Pandemic mismanagement: Fear, inequity and -- maybe -- hope?

Like almost everyone else, of all political persuasions, I imagine, I am furious. What and whom we are furious about or with varies, of course, with how we see the world, what we value, and whether we have a “reality-based” outlook. To a great degree our perception is affected by what we want to be true, rather than what necessarily is true, and our short-term desires rather than any long-term sense.

As a physician with a great interest in and concern for public health, I am very concerned (!!) about the horrible way that President Trump and his administration prepared for a pandemic (not at all), reacted to the first evidence of one (denial), finally moved into a response (incompetently), and have yo-yo’d (good word for them) back and forth between making tentative positive moves and stepping back. Trump’s own statements are pretty accurately parodied by a meme making the rounds with him as Captain of the RMS Titanic. But we now have a response team, headed by Ivanka and Jared, with folks like Mark Meadows, Wilbur Ross, and Steven Mnuchin, so everything should be OK. Or not. We will, as Masha Gessen tells us in the New Yorker, not know the moment when democracy dies. We can have armed rallies demanding ‘reopening of the economy’, and even calls for insurrection if he loses the election, by folks like Franklin Graham.

So far, the coronavirus does not appear to be intimidated.

Predictions for the duration of this pandemic and the way in which it will change society and human behavior in the US and around the world are both dire and probably accurate. The most distressing news has been the unsurprising degree to which it has had its greatest negative impact upon the most vulnerable: the poor, minorities, elderly, and those who cannot afford to not go to work. The most inspiring aspect has been the degree to which it has highlighted the contributions of not only heroic health care workers, but all essential workers, the majority of whom are women, especially non-white women, and are generally underpaid. Among the essential workers are NOT included CEOs, hedge fund managers, political pundits, and other mostly-male, mostly overpaid roles. Walter Scheidel gives us mixed news in his New York Times piece ‘Why the Wealthy Fear Pandemics’; back to at least the 14^th century, it brings about social disruption and tends to increase the relative power of workers to demand better wages and working conditions. However, he cautions, that while “more often than not, repression failed…none of these stories had a happy ending for the masses.”

But it is not just the far-right, the GOP, and Trump who are not responding well to this crisis. The Democrats have been much better, but that’s a low bar. They still insistently miss the point that a national health program would have put us in a much better position to respond to this pandemic, and at the very least have eliminated the probably of bankruptcy for many of those receiving treatment. It almost certainly would have decreased the number of people staying away from treatment because of fear of the cost. Bernie Sanders said this throughout his entire campaign, and has just said it again in a NY Times Op-ed:

We are the richest country in the history of the world, but at a time of massive income and wealth inequality, that reality means little to half of our people who live paycheck to paycheck, the 40 million living in poverty, the 87 million who are uninsured or underinsured, and the half million who are homeless.

These ideas are absolutely as correct now as they were before he left the race. We need a national health system.

Most recently (April 18, 2020) the case is made by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who continue to be amazed at the fact that ‘America can afford a world-class health system: Why don’t we have one?’. They note that

In March, Congress passed a coronavirus bill including $3.1 billion to develop and produce drugs and vaccines. The bipartisan consensus was unusual. Less unusual was the successful lobbying by pharmaceutical companies to weaken or kill provisions that addressed affordability — measures that could be used to control prices or invalidate patents for any new drugs.

The notion of price control is anathema to health care companies. It threatens their basic business model, in which the government grants them approvals and patents, pays whatever they ask, and works hand in hand with them as they deliver the worst health outcomes at the highest costs in the rich world.

And make this blunt and totally accurate statement:

The American health care industry is not good at promoting health, but it excels at taking money from all of us for its benefit. It is an engine of inequality.

It is not good at promoting health. That is a bad thing. It is good at taking money from all of us for its benefit. That is a corrupt and inefficient, as well as bad, thing. It is an agent of inequality. For most of us, that is a bad thing.

And yet it persists. And its enablers include the Democratic leadership, which resolutely continues to refrain from challenging the profits of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. They sometimes talk about how it’s a bad thing, but then so does Trump, and sadly it seems that Trump is often more sincere. The latest proposal for spending money on protecting people by the Democratic leadership is to pay for people’s COBRA (this is where you can continue to keep your former employment-based health insurance for a time when you are laid off by paying the whole premium yourself). A good thing if you were going to lose your health insurance, for sure, especially if now, not working, you can’t afford to pay not only what YOU were paying but also your employer’s contribution. Not a bad start. But, somehow, one would hope for a better, more proactive, more comprehensive, and most important more effective solution to this crisis than just paying money to insurance companies!

