Fantastic (& fantastical) hospital charges: The industry + insurers + Pharma making money hand over fist!

On March 15, 2009, in “Bargaining down the medical bills”,

I told the story of my hernia surgery – outpatient, in at 7 am, home by noon – and the $10,000 hospital (not doctor) charge. My insurance company paid $1,600, told me to pay $400, and the hospital wrote off the $8,000 as “contractual adjustment”. But if I was uninsured I would have gotten a $10,000 bill!

That was outrageous. Not so much the amazingly high charge, rather the fact that they were willing to accept $2,000 from an insured person, while they would have dunned and bankrupted an uninsured one, someone more likely to have less money! Of course, that would only be true if they had agreed to do such an elective surgery on an uninsured person in the first place.

Things have, apparently, not gotten better. Maybe worse. I recently had another outpatient surgical procedure (different hospital, different town) and the hospital – again, not doctor’s – charge was over $69,000! I was there for a few hours! Now I have Medicare, and a Medicare supplement plan, so I paid none of it. Medicare paid $2400, 80% of their approved charge for that procedure, and the supplement plan paid the rest. But $69,000 as a charge? I thought that the old one, charging $10,000 for a procedure that the insurer would pay $2000 for, was bad, but charging $69,000 for a procedure that you know Medicare has approved for less that 4% of that? What is the point?

Maybe an billionaire, or a royal from another country, will show up at this hospital and be willing to pay $69,000 in cash. Dream on. But the vast majority of the people that you would bill this amount would be uninsured because they couldn’t afford insurance. And the hospitals do not expect to collect anywhere near that amount from them, but they will keep billing them, and ruin their credit, and eventually sell off the bill to a collection agency for about 10 cents on the dollar. That agency will increase the dunning.

So what is the point of having such a high charge on the “chargemaster” (the name for the pricelist no one sees) if the only people who are going to be billed that much are those who are least likely to be able to pay? There has to be a reason, and there are in fact several, which include hoping that some insurer will, if not pay the whole amount, pay a fixed percentage of the billed charge, and so the higher the charge, the higher the reimbursement. But, of course, this makes no sense with Medicare (which has fixed approved charges that it will pay for procedures regardless of what the institution charges) or with insurers for which they have already negotiated reimbursement; in fact, the latter is usually determined as a “multiple of Medicare”, e.g., 2 or 3 times what Medicare pays. There are other arcane reasons, many of which have to do with the complex interplay between the “providers” (hospitals) and the payors (insurance companies), and who has the most clout in a certain area in a given situation. Assuredly, the interest of the patient does not enter into this discussion.

[I was going to add the following paragraph as a comment, but I thought it belonged here...]

A colleague pointed out another important reason why the prices for services in “non-profit” hospitals are so high. They don’t pay taxes because they are (supposed to, but often don’t) deliver “community benefit”. One way this is measured is reducing the debt of those who can’t pay! So if you can take, say $3000 from an insurer for a procedure but your “official” charge is $10,000, then if you accept $3000 from an uninsured person you can call the $7000 “community benefit”! And if your charge is ostensibly $69,000, you can meet the requirements for your tax-free status without losing a dollar…

 

Trying to find a pricelist with any meaning is almost impossible, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I go to the dentist in Mexico (I don’t have, but it accepts, US dental insurance). They can tell you before they do anything exactly what it will cost. Cleaning, $60. Gum trimming, $160. Same for repairing cavities, making crowns (on site, in an hour) or implants. No surprises. In the US, not even the doctors or hospital administrators know what the actual price will be for the patient.

This absurd pricing is yet another example of a “healthcare” (or maybe “healthdon’tcare”) system that is predicated on making money for the power players, and the technical details about which of them benefits most (sometimes, in the case of inner-city and rural hospitals, suffers most) dominates the policy discussion and political rule making. Politicians like to talk about regulating health insurers (and sometimes hospitals), and for sure drug companies because of their exploitation of patients. They rarely, however, do anything much about it. When they do something, it almost always 1) is very watered down by “compromises” with the big-contribution lobbyists from the regulated industries, and 2) when it does help people by reducing their cost, it always continues to make money for the (maybe) regulated companies, just a little less exorbitant than before. 

 Drug costs are a prime example of both. The legislation that created the Medicare drug plan (Medicare Part D) passed during the George W. Bush administration. The positive benefit to patients was that, prior to it, many Medicare patients did not have coverage for their prescription drugs and often went broke trying to buy them; it required all Medicare recipients to have a plan.  The obvious benefit to the corporations was that now all Medicare recipients had to buy drug coverage from an insurance company, and drug companies would now get paid for all these people’s medications. A less obvious, but incredibly important benefit to drug manufacturers was that the Part D legislation forbid Medicare from negotiating drug prices! So big bonus – everyone has to have drug coverage and they have to pay what we charge! Medicare is the only civilian purchaser of drugs (and other healthcare services) large enough to force prices down, as they do for hospital services (see the anecdotes at the start of this piece). But that they might do the same for drug prices really worried Big Pharma – after all, the VA and TriCare, the only other purchasers big enough to have real clout, did negotiate lower drug prices for their members, and this decreased their profits. Indeed, in most states Medicaid negotiates drug prices, and the manufacturers don’t like that at all. Luckily (for them), they have hundreds of highly paid lobbyists in DC, and make millions in contributions to politicians, so they were able to get this great deal. A great example is former Rep. Billy Tauzin (R, LA) who was chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee when Part D was passed, and, “On January 2005, the day after his term in Congress ended, he began work as the head of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). a powerful trade group for pharmaceutical companies.” (Wikipedia)

Drug company profiteering is also a good example of the second point, that drug companies always continue to do fine and make big profits even after a reform has decreased them a little. A more current example is the push (including from the Biden administration) to lower the cost of insulin, a drug that is literally a daily necessity of life for those with Type 1 diabetes and very commonly needed for the much larger number of people with Type 2 diabetes. The 2020 Prescription Drug Pricing Report from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services states that

The average gross manufacturer price for a standard unit of insulin in 2018 was more than ten times the price in a sample of 32 foreign countries:$98.70 in the U.S., compared with $8.81 in the 32 non-U.S. OECD countries for which we have prescription drug data. The U.S. prices for the mix of insulin used in the U.S. were 8.1 times prices paid in all non-U.S. OECD countries combined. !!

Verywell Health reports that “As of March 2022, the price for a vial of insulin ranges from $50 to over $1,000, and a pack of pens ranges from $45 to over $600.” News organizations such as the BBC have reported on the impact of this on actual people. No wonder limiting the price of this life-saving drug is something concerning to both Republicans and Democrats. President Trump talked about it a lot, and President Biden is actually moving to limit the cost. With the administration-backed Inflation Reduction Act, not only did the price get controlled, but Eli Lilly (one of the 3 major manufacturers of insulin for the US, along with Sanofi-Aventis and Novo Nordisk, and the company that was given the patent for insulin from Banting and Best for $1) announced a 70% reduction in their charges. The White House briefing fact sheet on this legislation’s effect is interesting, and contains some information on who in the US has diabetes. The answer is a lot of people, over 11% of the US population, and minority groups, the poor, and the poorly educated have an even greater burden of this disease.

