Not enough primary physicians OR Nurse Practitioners: It's the money, stupid!

“Like doctors, more nurse practitioners are heading into specialty care”, a recent article in the Washington Post (June 17, 2024) by Michelle Andrews, a contributing writer for KFF News, and McKenzie Beard, makes the point that

Nurse practitioners have long been a reliable backstop for the primary-care-physician shortfall, which is estimated at nearly 21,000 doctors this year and projected to get worse. But easy access to NPs could be tested in coming years. Even though nearly 90 percent of nurse practitioners are certified to work in primary care, only about a third choose the field, according to a recent study.

That study, called ‘No One Can See You Now: Five Reasons Why Access to Primary Care Is Getting Worse (and What Needs to Change)’ was published by the Millbank Memorial Fund, and goes on at length to explain those reasons, and what needs to change.

Spoiler Alert: Like physicians, primary care nurse practitioners make less money, often for more work, and far less restricted scope of practice. Or, borrowing from an old political mantra, “It’s the money, stupid!” Or, as the WaPo article quotes Candice Chen, an associate professor of health policy and management at George Washington University, “We get what we pay for.”

It is, of course, more than just the raw amount of money. It is also how much NPs – and physicians – are paid for the amount of work that they do. This work is undervalued for primary care, based upon the notion that, somehow, being expert in a narrow specialty and knowing a lot about a little, is worth more than having a broad knowledge and being able to help a lot of people, most people, a great deal. Thus, subspecialists dramatically limit their practices to what they feel most expert at and expect the primary care clinician to do everything else. This often includes preparing people for a procedure and following them up after, which are both completely the responsibility of the person doing the procedure. Subspecialists particularly like to send paperwork back to primary care. “Your primary care doctor (or NP) will have to take care of this.” Implication: ‘Unlike primary care clinicians, I do important things.’

I would argue that managing people’s health is doing important things. Which is what the primary care clinician (family physician, general internist, general pediatrician, or the NPs that work in these fields) does. Managing the actual person, you, not just one of your diseases, or one aspect of one of your diseases; being knowledgeable about you, your life, and the interactions of all your conditions and the impact that they have on the rest of your life.

How might this manifest? Let’s say you have knee pain. You go to your family physician, who examines it, and decides that you need an x-ray. They review the x-ray and the report, and decide that you might benefit from seeing an orthopedist. They fill out the referral. Then, after the consultation and recommendation from the orthopedist, they review it, and decide how to implement the treatment. That is a lot of work. The orthopedist was done in a few minutes. Guess who gets paid, altogether, more?

Like the physicians that employ them, NPs are often very expert in their limited area (say, heart failure management), but often do not know how to manage that problem in the context of a person whose other diseases or medications may complicate that. This is where the (underpaid) primary care clinician, physician or NP, has to come in. It is a lot of responsibility, a lot of work, and often a lot of extra hours. One NP profiled in the WaPo article is taking training to become a dermatological NP. This is one of the medical fields with the highest pay/work ratios. Most of its work is not emergent and can conveniently be scheduled during the day during the week, and is less likely than many other specialties’ work to interfere with treatment for other conditions. And it is very highly reimbursed.

Should people be paid based upon the amount and difficulty of their work? If we did, people doing the most difficult work that everyone agrees needs to be done but that most people do not want to do (e.g., picking up the garbage, doing farm work in the hot sun) would be paid more than those who get fancy offices and lots of perks and boss folks around (e.g., CEOs). But difficult can have other definitions; this is really a separate discussion. In health care, for physicians (and now NPs) it should be how they contribute to the system. Currently the usual measure is money, that is, how much a given practitioner brings into the practice, or more commonly now, to their employer (often a health system), which is based on how much payors (insurers) pay for different things. That amount is not God-given, but a matter of policies that could be changed. Two mechanisms through which the amount of reimbursement is set are the RUC and the facility fee. The RUC is a group of non-governmental physicians appointed by the AMA that makes recommendations on how Medicare money should be divided up between specialists – like “one gallbladder removal is worth 6 complete examinations”, or whatever. Medicare is not required to accept their recommendations, but they usually do. And – surprise – the RUC is mostly made up of subspecialists, not primary care clinicians!

