially, very little or not at all. The following chart presents the dates when other countries implemented universal health care, and when they got rid of it because it wasn’t working. Look at it carefully and you might discern a trend:

The US has a higher mortality rate than many of these countries. Jim Kahn, in the Health Justice Monitor, makes an effort to quantify the extent to which health insurance (or lack of it) contributes to this. It is an estimate, but as he notes, whether 170,000 or 220,000, it is too much. And, more, we spend much more than all these other countries on what we call “healthcare” despite so much of it going to corporate profit, that the fact that there is any excess mortality due to lack of health insurance is even more intolerable.

This might come as a shock to many Americans, especially those who have yet to personally experience the delays, denials, and deaths that the for-profit health insurance industry heaps upon its victims, because we are regularly and consistently told by politicians and pundits that a universal health insurance system would be a bad idea, that it wouldn’t work for Americans. That it would be too costly. That it would limit our freedom. We need to recognize that this is not true. Few of us want to have the freedom to choose which insurance company takes our money and then tries its best to limit our access to care (although, if we can afford it, we might choose the one that does it least). What we do want is the freedom to choose the doctors and hospitals that we believe will provide us the best care for our health needs and have our insurance pay for it. Of course, this is not the freedom that they are talking about; what they mean is the freedom of insurance companies (and to be fair, many health care providers) to make as much money as possible, which is what would be limited in a universal government-run health insurance system. And, oh, by the way, provide the funds to pay for it. Imagine that our health care dollars, from our pockets and those of our employers and our government (from the taxes we pay; the large corporations and billionaires who own them don’t) could be spent on providing us with health care rather than lining corporate pockets!

There are actual examples of “single payer” health care in the US. Military retirees and families are covered by government-funded health insurance through the VA or TriCare. In the military itself, for active duty service members, health care is not only single-payer, it is government run. The other big example of single-payer available to Americans is traditional Medicare, for those over 65 or disabled. Medicare. The most popular government program since…Social Security. Under traditional Medicare, health care services are approved for people who need them and have them ordered by a doctor, not micromanaged for each individual with people (or AI!) denying them willy-nilly. In an alternative to Medicare, people can opt for enrollment in an HMO/PPO like system run by the same insurance companies that insured (and often screwed) them before they became eligible for Medicare, and have it paid for by Medicare funds. This program, misnamed “Medicare Advantage”, takes away the guarantees of traditional Medicare and puts you back a the mercy of those for-profit health insurance companies that have treated you so well before!

This is exactly what we don’t need – erosion of Medicare. We need Medicare to be improved, to pay for 100% of all needed medical care, and expanded to cover every American, cradle to grave, paid for by the money now going to insurance company and pharmaceutical and device company and health system profits. The reason to do it is because it would benefit people, remove the major cause of heartache, loss and bankruptcy in the US, and make us more secure and happy people. The reason not to do it is that these huge corporations would no longer be making their exorbitant profits by taking premiums and denying health care, and thus would not be able to make such large contributions to the legislators who should be acting, instead, for the American people.

What do you want? Maybe in 2025 it is time to let your legislators know!

 

A final thought from Bernie Sanders:

 

 

 

 

Primary Care, Private Equity, and Profit: How to ensure poor quality care for the American people

 I -- and many others -- have written (frequently and recently) about the abuses of for-profit companies, and especially private equity companies, and “non-profits” that act like for-profits in health care (Private equity, private profit, Medicare and your health: They are incompatible, May 11, 2023; Privatizing Medicare through "Medicare Advantage" and REACH: The Wrong Way to Go!, Jan 20, 2023; "Private Equity": Profiteers in nursing homes, Medicare Advantage, DCEs, and all of healthcare, Sept 16, 2022). But despite our efforts, it doesn’t get any better. Indeed it gets worse.

Drs. David Himmelstein, Steffie Woolhandler, Adam Gaffney, Don McCanne, and John Geyman, have been leaders in the campaign for a national health insurance plan (e.g., Medicare for All), published an article 18 months ago in ‘The Nation’ (March 31, 2022) titled ‘Medicare for All is Not Enough’. They go through the ways in which the ownership of our health system has changed, particularly over the last decade, to focus on profit for the private owners rather than “health care”. That is to say, while a single-payer Medicare for All program would be a great thing and would limit the negative impact that for-profit insurance companies wreak on our collective health – which is considerable – as long as for-profit companies continue to own, and to increase their share of, our actual health delivery systems (hospitals, nursing homes, pharmacies, and physician practices) there will be terrible consequences, with those single-payer dollars flooding into investors’ pockets rather than patient care.