                                                                  

But don’t cry for Eli Lilly, or the other insulin, or any drug, manufacturers. That they will be doing fine and continuing to make huge profits after the price restrictions go into effect is further evidence that before they were making outrageous, unjustifiable, and indeed (given that insulin is needed to keep many people alive) murderous profits.

It is hard to discuss rapacious profiteering in health(don’t)care without drug companies, but let us not lose sight of the fact that the insurance companies and the big hospital and “health systems” are also making out like bandits, ripping us off, and endangering our health.

FDA approves Alzheimer's drug against the recommendation of its scientific panel. Be very concerned.

Early in June, an article in the NY Times discussed the possible approval of aducanumab, a recombinant DNA (the “-ab” is always clue!) drug intended to treat Alzheimer’s disease. The FDA approved the drug a few days later, going against the recommendations of its advisory committee of scientific experts, and generating this “Quotation of the Day” in the Times from one of its members, G. Caleb Alexander: “There’s no way to recover the opportunity to understand whether or not the product really works in the post-approval setting.” Almost immediately, three members of the advisory committee, Joel Perlmutter of Mayo, David Knopman of Washington University in St. Louis, and Aaron Kesselheim of Harvard, resigned in protest of the decision. Dr. Kesselman, along with his colleague, Dr. Jerry Avorn, presents a strong indictment of the FDA in an Op-Ed guest essay in the Times, and they are not alone. Most neurologists, including those that I know who are experts on and leading researchers in Alzheimer’s, echo these concerns.

This is pretty unusual. Not just the resignations, but the reason for them – the decision by the FDA to approve a new drug based on evidence of effectiveness so weak that the scientific advisory panel recommended against it. It raises a number of questions, the foremost one of which is “why?” Also: Is this a precedent, and will it happen again, or more regularly? What was the reason that the advisory committee recommended against approval? Who were the people at the FDA who overruled them, and what were their reasons?

First let’s start with cui bono? – who benefits. This is certainly Biogen, the company that developed aducanumab and will market it, under the tradename Aduhelm. It is estimated that it will cost $56,000 a year. This is not a record; there are other recombinant DNA drugs – including several for neurologic conditions – that cost even more. In fact, as indicated in recent study by the American Academy of Neurology, “Medicare paid 50% more for neurology drugs over 5 years while claims rose only 8%”. Still, it is a tidy chunk of change, and since Alzheimer’s is a far more common disease than most of the rare one that are ostensibly treated by more expensive drugs, Biogen expects to make a bundle. And, because only the very very rich could afford this much, most of it will be paid by you. That is, by insurance companies that collect your premiums, and especially by Medicare, the insurer for the majority of Alzheimer’s patients, which is funded by your tax dollars. This is described in another article, with the subhead: ‘Despite scant evidence that it works, the drug, Aduhelm, is predicted to generate billions of dollars in revenue, much of it from Medicare.’  If people are not insured, or rich, they can forget it. Which, in this case, might be just as well.

Making a lot of money, as much as they possibly can wring out of patients and insurers, is the core business of pharmaceutical companies (and most companies, although pharmaceutical companies have been particularly good at making outrageous profits, always ranking as the #1 industry for profit). It is not, despite their ads (and they spend much more on marketing than on research and development) about improving your health.  You are just the coincident vehicle for generating their profits. Their drugs do not have to actually help you get better; as long as they don’t harm you too much – and, of course, as long as the FDA approves them – they are golden. This is why they spend so much on marketing, and lobbying, and specifically lobbying the FDA. Indeed, the “golden parachute” of many FDA staffers is to retire from the agency and get a job lobbying for a drug company. Sigh. So that one is obvious. Corrupt and despicable, yes, worthy of complete anger and condemnation, yes. But obvious. Not, heretofore, however, predictable.

There is another stakeholder group involved, Alzheimer’s advocacy groups. The FDA still has an acting chief, Janet Woodcock, and another article notes these groups supported her becoming permanent. It says “Woodcock’s nomination back in February when the application for the drug, aducanumab by Biogen, was pending, its approval was a sign that they backed the right candidate.” Wow. Shouldn’t we be paying them attention? After all, they are not the drug manufacturers who will be making a mint. And Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease, and we need effective treatments, right?

Not so fast. Yes, Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease. Those who have it suffer greatly, at least until it is so advanced they no longer recognize what is going on. And their loved ones continue to suffer, more and more. A drug that would cure it, or mitigate it, or make it progress more slowly would be wonderful (although it shouldn’t cost $56,000 a year!). But is aducanumab that drug? Not according to the scientific panel, who know. But the advocacy groups are pushing for it anyway. Why? Well, they make not be making most of the money, but they have to justify their existence. And they almost certainly are getting donations from those drug makers. And maybe, even, they care so deeply about the disease that their hope and optimism overcomes appropriate caution. It wouldn’t be the first time that this has happened (e.g., the continued promotion by breast cancer advocacy groups for decreasing the age and increasing the frequency of screening even when science showed the opposite).

It also wouldn’t be the first time that those advocating for victims of terrible disease pushed strongly for approval before studies were completed. One meaningful and important example is the efforts of groups such as ACT-UP to get early approval for anti-retroviral drugs, as people were dying in droves from AIDS.  But there are differences. One is the disease; Alzheimer’s is not killing people quickly as did AIDS, and no one is claiming that aducanumab or any other drug will change its eventual downhill course. Another is health equity. In the political and social landscape of the 1980s, AIDS was a disease primarily affecting gay men and IV drug users, definitely not the mainstream. Leaders such as Ronald Reagan refused to offer support. And, perhaps most importantly, the anti-retrovirals were showing a definite positive effect in studies, and the calls were to speed up the approval process. In the current case, the trials are complete and the evidence showing a positive effect is not sufficient.

This is in no small part due to the fact that the “positive effect” studies show involves changes in biomarkers, not changes in people’s lives. That is, they look at lab tests rather than whether people die less soon or suffer less. Yes, there is evidence, as there is evidence in many diseases, that these intermediate markers are related to long-term outcomes, but the problem is that the further out they get the more it becomes like a game of “telephone” (well, our drug affects A, and A is related to B, and B may be related to long-term outcomes). We need studies that look at patient-oriented not disease-oriented or laboratory-test-oriented effects.