The facility fee is an amount that Medicare (and other insurers, see below) tack on to the physician fee if the practice is owned by a health system rather than a physician, and is often several times the fee for the procedure. To be clear, this means that if I receive a procedure today from a physician in their office and you get the same procedure in the same office by the same physician next week, but in the interim that practice has been acquired by a health system, the charge will be MUCH more. Medicare or your insurance may pay it, or most of it, but your co-pay will be much higher, and all of our premiums go up. This practice is hardly ever made apparent or explained in advance to patients (“Hi, thanks for calling. Just to let you know, Dr. Smith’s practice was just acquired by the MuchProfit Health System, so you will be charged three times as much for your procedure as you would have been last week.”) This is so insidious (not to say evil, but it is evil) that even doctors are often surprised, as revealed in the essay by Dr. Danielle Ofri in the New York Times (June 17, 2024) ‘Even Doctors Like Me Are Falling Into This Medical Bill Trap’ and the follow-up letters and comments from other physicians.

The fact that facility fees and the RUC are about Medicare does not mean that they do not affect the fees, cost, and reimbursement from other insurers. Almost all insurers payment rates are set as multiples of Medicare. That is, if Medicare pays $100 for something, they may pay $150 or $200 (and, more recently, those multiples are lower, with patient responsibility higher). Changing these two factors, facility fees and RUC allocations, for Medicare will affect all insurers and make a real difference in income (which is why most subspecialists and hospitals oppose them).

Should primary care clinicians be paid more, or subspecialists less, or somewhere in between? Whichever, by decreasing the difference more clinicians are likely to enter primary care specialties. And, whichever, the raking off of facility fees to increase the wealth of hospitals, not to mention the pocketing of huge profits by insurers, has to stop.

People are more important than profit. Period.

In his recent piece, ‘An Appropriate Anger’ on his Substack “The Reframe”, writer AR Moxon states that “All people have an intrinsic and indestructible worth that cannot be measured”.

He notes:  “That’s not true of everything, you know. If a car stops functioning properly, it’s no longer as valuable as it was when it was functioning properly…[but] It’s not that way with people who, as it so happens, are not things.”

I happen to agree with that, and honestly believe that most people do. But not everyone does. Moxon has some things to say about the businesses, and the people who hide behind the corporate logo, who clearly think that profit is more important than people and act on it. He particularly focuses on healthcare as he had a very scary event with a person close to him. But healthcare is a particularly good example of the core problem that he cites. Healthcare is a system which people want to believe, and often in the face of powerful evidence to the contrary do believe, exists to help them. In fact, it is actually an incredibly efficient and effective producer of profit for the industry, often at the expense of the health of the people it ostensibly exists to help.

What makes this worth continuing to comment upon is the ongoing, aggressive, and accelerating rate at which it is happening. No sooner can one say “well, this is bad, but at least we have X as an alternative” than X is taken away or modified into a profit-producing structure that decreases availability and quality of care for people while increasing their costs. And, as a result, harming their health. (Just in recent blogs I have written about ‘Why are we paying wealthy corporations billions to limit our healthcare?, July 23, 2023; ‘Older adults cannot afford healthcare even if they are insured: Time for a new system!’, Aug 22, 2023; ‘The problems with our US 'Healthcare' system are well documented. We need to start with the solution!’, Sept 3, 2023;  ‘Primary Care, Private Equity, and Profit: How to ensure poor quality care for the American people’, Sept 28, 2023).  The perpetrators of these evils – and they are evils -- are corporations including insurance companies, health care providers, and pharmaceutical companies, often now overlapping in a vertical integration, as for example with UnitedHealth’s ownership of the physician group Optum that now provides more income and profit than its insurance business! But the perpetrators are also the people that run those corporations and make their decisions.