The media has talked about the Democratic Party and its presumptive nominee, Joe Biden, coming a bit closer to the universal health, single-payer, Medicare for All (#Medicare4All) proposals endorsed by Sen. Sanders; a recent NY Times article tells us that ‘Biden's new proposals include expanding Medicare, government insurance for Americans over 65, to those 60 and older.’ Bold! Not! Yes, it is good that people who are 64 years old will not have to risk their lives waiting to turn 65 – that would become the province of 59 year olds! It certainly would not begin to solve the problems of the health system that are apparent to all of us, not just to Case and Deaton. It leaves the uninsured uninsured, the underinsured underinsured, the folks bankrupted by co-pays, deductibles, and surprise bills (especially those from catastrophic costs, mainly a problem for the middle-income with employer-based health insurance, per the Commonwealth Fund) bankrupt, and the insurance companies fat and happy.

It is not a solution, and the only thing audacious about it is that Biden and his campaign even dared to put it out there. We are told, by all the candidates who have dropped out, by all the liberal pundits, even by progressives, that if we want to defeat Trump and incipient fascism, we have to all come together and vote for Biden. If we do, we need to see meaningful movement to put the interests of the people ahead of those of the healthcare-industrial complex, as leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called for.  We need to see meaningful proposals from the Democratic standard-bearer.

In fact, we need to see him. Anyone seen Biden recently?

Tom Petty, the opioid epidemic and changing structural inequities in the US

In October 2017, the rock musician Tom Petty died at the age of 66. Given Mr. Petty’s history of heroin addiction back to at least the 1990s and the frequency with which overdoses seem to cause the death of celebrities, there was some early assumption that it may have caused his. This was confirmed by the coroner, (NY Times, January 19 2018); however, the cause was not heroin but rather prescription opioids (oxycodone plus 3 types of fentanyl), combined with two also-addictive anti-anxiety medicines known as benzodiazepines: “The coroner, Jonathan Lucas, said that Mr. Petty’s system showed traces of the drugs fentanyl, oxycodone, temazepam, alprazolam, citalopram, acetyl fentanyl and despropionyl fentanyl.” (The citalopram is an SSRI anti-depressant). According to a statement from his wife and daughter, he had many ailments including a fractured hip that caused him great pain.

Thus, Mr. Petty becomes another victim of the epidemic of prescription opioid-related deaths. His previous heroin addiction (chronic use of opiates or opioids leads to tolerance, requiring higher and higher doses for relief) and his stature as a rich and famous person (which seems to make it even easier to find doctors who will prescribe such drugs) may have increased his risk, but his death is one instance of a widespread American problem that has been the subject of academic articles, government reports, and opinion pieces from medical providers, patients, and the general range of pundits.

David Blumenthal and Shanoor Servai of the Commonwealth Foundation write in their report “To Combat the Opioid Epidemic, We Must Be Honest About All Its Causes” that “History offers only one other recent example of a large industrialized country where mortality rates rose over an extended period among working-age white adults: Russia in the decades before and after the Soviet Union’s collapse. The economic and social contexts have been eerily similar, and substance abuse has been a dominant factor in both countries: alcohol in Russia, opiates in the United States.” A major study by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton in 2015, “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century” (which I have previously cited, Rising white midlife mortality: what are the real causes and solutions?, November 14, 2015) posits opioid-related deaths as a major cause of the surprising  increase in mortality rate among white Americans. Blumenthal and Servai note that “Based on weighted estimates, 92 million, or 37.8%, of American adults used prescription opioids the prior year (2014); 11.5 million, or 4.7%, misused them; and 1.9 million, or 0.8%, had a use disorder. The epidemic is spreading so rapidly that it’s likely the numbers are higher now.”

So it’s a very big problem, with many causes, and the solutions are not simple. Doctors play a big role, since they must prescribe the opioids (whether these are taken by the designated patient or illicitly redistributed). While well-known surgeon and author Atul Gawande, in an interview with Sarah Kliff on Vox.com, says “We started it”, I don’t think that is completely true. Certainly doctors have been vehicles for its perpetration but there are other forces at work. One is the movement that began in the 1990s to adequately address patients’ pain, which was seen as insufficient by many critics. In many institutions pain was labeled the “fifth vital sign”, and staff were instructed to ask about pain relief in every interaction. While this is important, especially for acute short-lived pain (such as post-operative or post-traumatic), the use of opiates for chronic pain skyrocketed. The obvious problem is, as cited above, the more you have taken them the more you need; tolerance to opiate and opioid effects often requires increasing doses. The “high” resulting from these drugs (whether intended or not) increases their potential for abuse.

Long-acting opiates and opioids (such as extended release morphine or oxycodone, methadone, and fentanyl patches) are preferred as they can control pain with less of a “high”, but they still lead to tolerance. While addiction is not an issue for people who are dying of their cancer, it is for people with chronic diseases such as sickle-cell and chronic pain syndromes, most commonly in the US back pain. Opiates and opioids have been shown to be poor choices for long-term treatment of chronic back pain, but taking them is often easier and cheaper for patients than complicated (and often expensive) modalities such as physical therapy, and it relieves the pain more quickly and completely until higher and higher doses are needed. So patients, as well as physicians, are part of the problem, and physicians are working to try to help people, while complicating the problem.