Sometimes an intermediate marker improves but the patient does not, or gets worse. It could be from a side effect of the drug (drug safety) but it can also be from the desired positve effect of the drug!  For a time diabetes groups pushed to lower the target hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) -- a measure of long term glucose level, to be 5 rather than 6, because people with diabetes with lower HbA1c levels had lower levels of diabetes complications. Makes sense. But when the average blood sugar over several months is lower, it increases the risk of significant hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), which can be more dangerous than higher sugar. Indeed, if you pass out from low blood sugar, fall and break your hip, and die, the lower rate of complications from your diabetes in the long term is irrelevant. There is an old medical joke about Harvard doctors being very insistent that their residents keep patients’ lab values in the normal range, so that even when the patient died, they died in “perfect Harvard balance”.

This is not what we want. We want diseases to be cured, or ameliorated; for lives to be lengthened and improved in quality. We certainly do not want drug companies to make billions off of people’s suffering. When the FDA approves a drug over the recommendations of its scientific panel, it should be of great concern to all of us. 

And don't forget cui bono?

Some medical care may not help. Alternatives may not either.

‘Why Doctors Still Offer Treatments That May Not Help’, by Austin Frakt in the New York Times, August 27, 2019, is a well-done article that, despite its title, is fairly optimistic. He reports that while about 50% of current medical treatments no not have good evidence supporting them, only 3% have evidence showing them to be harmful, and another 6% unlikely to be helpful. This means about 41% (or only 41%, if you prefer) have good evidence that they are helpful.

Frakt cites some of the research on health interventions that do not work, or may even harm, quoting leading researchers Vinay Prasad and Adam Cifu (although he does not mention John Ionannidis, arguably the father of the field). He discusses the important “Choosing Wisely” campaign, initiated by the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation, that asks each medical specialty society to identify at least 5 things often done in their specialty which usually should not be done. There is not, however, always consensus. For example, among its 20 recommendations (a high number that continues to grow, perhaps because of its discipline’s broad scope), the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) recommends against imaging (including MRI and CT) for uncomplicated back pain, as does the American College of Physicians (Internal Medicine) (see ‘Medicine should not be primarily a business: choosing appropriate care for all, not excess testing for some, August 19, 2018).  Yet, neither the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, or the various groups of radiologists who perform these procedures, make this recommendation. Of course, both stand to benefit financially from doing these procedures.

It is concerning to think that, at least in some cases, financial benefit may influence the selection of some medical societies’ “Choosing Wisely” recommendations. Sadly, it is not a surprise, and financial benefit is, I believe, the reason for the use of many unproven treatments. Another important reason is an understandable reluctance for providers to abandon therapies that they have used for many years and believe to be successful. After all, if 50% of treatments do not have good evidence that they help or harm, many probably often do help, even if most of the evidence is anecdotal. Much more malicious, however, is the intensive marketing of new drugs and therapies to physicians by drug and device makers with a strong financial profit motive.

Frakt provides a litany of therapies-since-found-not-to-work-or-even-do-harm, including hormone replacement for post-menopausal women. The only drug he specifically names is Vioxx®, the “miracle” anti-inflammatory pulled from the market when it was found to cause heart disease (at least publicly found; the manufacturer actually knew it before it was released!). He also mentions “tight blood sugar control in critically ill patients” (and actually, probably most patients). This certainly relates to drug. The plethora of new, expensive, and marginally advantageous diabetes drugs is a testimony to their profitability. Ironically, it is often the same physicians who are unwilling to give up on treatments that are unproven or even proven to be of no benefit or of harm who are the first to begin using new (and, redundantly) more expensive drugs heavily promoted by the manufacturers.

Of course, it is not just diabetes drugs that are expensive. Compared to some of the newer drugs for rare diseases they seem like a bargain. In “The $6 million drug claim”, Times writers Katie Thomas and Reed Abelson discuss a woman who has $1 million in drugs to treat her condition in her refrigerator! While in her case they were paid for by her husband’s union, the cost can still be backbreaking: “At one point in 2018, for every hour that one of the union’s 16,000 members worked, 35 cents of his or her pay went to Alexion to cover the Pattersons’ prescriptions.” And what about those who have poor insurance, or no insurance? Or a union that goes bankrupt paying for them? Alexion, of course, does well, though.

A new law allows “gravely ill” patients the “right to try” drugs that the FDA has not approved. It sounds good; as a friend told me “I figure if I’m going out and they want to try something that might kill me I haven’t got much to lose. At best I’m cured. At worse, I go out but knowledge is gained.” Except for maybe dying sooner or more painfully, or possibly going bankrupt. It is not uncommon for doctors to suggest something new, unproven, or even a treatment that has already failed, one more time. Not everyone in this country has good insurance, and if your insurance company appropriately refuses to pay because there is no evidence of efficacy (yes, they are sometimes right!), you are on the hook for the bill. You may be dying, but your family may need the money you were saving for retirement. Thus, there may be a great deal to lose.

A certain percentage of people will take all this to mean that mainstream medicine is not to be trusted. This is definitely an overreaction, although a healthy skepticism is warranted, especially when the treatment is incredibly expensive and it is obvious that somebody (or some corporation) is making a killing on it. Some people will decide to pursue only what used to be called “alternative” medicine. These practices, often with hundreds or thousands of years of experience, are often called “complementary” and are now frequently offered along with mainstream medical therapies in “integrative” practices. But the same cautions must apply; because something is different, or traditional, does not make it necessarily either effective or safe.

For example, while people sometimes believe it is safer to choose only “natural” medicine, because a therapy grows in nature does not mean it is necessarily safe. Earlier in my career, medicine virtually abandoned the use of digitalis, made from the natural plant foxglove, to treat heart disease, after it had been used for decades. The key point is that if a substance works biologically and has “good” (i.e., desired) effects it can also have “bad” (i.e., undesired, or “side”, effects). This is true if it is straight from the plant, modified and standardized, or completely created in the laboratory.

Another real danger is what Frakt calls “wishful thinking”. Being optimistic and hoping that things will turn out well is good, and often useful when confronting serious illness. But when this transitions into the realm of “magical thinking”, being convinced that something good will happen to you because you want it to (or vice versa, that something bad will not happen because you don’t want it to), or believing a treatment will work because it is “natural”, or because your doctor recommended it in the absence of evidence, it is a real risk. “Magical thinking” is normal in three year olds, but dangerous in adults.

So what to do? Be open to new treatments, but do not reject the old, whether “traditional” or medical. Ask for evidence for treatment, such as when just changing a drug from an inexpensive standard (say, metformin for diabetes) to a new, costly one. Learn to understand probability, and ask for numbers. Do not reject anything out of hand, but do not believe that something will work just because you want it to.

Stay skeptical but not intransigent. Look for the evidence. And look also, when something is expensive, for the profit motive. Cui bono? It may not always be you.

How to prescribe a glucometer – or why I can’t support Medicaid-for-All

This is a guest post by Seiji Yamada, MD, MPH.