Groups that study the healthcare system, such as the Commonwealth Fund and the Kaiser Family Foundation, continue to issue increasingly distressing, indeed terrifying, reports about the state of US healthcare, the access people have to it (or not), and the impact that this has upon their health. The Commonwealth Fund in particular has published a series of pieces that, although written in a calm manner, create great alarm in me because of their content. ‘High U.S. Health Care Spending: Where Is It All Going?’, Oct 4, 2023, notes that ‘The United States spends twice as much per person on health as peer nations’ and concludes that

More than half of excess U.S. health spending was associated with factors likely reflected in higher prices, including more spending on: administrative costs of insurance (~15% of the excess), administrative costs borne by providers (~15%), prescription drugs (~10%), wages for physicians (~10%) and registered nurses (~5%), and medical machinery and equipment (less than 5%). Reductions in administrative burdens and drug costs could substantially reduce the difference between U.S. and peer nation health spending.

[Note that wages for physicians and nurses is on 15% of this total!]

The ‘Findings from the Commonwealth Fund 2023 Health Care Affordability Survey’ are reflected in its title, ‘How Health Care Costs and Medical Debt Are Making Americans Sicker and Poorer’. Those findings demonstrate that they are, and it is getting worse, and although the greatest impact is in those already marginalized (particularly Black Americans and those already poor), it is affecting more than half of the US population, those insured and uninsured:

Large shares of insured working-age adults surveyed said it was very or somewhat difficult to afford their health care: 43 percent of those with employer coverage, 57 percent with marketplace or individual-market plans, 45 percent with Medicaid, and 51 and percent with Medicare.

 

Commonwealth also had a series of reports, appearing every year or two, called “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall” which compared US health care costs and outcomes to other comparable (wealthy) countries. The US always did worst (see ‘US Health Rankings remain low and #Trumpcare will make them worse!’, June 18, 2017, which includes scary data tables comparing US health system performance to others). The most recent report, from 2022, has a different title that is even scarier: U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective, 2022: Accelerating Spending, Worsening Outcomes. It includes as “highlights” (or lowlights)

·        Health care spending, both per person and as a share of GDP, continues to be far higher in the United States than in other high-income countries. Yet the U.S. is the only country that doesn’t have universal health coverage.

·        The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions, the highest maternal and infant mortality, and among the highest suicide rates.

Comment: These are not good things.

 It is also easy to lose health insurance. It can happen intentionally when insurance companies seek to offload high-cost individuals (ie., the sick people). This procedure (“lemon dropping”) is common in Medicare-substitute programs like Medicare Advantage and push them into regular Medicare. It is the complement to efforts to enroll only healthy seniors (“cherry picking”). The ideal insurance client, from the point of view of maximizing profit (is there another point of view?) is one who pays premiums and never uses care. Of course, if you are not yet on Medicare, you can be dropped and – that’s that. You are uninsured.

But you can also lose insurance coverage by mistake or oversight; in her Oct 25, 2023 essay ‘It Shouldn’t Be This Easy to Lose Your Health Insurance’ in the New York Times, physician Danielle Ofri describes how she lost coverage because the notification for “open enrollment” from her own HR department was collected by her spam filter, and she was put into the “basic” plan – without coverage for her family. Why does she have to re-enroll every year? And why do Medicaid patients?

The stated reason for this bureaucratic merry-go-round is that eligibility must be ascertained every year so as not to allot services to someone who doesn’t qualify. But the process of determining eligibility is highly flawed. Only some disenrolled Medicaid patients, for example, are truly ineligible; according to KFF, a health policy research organization, a majority of people (more than 90 percent in some states) were disenrolled for procedural reasons, such as missed deadlines, paperwork issues and outdated contact information. Many of these people are eligible for insurance but lose coverage because of the byzantine logistics.

Yes. Dr. Ofri was able to reinstate her coverage but not everyone can; she is not only highly educated but a physician: “For me, it took endless phone calls to fix the problem and a miserable week in which I was convinced that I’d failed my family. For millions of Americans, the system is simply unnavigable.” Especially for those Medicaid patients.

Dr. Ofri concludes with the key point:

Of course, none of this would be necessary if the only requirement for getting insurance was — as it is in many countries — being born. 

Think about that. Everybody is insured – and coverage is the same – for every person in the country. There is no enrollment or disenrollment, no coverage lapse, no inability to afford it. Everyone is covered. And it costs less – all of those countries spend less, overall and per capita, than does the US. It is administratively simpler, less costly, more effective, and results in better health status for the population. It has been adopted by every other well-to-do (and many much less well-to-do) country in the world. The US is an outlier, not in a good way, in being the only nation that doesn’t.