Insurance companies like United Health and giant pharmacy firms like CVS own large portions of our practice and health delivery sector. And the role of private equity companies and investors, with their “buy ‘em and burn ‘em” approach to acquisition and profit, in taking over our delivery system is at least as terrifying. As the authors state:

At least UnitedHealth and CVS plan to stay in business for the foreseeable future, and may be constrained by the worry that substandard care will damage their reputation. Private equity companies face no such constraints. They promise investors quick profits, and often sell off the businesses they’ve bought within five years, often after stripping their assets and loading them with debts that hobble future operations.

On top of who will own our care provision, there also is the issue of who will provide the care. Most developed countries, with more rational health delivery systems, rely on primary care physicians and other clinicians far more than the US does. In those other countries primary care is at least 30-40% of the physician workforce, while here it is closer to 20% and dropping, an issue I have written about often (see, for example, What is the problem with Primary Care? The US health system!, March 22, 2022).  Primary care clinicians – family physicians, pediatricians, and general internists, and the NPs and PAs who work with them – can provide not only cost-effective care but care that is comprehensive, continuous, and reassuring to people and families because they know the person who is providing it and have a relationship with them. And the cost-effectiveness is not (only) about the fact that they earn less money (see below) but because they are in a position, as a result of taking care of the “whole person” and having a long term relationship, to more wisely utilize resources when necessary. Nonetheless, there is a definite shortage of primary care clinicians, as anyone who has tried to find one recently, because they moved, or their physicians retired or had their practice bought out by a large company like Optum (a subsidiary of United Health Care, which has become UHC’s major profit center as documented by former insurance executive Wendell Potter in his “Health Care Un-covered” substack) or, sometimes in response, went into a “concierge” or “boutique” practice, can testify. Elisabeth Rosenthal, editor of Kaiser Health News, documents this in a recent piece in the Washington Post, “The Shrinking Number of Primary Care Physicians is Reaching a Tipping Point”. She notes that “fewer medical students are choosing a field that once attracted some of the best and brightest because of its diagnostic challenges and the emotional gratification of deep relationships with patients.” And she makes the important point that

One explanation for the disappearing primary-care doctor is financial. The payment structure in the U.S. health system has long rewarded surgeries and procedures while shortchanging the diagnostic, prescriptive and preventive work that is the province of primary care.

Don’t forget that one. Rosenthal discusses the terrible experience of colleague Bob Morrow, MD, who, under financial pressure, finally had to sell his decades-old practice, and then, watching how the new owner ran it (suffice it to say, not in the best interests of the patients), leave medicine. Morrow is not a depressed person, but reading about what has happened to him and thousand of other primary care doctors is enough to make you depressed.

In a data-driven “Report Card” on primary care in the US, the Milbank Memorial Fund ranks it poorly on all front, although not on the quality of the physicians:

This first national primary care scorecard finds a chronic lack of adequate support for the implementation of high-quality primary care in the United States across all measures, although performance varies across states. The scorecard finds:

1.      Financing: The United States is systemically underinvesting in primary care.

2.      Workforce: The primary care physician workforce is shrinking and gaps in access to care appear to be growing.

3.      Access: The percentage of adults reporting they do not have a usual source of care is increasing.

4.      Training: Too few physicians are being trained in community settings, where most primary care takes place.

5.      Research: There is almost no federal funding available for primary care research.

The  report card, created for Milbank by the Robert Graham Center (the policy arm of the American Academy of Family Physicians, AAFP), not only identifies these deficits, but also the importance of solving them for the health of the American people. 100,000,000 people without a primary care doctor, only able to see a physician (if they can see any physician) who has a narrowly focused, disease-based practice is a real problem. We need those specialists for when we are diagnosed with a particular condition that requires their expertise, but they are often not knowledgeable about conditions outside it. Moreover, the primary care clinician does not only care for many conditions; much more important is that they care for the person who has those conditions.

The report also endorses the conclusions from the National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) from 2021, recommending that the US:

1. Pay for primary care teams to care for people, not doctors to deliver services.
2. Ensure that high-quality primary care is available to every individual and family in every community.
3. Train primary care teams where people live and work.
4. Design information technology that serves the patient, family, and interprofessional care team.
5. Ensure that high-quality primary care is implemented in the United States.