A shorter version recently appeared on the KevinMD blog, http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2017/09/heres-glucometer-turned-doctor-medicaid.html

In a recent Vox interview, Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii announced his plans to sponsor a bill to allow individuals without insurance to buy Medicaid coverage for themselves.  As a family doc who cares for patients on Medicaid in safety net clinics in Senator Schatz’s home state, I cannot support such a plan.

While private insurance companies offer supplemental insurance, Medicare continues to be run largely by the federal government.  In contrast, while Medicaid programs receive federal funding, they are largely run by state governments.  In a trend known as Medicaid managed care, in recent decades, states have been contracting out Medicaid to private insurance companies.

Prior to 1994, Hawaii’s state Medicaid system was run by HMSA, Hawaii’s Blue Cross/Blue Shield.  During the Clinton presidency, the buzzword was managed competition, the idea being that insurance corporations would compete on price to provide publicly funded health insurance.  Thus in 1994, the State of Hawaii devolved to managed care Medicaid and started farming out Medicaid to other corporations besides HMSA.  In 2009 Medicaid managed care was extended to the aged, blind, and disabled.

Medicaid also generally reimburses at lower rates than Medicare or private insurance.  (Senator Schatz proposes to fix this.)  However, low reimbursement is only one reason that physicians in private or group practice take few Medicaid patients today.  Another reason is the administrative hassles to care put up by insurance companies as well as the difficulties of dealing with multiple insurance companies.  Thus, Medicaid patients have relatively restricted networks of providers from which to choose.  Many are therefore seen by safety net providers such as Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) or training clinics.

The modern practice of medicine is complicated enough, but the different requirements and different formularies of different insurance companies complicates it to Kafkaesque levels.  I believe that the powerlessness and helplessness induced by this nightmarish bureaucracy is a major cause of physician burnout.  I want to give just one example.  Let us say that one of our patients has newly diagnosed diabetes.  Let us say that he has Medicaid.  Just to prescribe him a glucometer, I have to go through the following:

Patients on Medicaid must enroll with one of the following:  HMSA, AlohaCare, Ohana (WellCare), United Healthcare, and Kaiser.  I need to go to the insurance section of the patient’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) to find out which insurance corporation is responsible for this patient.  Then I go to The Prescribing Guide (http://prescribingguide.com/), a cheat sheet developed and maintained by my family medicine faculty colleague Chien-Wen Tseng, MD.  The prescribing guide tells me which brand of glucometer to prescribe.

Each insurer contracts with a different glucometer manufacturer, so I can’t just prescribe a generic glucometer.  I have to figure out whether to prescribe Freestyle, or OneTouch, or AccuChek.  Because the contracts are continually re-negotiated, the preferred brand can change every six months.  If you enter the wrong brand, the pharmacy will reject it and tell you to get a prior authorization.

Next, I have to identify the ICD-10 code that corresponds to the highest complexity of the patient’s diabetes.  Does she have nephropathy, or neuropathy, or ophthalmopathy?  I often have to review the patient’s labs to see if the creatinine/GFR is abnormal.  Am I going to place the patient on long-term insulin?  Because if I am, I can justify asking for test strips for more than once a day testing.  The number of times per day the glucose is to be measured, the ICD-10 code, and whether or not the patient is on insulin has to be on the prescription.  If not, the pharmacy will reject it.

Now that I have prescribed a glucometer, I can now start working on prescribing a diabetes medication.

And I’ve yet to address the fatigue, the blood pressure, or the back pain for which his friend’s oxycodone worked real good, Doc.

. . .

“All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players” -Shakespeare

Was this theater of the absurd composed by Alfred Jarry?  Samuel Beckett?  No, this play was composed by the layers of business administration types that have piled onto the health care system over the past couple of decades to bring corporate-style efficiency to medicine.  Insurance companies limit their costs by imposing roadblocks.  By making it so time-consuming and so frustrating to get anything done, we physicians throw up our hands and decide, no it’s not worth the hassle to order a different medication or sophisticated tests.  Perhaps my patient gaining weight on a sulfonylurea would benefit from a glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonists or a sodium glucose transporter 2 inhibitors instead.  But the prior authorization form requires me to list the dates that the patient has taken every other diabetes medication she has ever been prescribed . . .

For those physicians who are employed by hospitals or other institutions, we are finding that our employers are engaging in an arms race with the insurers by hiring their own army of coders and billers.  These coders and billers find our documentation lacking in order to maximize return.  So now we are told to write addenda to chart notes entered months ago - in order to justify higher reimbursement.  These coders and billers shake their heads sadly and say to themselves, “Dr. Yamada, you are such an idiot.”

. . .

The new interns started in July.  When they were medical students, I taught them about the pathophysiology of diabetes, about the evidence base of what treatments have been shown to improve patient outcomes, about how to discuss lifestyle measures, about the social determinants of the development of diabetes.  Now that they’re interns, though – all of that goes out the window.  Now that they’re managing real patients, I teach them how to enter billing codes into the electronic health record, and how to get a glucometer covered by insurance.

They look at me with incredulity.  They are dumfounded by how irrational and Byzantine our health system is.  They realize that I am no longer teaching them medicine.  Because there is no time for that now.  There is only throughput.  Treat ‘em and street ‘em.

 “Welcome to the desert of the real,” I say.  “Get used to it.”

. . .

The MBAs who manage us physicians say, “It’s not about throughput.  It’s about quality.  We’re not going to pay you for throughput any more.  We’re going to pay for performance.  We don’t care how many times you see the patient.  We only care about their A1cs.”

OK, then, tell me how you get better outcomes with a patient with diabetes without seeing them every once to talk with the patient about diet and exercise, to prescribe a glucometer so they can learn how diet and exercise affects their glucoses.  What is the point of telling the homeless patient to bring down their A1cs by eating more fresh vegetables?  What use is the A1c when the patient has cancer?  What does the patient dealing with domestic violence care about her A1c?  To measure the quality of care provided by a physician through A1cs is like the drunkard searching for his keys under the streetlight because that’s where the light is.  The A1c is easily measured.  Other aspects of medical care are not so easily assessed.

. . .

Insurance companies and their corporate mind-set have so thoroughly taken over American medicine that we can hardly see the forest for the trees any more.  EHRs, essentially designed for reimbursement purposes, define the patient encounter – such that physicians look only at their screens.  I can’t afford to make eye contact with my patients, or I’ll fall hopelessly behind.  Was there a time that we used to eat lunch?  Nowadays, lunchtime is for finishing with charting or dealing with phone calls.  Dealing with medication refills, or lab or x-ray results?  Planning for the patients on tomorrow’s schedule?  We do that in the evenings or weekends by remote access to the electronic health record.