But American insurance companies and health care providers make huge amounts of money, money that is intended (often by the government) to be spent on providing health care but instead ends up on the positive side of a corporate balance sheet. That can be seen as a good thing, if you are a corporate executive, a completely heartless and unempathetic bastard, and, of course, you are certain that the negative impact will never affect you. We need to change that, i.e., make it affect them.

Moxon goes on at great length documenting how the “profit motive”, which can have positive effects on a society, has been so perverting by being the ONLY thing that is considered to matter (“the profit motive doesn’t care about enriching the lives of people, and it never will, any more than a garden trowel cares about the state of your garden”) that it leads to mass suffering, in health care and  “with justice, and with education, and public safety, and housing, and transport, and recreation, and water, and the arts, and elder care, and on and on and on.”

What is amazing is that so many of us have drunk enough of the Kool-Aid to believe that, while  these are not good things, we think it is inevitable and the way that things have to be. Of course, there are also those who in fact believe, either because they are ideologues or are getting rich from the corporations they control or both, or are politicians being paid from the lobbying arms of those corporations, that profit is in fact more important than people. They should voluntarily (or not) sign up on the list of people who will not get care because that would decrease profit. They are welcome to live out their principles. Until they can’t because they aren’t getting health care.

As long as the rest of us do not continue to have to sacrifice our health to their profit.

Expecting everything from primary care: reasonable?

In 2003, Kimberly Yarnall and colleagues from Duke University published an article in the American Journal of Public Health documenting that it would take 7.4 hours a day, essentially an entire workday, for a primary care physician to perform all the preventive services recommended by the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) on a typical population of 2500 patients.[i]  Six years later, they wrote a follow-up article in which they added the time it would take to also deliver care for the acute and chronic conditions that patients actually came to their doctor for, and it came to 21.7 hours of a 24-hour day![ii] One year after that, in What’s Keeping Us So Busy in Primary Care? A Snapshot from One Practice, Richard Baron wrote about a day in his practice, where, in addition to seeing an average of 18.1 patient visits per day (the one activity they were paid for), they also returned an average of 23.7 telephone calls, and 16.8 email messages. They refilled 12.1 prescriptions, reviewed 19.5 laboratory reports, 11.1 imaging reports and 13.9 consultation reports per day, and also filled out large amounts of paperwork that they do not report on because they are not captured by their electronic medical record, such as “…administrative forms (e.g., for physical examinations for work, camp, and school and Family Medical Leave Act forms), correspondence received from health plan (e.g., disease-management letters), and reports on home care and physical therapy.”[iii]

When I wrote about this, in Primary Care: What takes so much time? And how are we paying for it? (May 21, 2010), I discussed the incredible burden that this placed on primary care physicians, and how unrealistic it was to expect this of them. I addressed an article by David Margolius and Thomas Bodenheimer, Transforming Primary Care: From Past Practice To The Practice Of The Future,[iv] in which they envision the effective and efficient provision of primary care by well-designed teams. I also expressed some skepticism about how likely this would be to happen. So, now it is another 9+ years since the Baron article, and how far have we come? Not, as it turns out, all that far. The impetus in medicine, from health systems, payers, and primary care physicians’ own specialty colleagues, is for more and more work to be expected from primary care providers, both in terms of direct patient care (acute, chronic and preventive) and the kind of paperwork and form-filling-out described by Baron. This comes, unsurprisingly, with little additional financial reimbursement to the doctors or practice (or financial support from health systems for the kind of expanded teams envisioned by Margolius and Bodenheimer), and certainly without more hours in the day!

Why? For one thing, it’s easier. If you don’t know where something fits in the always-getting-more-complex-and-confusing health system, assign it to primary care providers. This is particularly attractive if you are a specialist and it’s something you don’t want to do. And, if you are a health system manager, if it is something that is poorly reimbursed. Think about it. The surgical subspecialist, for example, wants to operate on people. S/he wants, perhaps, to consult with patients about their particular problem, and maybe even their concerns about it, but mostly wants to operate, and to generate the income that comes from operating and not to fill their time up with additional paperwork, or blood pressure checks, or FMLA requests. When they do follow-up they mainly want to follow up the narrowly-defined surgical problem; if there are other complications that are acute, there are consultants for that; if there are longer-term issues that will need to be dealt with, there are primary care providers for that.