Real villains include those who have originated and perpetuated this crisis only to make money. This includes insurance companies, who often deny more expensive treatments such as extended physical therapy or drugs such as buprenorphine, essentially pushing doctors and patients into the use of opioids. They certainly include the pharmaceutical companies who have developed and heavily marketed these drugs, notably the Sackler family who owned Purdue and made and pushed Oxy-Contin®, as documented in the New Yorker article “The family that built an empire of pain” (October 30, 2017). In brief, they acquired the rights to long-acting morphine, but because this was losing its patent protection (and thus its profitability), they developed a long-acting form of oxycodone, which was patented and thus more profitable. Counting on the negative associations that the public and even physicians associated with morphine, they pushed Oxy-Contin, which was at least as addictive and dangerous, for an ever-expanding list of chronic conditions. Back pain, of course, was the target market, and it soon seemed as almost everyone had an indication for opioids. And we have since been paying the price with their deaths.

The flaws of capitalism that directly drove and continue to drive this epidemic through the pursuit of profit should be clear enough. The structural flaws that have and continue to ruin the lives of so many Americans (not to mention people in the rest of the world) may be less obvious but are no less real. The dramatic redistribution of wealth from the vast majority of us to the already-wealthiest, with the concomitant decrease in the quality of life for so many, proceeds apace. The 1%, maybe even the 5%, are doing great, although the biggest benefit (including from the new GOP tax “reform”) law goes to the 0.1% or less. The richest 1% now owns half the world’s wealth and the 8 richest men have as much as half the world’s population!  Worldwide, it is those in the poorest countries that suffer most. In the US, it remains minorities. While the shocker in the Case and Deaton study was the fact that white mortality is increasing, the fact remains that minorities, especially African-Americans, still have far higher mortality rates.

If we wish to decrease this excess mortality, it certainly will be important to address the opioid crisis, by physicians becoming more reticent to prescribe long-term opioids for chronic conditions, patients to accept alternative treatments, and insurers being willing to pay for those treatments. It will also be important to address other chronic addictions, like alcohol (Blumenthal and Seervai observe that while “11.5 million, or 4.7%, misused them [opioids and opiates]; and 1.9 million, or 0.8%, had a use disorder…By comparison, there are 17.1 million heavy alcohol users among adults over 18.” Legal does not mean safer, whether we are talking alcohol abuse or “legitimized” (by prescription) opioid abuse. It most often reflects the relative power of the industries that financially benefit.

The core problem is in the unfair, unjustifiable, and oppressive structural inequities in our society. These are so deeply seated that we often assume they are inevitable, and that there is no other way. There is. We may not be able to eliminate inequality, but if we are to seriously address the epidemic of unnecessary deaths, we need to do more than treat the symptoms; we must grapple head-on with and change our society’s structure. 

Rising white midlife mortality: what are the real causes and solutions?

 A widely covered and important health research study was recently published by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century”. The main message is contained in the title – mortality rates for white middle-aged Americans are going up – but there are three other important findings that emphasize its significance.

The first is that mortality rates are going down for every other age and ethnic group, as well as for whites of the same age in other developed countries (see graphic). This means something special is happening to this population group in the US. The second is that this increasing mortality rate is not evenly distributed across class, but is concentrated in the lower-income, high-school-educated or less, group of people. This begins to suggest what is special about this group: that they are being hit hard by societal changes that particularly affect them. The third is that the mortality rates for African-Americans, while decreasing, still significantly exceed those of this group of midlife whites. All of these bear further examination.

That these death rates are rising was apparently surprising to the study’s authors, according to the New York Times article “Death Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans, Study Finds” by Gina Kolata on November 2, 2015, which begins with the sentence “Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans.” It surprises not only Case and Deaton, but also numerous commentators quoted in the article and in subsequent coverage. An example cited by Kolata is Dr. Samuel Preston, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on mortality trends and the health of populations, whose comment was “Wow.”  I guess this is an appropriate comment about an increase in mortality rates of 134 more deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014, which Dr. Deaton says is only matched by HIV/AIDS in current time.

But the findings are not too surprising to me. After all, Deaton and Case are economists, not physicians or health researchers, and they came upon this data almost serendipitously while studying other issues (such as whether areas where people are happy have lower suicide rates). But others, those who are physicians and health researchers, should know better. Maybe the doctors expressing surprise are those who don’t take care of lower-income people. And the health researchers are those who have not been reading. In a blog piece  from January 14, 2014 (“More guns and less education is a prescription for poor health”) I cite  Education: It Matters More to Health than Ever Before, published on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation website by researchers from the Virginia Commonwealth University Center for Society and Health, which notes that “since the 1990s, life expectancy has fallen for people without a high school education, a decrease that is especially pronounced among White women.” This was reported over a year and a half ago, and discusses a trend in place for two decades!