Though Senator Schatz’s proposal would make Medicaid something like the public option that didn’t make it into the Affordable Care Act, it would likely leave intact insurance company-run Medicaid managed care – with its restricted networks and administrative hassles.  As a practicing physician, I would like to get corporate profits and the layers upon layers of bureaucrats out of medicine.  The American physician is in a predicament like that of Josef K in Kafka’s The Trial.  The rules are obscure and seem to be constantly changing.  We are never told what crime we committed to justify our being treated the way we are.  The sense of a lack of agency and helplessness induced is one major cause of physician burnout.  The practice of American medicine needs to be rationalized, so that we health workers can go back to focusing on the medicine.  Medicare for All is what we need.  Not all the inefficiencies and irrationalities of the modern practice of medicine will be fixed by Medicare for All – but patients and doctors need a way out of this Kafka novel.

"There's a sucker born every minute": False and inflated health claims

“There is,” in a phrase rightly or wrongly attributed to P.T. Barnum, “a sucker born every minute.” To Barnum, and to countless others before and since, this was a business opportunity. They can get rich off us because we want stuff to be true even when every input from our senses should show us that it isn’t; we want magical, easy cures and money-making schemes, even when we know that they only work for the scheme’s designers, not the suckers who take the bait. Betsy DeVos, the recently approved Secretary of Education, who knows nothing about education and devalues public education (I could go on, but that’s another story…) is the beneficiary of such desires. She is in the position that she is in because of her great wealth which has bought her great influence, and that great wealth, at least the portion from her husband’s side, derives from the Ponzi scheme known as Amway. It is clear that Amway was in fact the path to wealth that it was claimed to be, for the DeVoses anyway.

The persistent and widespread greed of people despite evidence that the odds are stacked way against them is testimony to either optimism or stupidity, or some of both. It is one of the oldest memes in literature, from the alchemists who would turn lead into gold (or Rumpelstiltskin who would weave it) to Faust who would sell his soul to the devil (and maybe so did guitarist Robert Johnson) to Ralph Kramden (and his cartoon successor Fred Flintstone) and George “Kingfish” Stevens, doubly oppressed and vulnerable, being poor and black. And the outcome is always the same, the little guy gets screwed.

We could go on and on with this theme. The temptation to tie it to the election and reign of Donald Trump is enormous; people want something to be true (that they’ll get good jobs back, that their streets will be safe, that they can have all the health care they want and need without paying for it when they don’t need it, whatever) and Trump promised it all, and of course he is not and will not deliver, but many still love him. If you want a good article about this, try Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, “The end of facts in the Trump era”. But, after all, this blog is about public health and medicine, and there is no shortage of examples in those fields. After all, con men and grifters, whether low level hucksters, Amway merchants, or Wall Street bankers are all regularly called “snake oil salesmen”, and what was snake oil but a promise of better health? And the liniment sold by these folks might have worked a bit since it had red pepper, a bit like current capsaicin. When they were convicted it was because their oil did not come from snakes, not because it was a fraudulent cure.

You’d think that people would wonder why, if there is a miracle easy (and sometimes even relatively cheap) cure for all their ills that everyone else hasn’t benefited from it. Ah, but that is part of the attraction – being in the know about something everyone else isn’t. Is that not the way that inside traders work? Isn’t that how they fix sporting events, how your brother-in-law knows that this 100-1 shot will come in at Santa Anita? Is that not how Arnold Rothstein got rich? So, sure, it’s done in health. Watch daytime television sometime. It is mostly about medicine, from Dr. Oz (a font of misinformation), to an electric scooter you can get FREE (or at no cost to you, other than as a taxpayer paying into Medicare), or a miracle drug that will allow you to have even better relief from your arthritis or asthma or will keep your blood from clotting even better than warfarin, at only 1000 times the price, and at great potential risk to your immune system.

The hucksters present not only misinformation about individual medical care, but also public health. The most obvious, and likely most serious, current issue is that of vaccines. Despite there being no evidence linking vaccines to autism, and strong evidence showing there is no link, the myth persists. The price will likely be serious outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, especially measles, as discussed by Peter J. Hoetz in his NY Times Op-Ed “How the anti-vaxxers are winning”, February 7, 2017. Water fluoridation suffers from similar myths. Public health may be even more susceptible to such hype than medical care, since so many of its benefits are things (like measles, or tooth decay) that don’t happen, rather than those that do. We rarely wake up saying “Gee, I’m glad I don’t have cholera today because we have clean water”; indeed, we mostly worry about water quality when something specifically bad is happening, like lead poisoning in Flint. People are susceptible to liars and charlatans who tell them things that they want to believe, as well as things that seem to make sense, but as I tell students, something that seems to make sense is called a research question; only when the study is done will we know if it is true.

But it is not only the more obvious (to the discerning, anyway) scams. Mainstream medicine does it often. Every new discovery, every potential ameliorant (if not cure) is trumpeted by both the companies that manufacture it and, at an earlier stage, the university for which they work. Of course, most of these discoveries are scarcely the magic breakthroughs that they are initially claimed to be. That is the nature of science; things are learned and knowledge grows incrementally. But a new discovery by a scientist at your university is worth a lot of publicity! Maybe it is a cure for Alzheimers! Or at least a step in that direction! Certainly worth millions of dollars more in NIH funding! There is nothing wrong in incremental discoveries; the problem is when they are hyped as the Holy Grail. Indeed, on July 16, 2010, I wrote about Rosiglitazone and the "Holy Grail", and how disappointed diabetes advocates were that Avandia® was being taken off the market just because it caused heart disease, because it did lower blood sugar! (A diabetes advocate noted that lowering blood sugar was the “Holy Grail”.) This story is a terrific example of the peskiness caused by the human body being an integral organism; something that is very good for one condition may still cause big problems. And so, maybe we should wait before we hype it too much. On the other hand, what an opportunity we have to get big publicity before that happens…

A recent example involves using low-dose CT screening for lung cancer. The US Preventive Services Task Force recommends it (as a “B” recommendation) for men 55-80 years old with a history of smoking. This “B” recommendation is worth a lot to the CT manufacturers and radiologists who read them, since the ACA requires insurers to cover USPSTF “A” and “B” recommendations. But a big Veterans Administration study just published in JAMA shows that it is not quite as good as previously thought. “Of the 2106 patients screened, 1257 (59.7%) had nodules; 1184 of these patients (56.2%) required tracking, 42 (2.0%) required further evaluation but the findings were not cancer, and 31 (1.5%) had lung cancer.” Does this mean that it is a bad idea to get screened? Not necessarily; if I had a patient with a significant smoking history, I would discuss the risks inherent in getting this procedure but prepare them for the probability that even a positive test would likely not mean they had cancer, and that they might have to undergo more procedures with some risk to find out. The point is not that this is a bad idea, but it is not some amazing breakthrough, as touted.

Just because you want to get rich quick, or avoid needle sticks, or find the magic cure for your arthritis or cancer that has been denied you, and someone is selling something that claims to do it, doesn’t make it true. If you think so, I’ve got a couple of bridges to sell you.