Finally, for the moment, an effort is actually being made in Congress to try to increase the number of primary care clinicians.  In an uncommon bipartisan effort, the bill is cosponsored by Bernie Sanders (I, VT), chair of the Senate HELP Committee and Roger Marshall, MD, an OB/GYN and conservative Republican from Kansas, as reported by Jake Johnson in Common Dreams, Sept 14, 2023. It’s a good thing to have bipartisan support, but it is, sadly, unlikely to have a major effect on increasing the primary care physician supply. Funding in the bill – about $6 billion -- goes mainly to Community Health Centers (CHCs), especially Federally-Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). These centers can be, and usually are, good. They provide care to lower-income people and communities where access to other clinicians is difficult. Republicans like them because they are not actually “government” programs, but responsible only to their boards of directors. But, while they often rely heavily on primary care, and expanding them will increase the number of jobs for primary care clinicians, it does nothing to increase the supply of those clinicians, to convince medical students to enter family medicine, pediatrics, and general internal medicine instead of much higher-paying subspecialties.

I mention money, the Milbank report mentions money. It is a lot about money. It is increasingly difficult to convince students to enter fields where their income is likely to be a fraction of that of subspecialists (even if much better than that of most Americans), especially in the context of huge educational debt (frequently over $250K), and the lack of respect given by the medical profession and often the society at large to primary care. And, not at all to be minimized, the takeover of so many practices by for-profit corporations and private equity, with situations like Dr. Morrow’s becoming the norm rather than the exception. Some subspecialties make 2-3 or more times that of primary care doctors, which makes it increasingly difficult for students to decide to enter primary care. And while some of these subspecialties have grueling work hours (e.g., general surgery) others have much more circumscribed work hours, often shift work and little call.

There IS certainly something the federal government could do. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sets the relative reimbursement for physician services (office visits, procedures, etc.) and virtually all private insurance companies reimburse based on multiples of the Medicare rate (traditionally more, but now often less). So all CMS has to do is to revise its fee schedule, increasing the relative value of primary care visits relative to procedures. Of course, there will be great opposition from other specialists; indeed the “RUC”, a non-government committee that advises CMS on this ratio is completely dominated by subspecialists (Changes in the RUC: None.. How come we let a bunch of self-interested doctors decide what they get paid?, July 21, 2013). CMS is not required to follow the recommendations of the RUC although it usually does; CMS could ignore or adjust what the RUC recommends, or reconstitute the membership of the RUC to have more primary care doctors. Primary care physicians do not need to make as much as the highest-paid subspecialists (indeed neither do those subspecialists!) but the difference needs to be decreased. Studies have indicated that if primary care doctors earned 70% of what subspecialists do, income would no longer be a significant factor in specialty choice.

Addressing this income gap is critical for increasing the number of primary care clinicians. Then there is a lot else to do, like getting for-profit corporations and private equity out of healthcare altogether.

 

For a “humorous” depiction of the takeover of primary care by for-profit companies like Optum, check out this short piece by the brilliant Dr. Glaucomflecken: https://twitter.com/i/status/1706339952857149895

COVID-19 emphasizes the necessity of Medicare for All

This will not be much of a reprise of “what should you do about COVID-19”, you know, wash your hands, use hand-sanitizer, avoid groups whenever possible, stay home if you are sick-but-not-too-sick (if you’re really short of breath, go to the ER; if you have signs of a heart attack or significant trauma, go to the ER, even though both increase your risk of infection). It will also not be much of reprise of what not to do: have big parties to celebrate the cancellation of classes, like many of the students at Cornell (https://cornellsun.com/2020/03/15/while-some-cornellians-self-quarantine-others-pack-parties-in-response-to-campus-shutdown), who at least have to “excuse” of being both young and thus less likely to die and young and thus have underdeveloped frontal cortexes (where judgement resides). Or the racquetball players at my local racquet club who had a tournament this weekend gathering at least 40 people in a relatively small space and sharing finger food like fruit and cheese and crackers (and who are decidedly NOT young! Although they may lack judgement…).

At the debate on Washington DC on March 15, Bernie Sanders emphasized the degree to which having a universal health program, a single-payer program, Medicare-for-All would help in this crisis. Yes. It would have and it will in the future, when another epidemic comes calling. It will not, by a long shot, solve all the problems that have existed in our (and other nations’) response to COVID-19, but it would have helped a lot, particularly in alleviating the still-valid fears that people have of getting crippling bills if they seek care.

This is not to minimize the incredibly incompetent, not to mention destructive, role that the federal government has played. The Executive Branch, led by President Trump, has bloviated, lied, misled, created fear, and provided incredible misinformation to the American people. This has been extensively covered by the media; criticizing the buffoonery of Trump is apparently fair game among the mainstream press. There has also been some, albeit less, coverage of the purposeful decimation of the nation’s public health infrastructure by the Trump administration prior to the advent of SARS-CoV-2. The federal epidemic response task force was eliminated by the administration. Federal support for state and local health departments was cut. Once the administration finally acknowledged that it was a big problem (one for which the President took no responsibility), the response was anemic and ineffectual.