Or maybe I am not surprised because I am a doctor, and see these patients both in the clinic and in the hospital. We do take care of lots of lower income people – those not in the 1%, or the 20% or even the top 50%. Yes, the bottom half of the population by income do exist, and many of them are white, and they are not doing well. The study by Case and Deaton indicates that the causes of death that are increasing the mortality rates in this group of people are not increases in the “traditional” chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, but are rather due to substance abuse (illegal drugs, prescription narcotics, and alcohol) and suicide. This is not to say that we don’t see much illness and many deaths from those other chronic diseases in this population; we do, and they account for the high baseline mortality among this group, but these other causes are the reasons for the rising mortality rate.

We have seen the explosion of prescription opiate use in people who (like Dr. Case, as it happens) have chronic musculoskeletal pain (despite increasing evidence that opiates are not very effective for such pain). This often results from their work as manual laborers, either from a specific accident or from the toll wreaked by chronic lifting, bending, twisting, and straining. We also see increased use of alcohol, that traditional intoxicant. While sometimes it seems that we hear more about studies touting the benefits of a couple of glasses of wine a day, the reality is that millions of lives are destroyed directly and indirectly by alcohol use: those of the drinkers, those of their families, those of the people they hit when driving drunk. And in both urban and rural areas (people in rural areas were particularly affected by the mortality increase in Case and Deaton’s study) the use of methamphetamine. And as the drop in standard of living for people who used to make their living with their bodies doing jobs that have disappeared or they can no longer physically do becomes clearly irreversible and leads to serious depression, often compounded by chronic pain and substance use, increasing rates of suicide.

What is only alluded to in some of the coverage of this study is the most important point: this is about our society failing its people. It is about the “social determinants of health” writ large. Yes, the direct causes of the increased death rate in this population are alcohol and drug use and depression leading to suicide, and we do need better treatment for these conditions. But to leave it there would be like looking at deaths from lung cancer and chronic lung disease and concluding only that we need better drugs to treat these conditions without considering tobacco. Our society has, for at least four decades, been somewhere between uncaring and hostile to a huge proportion of its people. Where once we were a land of rising expectations, where people who worked hard could expect to have a reasonably good life, this changed beginning in the 1970s. Jobs for those with high school educations started to become rarer, and in the Reagan 1980s, “Great Society” programs that supported the most needy were decimated. (For the record, the “War on Poverty” actually worked; poverty rates went down!)

In the 1990s, economic growth hid the concomitant growth in income disparities. With the crashes of the tech and housing bubbles leading to severe recession in the mid-2000s, the impact of these disparities became apparent. While there were protests in response (e.g., the “Occupy” movement), the banks were bailed out, the wealthy continued to grow wealthier, and working people have seen their jobs, incomes, standards of living, health, and ultimately lives disappear. Only the blind or willfully ignorant could have not seen this coming.

To a large extent, then, this is an issue of class, however much “important people” decry the use of that word. It is also an issue of race, since, as noted, mortality rates for African-Americans (although not for Latino/Hispanics) continue to exceed those of whites; even as they begin to converge, there is still great disparity. Camara Jones, MD, the new president of the American Public Health Association (APHA) uses the term “social determinants of equity” to describe why African-Americans are so over-represented in the lower class.  The current data showing that lower-income whites are moving toward the long-term disadvantaged should not obscure this fact, but rather remind us that white people have had a privilege that is now, for the lowest income, being eroded.

The irony is that many of the people in the groups reported on, and their friends and relatives and neighbors, voted for those in Congress and their states who pursue policies that make their situations worse. That the 1%, or 0.1%, or 0.001% (after all, 153 families have contributed 50% of all campaign donations this year!) like these policies is understandable provided that they are not only rich but selfish, but they alone don’t have many votes. That their money controls votes, both by buying advertising and directly buying politicians, is undeniable. Maybe poor people cannot contribute as much as rich people, but they can vote (most of the time) and there are so many more of them. If we must reject “trickle down”, we must also reject appeals for votes that are implicitly or explicitly racist; lower income white people are not benefiting by voting for the racists.  The lives and health of Americans will be improved by improving the conditions in which they live, by an economy whose growth is marked by more well-paying jobs, not money socked away by the wealthiest corporations and individuals. People, of all races and ethnicities and genders and geographical regions need dignity and opportunity and hope that is based in reality, not false promises.

We need to treat the diseases that affect people and cause rising mortality, but we need to treat the conditions that lead to them even more urgently.