Guidelines, bias, and your health

One of the challenges in educating health-care professionals is the massive – and growing -- amount of information about diseases, diagnosis, and especially treatments that are available. This is not only an issue for students and residents, but for continuing education; if a doctor or nurse or pharmacist knows only what they learned in school, it will be outdated in a very few years. Thus, the health professions have committed to the concept of “life-long learning”, but how this happens, and how effective and accurate it is, is the challenge.

With the development of the Internet, information is extraordinarily widely shared very quickly. It makes information available not only to health professionals, but to everyone; in the “old days”, perhaps someone with symptoms, or a new diagnosis, might go to the library, or find an outdated copy of Morris Fishbein’s “Handy Home Medical Encyclopedia” or a similar book. Now they go to the internet and are overwhelmed with information. The problem is that this information may be correct, partially correct, or wrong; it may be complete, incomplete, or valueless. There is a difference between information and truth, and certainly between information and wisdom. Wisdom, and truth, require information, but much  of the information is chaff or worse.

If keeping up with information and sifting through it to discover what is true, relevant, and important is hard for a person who wants to find out about their one condition, it is truly daunting for health professionals who need to keep up on many. There are so many drugs! And new ones all the time! And they are all better, improved, more effective (and certainly more expensive!) than the old ones. Until, of course, we find out that they are not. Or, worse, dangerous. Sometimes so dangerous that they have to be pulled from the market.

In his Op-Ed piece in the New York Times on June 12, 2013, “Healing the overwhelmed physician”, Dr. Jerry Avorn of Harvard Medical School calls this the “Stendhal syndrome”, after the French author who, on an 1817 visit to Florence, “…was seized by palpitations, dizziness and a feeling of being overwhelmed by the abundance of great art surrounding him”; the over-abundance of information, too much to grasp, integrate, and categorize, not to mention utilize effectively.  How can doctors and other health professionals get through this to “truth”? To be able to most effectively help, and, primum non nocere,  not hurt you?

One traditional method, adopted by our friends in the drug industry, has been “detailing”. Pharmaceutical representatives (called, regardless of gender, “detailmen”) fanned out, visiting physicians, giving out free samples of their wares as well as food and pens and sticky-note pads and clocks and calendars and little scale models of whatever organ their drug worked on, along with information about the drug. The information might have been accurate and complete, but often was skewed, and almost always was research funded by the manufacturer. The detailpersons were easily identifiable, even when not pushing a cart full of pizza for “grand rounds” because they were all good-looking and so much more well-dressed than run of the mill health care workers. What a great system! You get information about new drugs, direct from the person selling them, and little scale models of the urinary system and donuts too! Isn’t that how we all hoped our doctors were keeping up with the field of caring for our health?

Well, ethics rules have limited the ubiquity of detailpersons, and free gifts, and even samples; the “educational cruises” to the Caribbean just for being a high-utilizer of a company’s drugs are all but gone. A resident asking a drug rep to fly their whole residency class to Las Vegas for graduation is so last millennium! But an incredibly wealthy industry like the pharmaceutical industry will not give up there. This is the real thrust of Avorn’s op-ed piece. He discusses the influence that these companies have on the development of “clinical guidelines” by groups of experts in a particular medical field.

Clinical guidelines can be really good and helpful. The information glut is real, sifting through all the data is almost impossible for all the conditions that exist, especially ones that are seen rarely by a particular practitioner. It makes sense that a group of experts in the field review all the evidence in that narrow area and make recommendations that we can count on as accurate and can utilize effectively. But we may be reaching a point where there are too many guidelines, often with conflicting recommendations. Avorn focuses on recent recommendations from the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) on caring for patients with diabetes:

“The A.A.C.E.’s latest guidelines elevate many second- or third-line drugs to more prominent positions in the prescribing hierarchy, rivaling once uncontested go-to medications like metformin, an inexpensive generic. They also emphasize the riskiness of established treatments like insulin and glipizide, which now carry yellow warning labels in the A.A.C.E. summary. Several of the now promoted drugs are expensive newcomers that lack the track records of clinical effectiveness and safety held by the older, potentially displaced treatments. The changes were made, ostensibly, to give physicians more treatment choices for their patients. But there is also concern that they could have been influenced by another factor: the manufacturers of some of these new drugs financially supported the development of the guidelines, and many of the authors are paid consultants to some of those companies.”

Avorn goes on to cite previous examples of expert-generated and industry-sponsored guidelines that have led to overuse of drugs with very bad outcomes for patients. He also cites reliable sources of clinical guidelines, which are based solely on review of the evidence, not the opinions (possibly influenced by money) of experts, “…including the Institute of Medicine, the American College of Physicians and the Cochrane Collaboration, an international network of experts that evaluates clinical research.” He also refers to the practice of “academic detailing”, which he helped to develop[1] [2], in which academic physicians and pharmacists try to counter the impact of drug-industry detailpersons by going out to practicing physicians and presenting evidence-based recommendations.

There are at least two other sources of bias in addition to any direct influence exerted by drug company funding of research, guidelines development, and individual experts. One is the fact that many treatments, particularly when they involve procedures, can increase the income of the individual physicians doing them. Unfortunately, we have seen (and continue to see) the persistence of many procedures for which there is weak evidence overall or for as broad a population as it is being used on, presumably for this reason. The other, less overtly money-driven and thus more insidious, is that many experts are, almost by definition, specialists (well described in this context by the more pejorative “partialists”) who are focused on the impact of a treatment on “their” disease and may miss the potential for negative impact on the patient. An example may be very tight control of blood sugar in people with diabetes; it may improve the outcomes from diabetes, but if it also leads to potentially dangerous episodes of low blood sugar, it may not be a good idea.

Guidelines issued by different organizations also may be in conflict. An excellent example is mammographic screening for breast cancer, discussed in two outstanding “Viewpoint” articles in a recent JAMA. Michael Marmot addresses potential benefits and harms from different guidelines, focusing on UK recommendations[3], and Kachalia and Mello look at the differing US recommendations from the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), American Cancer Society (ACS), and American College of Radiology (ACR).[4] If a radiologist reads a mammogram as normal, but, following ACR guidelines recommends another in one year, while the clinician is following USPSTF guidelines for less frequent screening, does that place the clinician at increased legal risk? They argue at least for consistent guidelines to be utilized within a single institution.

Finally, there is the potential for unintended outcomes. One of the most reliable evidence-based sources of recommendations is the USPSTF. Its recommendations are based solely on review of the science, which has generated controversy before when those recommendations were unpopular with powerful groups (see mammography guidelines). Their reliability led them to be written into the health reform law, ACA, which mandates insurers pay for preventive services with an “A” or “B” recommendation from USPSTF. However, as articulately described by USPSTF members Steven Woolf and Doug Campos-Outcalt in another recent JAMA[5], this creates the unintended consequence of turning USPSTF into a group that decides whether companies and doctors will make money; you can imagine the lobbying by a company to try to prove that its product deserves a “B” rating!