Similarly, the health system makes money from procedures being done, and wants their proceduralists, say this subspecialty surgeon, to generate the surgical procedures that make them money, not “waste their time” on more poorly reimbursed medical activities -- or certainly paperwork. When such work can be done by others – nurse practitioners or physician’s assistants, or scribes or nurses, or anyone who gets paid less, then it is financially efficient to fund those positions. In her New York Times article “The Business of Health Care Depends on Exploiting Doctors and Nurses” (June 8, 2019), Danielle Ofri, a physician at Bellevue Hospital in New York, makes a truly important point: that health care professionals actually care about their patients, and want to do the right thing, and will work hard even when that requires more hours than they have or are being paid for. In this sense, it is the health systems (individually) and the health system (writ large) that is profiting. But it is also true that the degree of exploitation (and payment) is not the same for all health professionals; it is not the same for nurses and doctors, and it is not the same for primary care doctors and many subspecialists.

Primary care physicians may inadvertently encourage this. As Ofri describes, they want to be professional and responsible, to know about everything that is going on with their patients. They want to be the physician for the patient, not the disease, to coordinate and manage all the care, to interpret for their patients what other doctors are telling them, especially when the messages that the patients are getting are mixed or unclear. This is what makes them good doctors. However, it is also what makes them really good candidates for being the “buck-stops-here” venue, the “take care of everything no one else can or wants to”, especially if these tasks, from the larger health system point of view, are not reimbursed or poorly reimbursed in themselves but are required by payers (private and government insurers) to be done in order for the system to get reimbursed for the high-ticket items (such as surgery) that they provide.

This is not irrational. It makes sense for people to do the work that only they can do, to, in the jargon, “work at the top of their license". But this requires changes in reimbursement. In particular, the concept that a single episode of treatment (e.g., surgery) is worth a lot more than the ongoing continuous lifelong management of a person’s health needs to be re-examined. But for this to work, adequate resources – especially human, like enough primary care doctors so that they don’t have the 2500 patients each, and enough support nurses and assistants and clerks and scribes to address the workload – have to be available.

Some primary care providers have moved into “direct primary care”, where, for a fee beyond insurance reimbursement, they provide (presumably) all the primary care needs of smaller group of patients. It has its pluses, but without adequate numbers of providers and without a national health insurance system covering everyone, it leaves too many people out; it becomes another “market niche” for those who can afford it, and this is not what health care should be.

I have heard it said that there are 3 entities that are always identified as likely places when something additional is suggested to be added to health care: primary care, nursing education, and black churches. Nursing education because, you know, nurses should know how to do that (whatever that is today). Black churches, you know, because they are important institutions in the community, with credibility, so if they urge people to healthier behaviors it may work better than when outside health professionals do. Could be a good idea. Maybe the nursing schools or black churches could hire people who could use the jobs to do this work.

But, as in primary care, rarely are these “good ideas” backed up with money, with sufficient funding to make it happen, to employ people, to support them. That money, of course, needs to go to for health systems, subspecialists, insurance companies, and mega-corporations.

Time for a change.

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[i] Yarnall KSH, Pollak KI, Østbye T, Krause KM, Michener JL, Primary Care: Is There Enough Time for Prevention?

MD Am J Public Health. 2003 April; 93(4): 635–641.PMCID: PMC1447803. PMID: 12660210

[ii] Yarnall KSH, Østbye T, Krause KM, Pollak KI, Gradison M, Michener JL, Family Physicians as Team Leaders: ‘Time’ to Share the Care, Prev Chronic Disease Apr2009;6(2):A59),

[iii] Baron R, What’s Keeping Us So Busy in Primary Care? A Snapshot from One Practice, New England Journal of Medicine, Apr29,2010;362(17):1632-6

[iv] Margolius D, Bodenheimer T, Transforming Primary Care: From Past Practice To The Practice Of The Future, Health Affairs May 2010, 29(5): 779–784.