Trump named science-denier Mike Pence to lead the effort. Jared Kushner has it added to his portfolio; he consulted his brother’s father-in-law, who is, after all, a doctor, and a Facebook group. Trump called it the “China virus”, but SARS-CoV-2 was not intimidated. Concerned about a stock market taking its biggest dive since 2008 (something that really worries him!) Trump proposed cutting payroll taxes paid by employers by $700B, both remarkably stupid (takes a long time, and cuts funding for Social Security, and helps neither the economy or the stock market) and typically directed to benefit the best-off, ignoring the plight of those most affected, the poor. The response to the epidemic, including especially the unavailability of tests for SARS-CoV-2, has been scandalous. We are at least a year from having a vaccine, but the President continued his moronic approach by apparently trying to buy a vaccine developed in Germany for use “only in America”.

But it was not just the administration. The Congress also did not demand a public health infrastructure. The states and local governments, in part because of decreased federal funding, have grossly underfunded their own health departments, which were woefully unprepared in most areas and are struggling to begin to catch up. Luckily, the health department in Seattle/King County Washington, where the virus has hit hardest in the US, was one of the ones in better shape.

So there is no question but that poor planning, addressing core health needs only when there is a crisis, focusing on tax cuts for the wealthiest and not planning for “the big one” (just as we have not planning for climate change or war) has crippled the US and its response. There is also no question that having a president who plays to his right-wing base who see him as the one “in charge”, and enablers like Fox News’ Sean Hannity, made it even worse. The system that does exist in the US has long been focused (“focus” = funded) on individual care of individual people (called “patients), and particularly on those who have money or good insurance and even more on those whose diseases (such as cancer) are very well reimbursed by those insurers. Public health suffers because, other than in epidemics (SARS, H1N1, Ebola) it is not in the public consciousness, so the government can work on tax cuts for the rich and the health system can work on making money on the insured sick. Sins of omission are less obvious; I have noted previously that people do not wake up each morning saying “thank goodness I don’t have cholera because we have a clean water supply!”

But there is another part of the story, which will become even bigger as folks get sick. This is because the US does not have universal health care, does not have a national health system. It has not even addressed who will pay for COVID-19 testing (a local university recently suggested it would charge its own students $200, until it was embarrassed out of it!), or a vaccine if it becomes available. It certainly has no reasonable plan for paying for the care of people who fall ill with disease, need hospitalization in intensive care units need to be on ventilators, but have no or rotten insurance. We hear that the VA will be a backup health system; great, if it can. When will we federalize the for-profit and “non-profit” hospitals?

We have also, of course, had policy decisions on closure made by each individual business/organization/school/local government, based on its own perception of risk (epidemiologic, financial, peer pressure) without adequate consideration of its impact on the entire social structure. Stay home from work? Work from home? What about the (generally lower paid) folks whose work depends on being there (cleaners, health workers, etc.)? What about those who don’t have sick leave? What about those who don’t get paid, or lose their jobs, if they don’t show up? What about school closures putting parents in the position of choosing childcare vs work (or calling upon grandparents, in the higher risk group)?

Planning for and implementing a response to an epidemic is different from having an organized national health system. Many European countries including Italy and Spain have their citizens all covered but are struggling terribly. But having such a system does create the infrastructure basis for national health policy and national health response; see how South Korea dramatically ramped up its COVID-19 testing, and was able to implement it because of a national health system. Spain has indeed nationalized all private healthcare to battle this crisis. Norway suggested that its citizen living abroad come home. It is urging its citizens abroad to return home, especially if they are "staying in a country with poorly developed health services and infrastructure and/or collective infrastructure, for example the USA"! We planned poorly and we won’t necessarily provide care for them, or indeed for “us”!

Much terrific insight is provided by Dr. Seiji Yamada in his terrific Counterpunch piece “Coronavirus for All”: ”These days U.S. health system is run by health care executives, with their business smarts, their lean operations (except for their compensation packages), achieving just-in-time delivery.”

Health care should be a human right. This crisis illustrates the need to have a robust, continuously-funded public health infrastructure. It also illustrates the need for a universal health care system that can take care of all of us. Bernie Sanders may not win the nomination, but the fight for universal health care for all of us must continue.

As Dr. Yamada notes:

Certainly it’s true in the U.S.A. it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. On the other hand, it’s also obvious that capitalist health care is going to faceplant in the face of the coronavirus. It’s going to be a choice between Medicare for All or Coronavirus for All.