You sure can imagine it. It is not what we need. Essentially, as long as potential for big profit exists in health care, for providers, drug companies, device manufacturers, insurers, and others, there will be plenty of opportunities -- and actual occurrences – of this, not scientific evidence, guiding medical practice.

And I doubt that this is what you want for your health.

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[1] Soumerai SB, Avorn J,  “Principles of educational outreach ('academic detailing') to improve clinical decision making.”, JAMA. 1990 Jan 26;263(4):549-56. PMID: 2104640

[2] Fischer MA, Avorn J, “Academic detailing can play a key role in assessing and implementing comparative effectiveness research findings,” Health Aff (Millwood). 2012 Oct;31(10):2206-12. doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.2012.0817.

[3] Marmot M, “Sorting through the arguments on breast screening” JAMA. 2013;309(24):2553-2554. doi:10.1001/jama.2013.6822

[4] Kachalia A, Mello MM, “Breast cancer screening: conflicting guidelines and medio-legal risk”, JAMA. 2013;309(24):2555-2556. doi:10.1001/jama.2013.7100

[5] Woolf SH, Campos-Outcalt D, “Severing the link between coverage policy and the US Preventive Services Task Force”, JAMA. 2013 May 8;309(18):1899-900. doi: 10.1001/jama.2013.3448. 

Keeping immigrants and all of us healthy is a social task

The Health Toll of Immigration, by Sabrina Tavernise in the May 19 New York Times, documents the decreased life expectancy and worse overall health that accompany immigration to the United States. Focusing on Mexican immigrants in the border city of Brownsville, Texas, but drawing on data about other ethnicities and even time periods, the article provides convincing data that descendants of people who immigrate from Mexico and other, poorer, countries, have, in general, worse health, greater rates of obesity and diabetes, and shorter life expectancies than their parents or those who stayed. The numbers are impressive:  “A 2006 analysis by Gopal K. Singh, a researcher at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Robert A. Hiatt, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, found that immigrants had at least a 20% lower overall cancer mortality rate than their American-born counterparts. Mortality rates from heart disease were about 16%  lower, for kidney disease 18%  lower, and for liver cirrhosis 24% lower.” It seems to get worse for later generations; “Elizabeth Arias, a demographer at the National Center for Health Statistics, has made exploratory estimates based on data from 2007 to 2009, which show that Hispanic immigrants live 2.9 years longer than American-born Hispanics.”

Some, perhaps most, of this is related to the prosperity of the US, and the easy availability of cheap, high fat, high sugar, high calorie food. One woman, who came to the US at 26 and has since developed diabetes, says she was amazed at seeing hamburgers as big as dinner plates; “I thought this really is a country of opportunity! Look at the size of the food!” Grueling work hours, both parents working (when both are here) make time for preparation of healthful food scarce, and more cash in their pockets allows the purchase of tasty-but-bad-for-you fast food. In addition, there is evidence of increased smoking and drinking as immigrants move into the US underclass, a group particularly targeted by marketing efforts for these substances of abuse.

Traditional diets for most people, including Mexicans, are based on food that is grown or found wild (vegetables, cactus) or bought in bulk (rice and beans). These are high fiber and low in empty calories. Robert Valdez, from the Department of Family and Community Medicine and Economics at the University of New Mexico, is quoted as saying “All the things we tell people to do from a clinical perspective today — a lot of fiber and less meat — were exactly the lifestyle habits that immigrants were normally keeping.” There is some evidence that there may be a genetic predisposition to diabetes in some Latinos, particularly Mexicans, as there is in American Indians; after all, Mexicans are largely a mestizo people with much Indian “blood”. Of course, these observations may be related; the natural diet of native peoples did not provide the environmental  factors (high calories, obesity) needed to trigger clinical diabetes, and so the genes for this did not “die out” as readily as in other groups. The same model is seen in South America; the remote Xingu Indians of the Amazon now have extremely high rates of diabetes where it never existed before the introduction of “white” food (used to refer to the color of the food as well as of the people who introduced it).

The other big factor is physical activity. While many immigrants work in physically demanding jobs, the prevalence of physical activity is not as great as for those living on farms in Mexico. One man talks about losing 75 pounds motivated by the image on the wall of his grandfather, who is 93 and still rides his bicycle every day. Yet, 4 of the 6 siblings of the grandson are obese and have diabetes. Another immigrant talks about walking in her early years in the US and feeling so conspicuous (“a bean in rice”) that she was afraid people would think she was here illegally. This has also been described in African-Americans moving from the agricultural (and very poor) South to a more prosperous, but sedentary, life in the North, and in most families a generation or two removed from farms, whatever their ethnicity. Concepts of what is “enough” food, what is a “good” breakfast or dinner for our children, did not change as quickly as lifestyles did. Our culture does not require physical activity as part of daily life the way farming, including subsistence farming, did, but we fed our children the same number of calories as we did (if we were prosperous farmers) or would have liked to, or more, because it is more easily available. Indeed, these changes are not limited to the US; things are changing for the worse (in terms of health) in Mexico as well; citing the fact that up to 40% of the rural diet in Mexico comes from packaged foods, “Researchers are beginning to wonder how long better numbers for the foreign-born will last.”

These are all factors in the “social determinants of health” – how we eat, how we exercise, how poverty grinds us down and how marketing of harmful substances like tobacco, alcohol, and high-sugar foods take their toll at even greater rates on the poor. This is not to romanticize rural poverty, of people, including children, having to do excessive physical labor in order to survive and thus burn up more calories than they consumed, or to minimize the difference between a rural/farming life which provided enough income to supply those calories and those in which malnutrition claimed lives and health. It is, rather, to point out that some of these terrible conditions ironically protected the health of its victims. This has been observed in the past; beri-beri occurred more in wealthy Chinese who ate hulled white rice than in the poor who ate the rice with hulls that contained the thiamine. In England in the early 20^th century alcoholic cirrhosis was a disease of the rich who could afford highly-taxed spirits, while workers drank watered beer. The image of the wealthy many as obese – and suffering from gout, "The disease of kings1" (all that high-protein food) persists in cartoons.

Dr. Arias, cited above, observes that the health status of immigrant families “…may indeed improve as they rise in socioeconomic status, which in the United States is strongly correlated with better health.” Of course, there is no guarantee that longer time in this country will cause a rise in socioeconomic status; the last decade shows a persistent decrease in the socioeconomic status of most Americans, despite a “recovery” measured by Wall St. stock prices. The answer is not to regress to rural poverty, but it is to address these social determinants. It is to build towns that encourage walking and other physical activity. It should be to make fresh, healthful food widely available. It should involve education in schools about healthful eating, not undercut by junk food available in machines. It should limit advertising for poisons such as tobacco and alcohol. It should make clean air and water a priority, and ensure everyone has access to good health care.

 It should be a no-brainer, but in the politics of the US today, it may not be. Charles Blow in his May 18, 2013 column “Resonance Resistant”, notes that “We all know that anything with ‘social’ in its name activates the conservative gag reflex.” This is crazy; we are social beings. We can do better, and we should.

The real face of lack of access to health care

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I have often written about the fact that lack of health insurance is a major source of cost for the health system. People without insurance often cannot afford to pay doctors or buy medications, and so do not seek care for treatable illnesses until they are so far gone that they can no longer be ignored, and then show up in the Emergency Room and require admission and treatment for advanced disease (for example, in Does the nation need a clear policy on a right to basic health care?, April 10, 2009). The cost is not only enormous in human terms -- treatable diseases converted into much more serious conditions because they haven’t been treated -- although this is the most important. It is also much more costly in terms of actual health care dollars, as these advanced conditions are much more difficult and expensive to treat.

However, as in every area, what affects us most are not the data or the statistics, but the individual stories of individual people.  These are the stories that touch our hearts because they we can identify with them – they could be our stories, or those of our friends or neighbors or relatives. These are the stories that make the evening news, the stories that might persuade a legislator to become interested in a problem, the stories that motivate us to send a donation to a worthy cause.

This was brought home to me very starkly when I recently served as the attending physician on our inpatient service in the hospital. We take care of a lot of patients, and they are very sick. Their medical diagnoses varied: kidney failure, diabetic ketoacidosis, malignant hypertension, severe asthma exacerbation, infections in a variety of places, etc. But, really, the most common diagnosis was lack of access to health care, mainly because of lack of health insurance. While not all these people are poor, they, like most people, have limited incomes, and have many other basic needs (rent, food, caring for their children) that compete with health care for the dollars available. Asymptomatic diseases (or conditions with “tolerable” symptoms) often seem to be a lower priority.

I’d like to share some of their stories, although obviously I cannot share their names or present too many actual details about them; I’ll make up initials and change some details that do not affect the essential issues. These are real people, with real names and real problems.

·     AG has diabetes and high blood pressure. (These two conditions, diabetes and high blood pressure, are going to be a recurrent theme; they are the mainstay, most-common, diseases of any general adult medicine practice. They are treatable, but when not well controlled their complications -- strokes or kidney failure or heart attacks or amputations – are also major contributors to the work of many subspecialists: cardiologists and endocrinologists and nephrologists and neurologists and surgeons and orthopedists, just to name a few.) AG had lost his job, and while unemployed and without health insurance he hadn’t been going to the doctor. Luckily, his chronic diseases weren’t bothering him much, except for a small sore on the bottom of his foot. High blood pressure often causes no symptoms, until the stroke or heart attack; foot sores in diabetes are a big threat, because the disease both diminishes the sensation of pain, so it doesn’t hurt much, and the circulation of blood so it doesn’t heal well, but the lack of pain makes it seem not so bad. He finally found a job, a reasonably good job with the promise of health insurance after a while. Unfortunately, it involved walking almost 20 miles per day, not a good thing for his foot. The foot developed a severe infection, requiring expensive hospitalization for intravenous antibiotics, and might still need to be amputated.

·     PS also has diabetes, which, especially when untreated, makes one susceptible to infections, and he has had several of them. Now, in late middle age, he presents with a very serious infection, requiring not only intravenous antibiotics, but surgery to clean out the pus, resulting in an open wound. A machine attached to drain out the residual infection and keep it clean will need to be regularly replaced, for many weeks as he continues the intravenous antibiotics. Fortunately (should you ever be in a similar situation), home health can be arranged to provide these services. Provided you have health insurance coverage. Oh yes, and a home. PS has neither. Makes follow-up care a little more difficult.

·    DR is a good deal younger but also had a severe infection requiring long-term antibiotics for a foot infection, after an unsuccessful attempt at outpatient treatment. And, yes, his diabetes is uncontrolled because he hasn’t had insurance and so hasn’t gone to the doctor or taken his medicine in quite a while. He also had lost over 80% of his kidney function, so he’ll be on dialysis soon. There is a “silver lining” (!); thanks to a law passed early in the 1970s, anyone with end-stage kidney disease requiring dialysis is eligible for Medicare, so he will be insured. Of course, the cost to Medicare will be far, far more than would have been the treatment of his diabetes, had he had coverage before the “end stage”.

·     MT will also become insured through this wonderful program, although her kidney failure is due mainly to untreated high blood pressure rather than diabetes. As I noted above, high blood pressure is often asymptomatic (thus the sobriquet “silent killer”); she didn’t have insurance or money so didn’t go to the doctor to find out how uncontrolled it was, as it slowly destroyed her kidneys.

Not all of our patients’ problems came from diabetes or infections, and not everyone who is uninsured is poor.

·     KF has asthma, pretty severe asthma, for which he was taking an inhaler to be able to breathe. It is a bronchodilator (airway-opener), the right drug for an acute attack, but KF’s attack never went away and he was taking far more of it than was safe. And spending an awful lot of money on it. It is available for a much lower cost at some pharmacies that provide certain generic medications for $4, but he didn’t know that. He does now, after being in the hospital for a week getting expensive breathing treatments. It’s a good thing, too, because the other inhalers that he needs to prevent (or at least decrease the frequency and severity of) these attacks, steroids and sustained-release bronchodilators, cost a lot, well over $100 per inhaler. They have been around for a long time, so one would expect that by now at least some of them would be available generically and cheaper. But there’s a great story here. The propellant in these inhalers used to be fluorocarbons, but these, as we know, destroy the ozone layer and contribute to a lot of bad environmental effects. So they were made illegal, and the pharmaceutical manufacturers had to replace them with environmentally safe propellants. Good for the environment. Unfortunately, bad for KF and millions of other people with asthma; using a different propellant meant that the drug was a “new formulation”, which allowed the drug makers to extend their patents for many years. So low-cost inhaled steroids are still not available. This is a cruel joke, but it is not a joke. The pharmaceutical companies will not suffer; only patients will.

AG, PS, DR, MT, and KF were all people we cared for in one week, and they were not the only ones with a primary diagnosis of lack of health insurance coverage. Of course, we also took care of lots of sick people with health insurance; I don’t work in a “safety net” hospital. People with insurance, even with good insurance (and certainly not all insurance is “good”, not all insurance covers necessary medications and tests) also get serious diseases and need to be hospitalized. But the people whose stories I have told, and others I have not discussed, stand out because they didn’t have to be as sick as they were and require the costly services that they did. That they were, and did, is not only immoral and bad medicine, it is bad economics. It is inexcusable.

Maybe DR and MT would not have had kidney failure and need dialysis if they had Medicare or any other kind of coverage before needing it. Maybe everybody should have Medicare. In a future blog, I’ll discuss the proposals to “save Medicare” that are currently being floated, but now I’d just like to have some thought given to saving these actual people. Got any ideas?

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