Guns and the Public's Health: what can we do?

 "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Recognize those words? The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, what all the fuss is about. In addition to the confusing use of commas, apparently more generously applied in the 18^th century, we have two key phrases. The final phrase, “shall not be infringed”, is read by the NRA and other “gun rights” zealots (and it is important to remember that only a minority of NRA members, and a smaller minority of gun owners, support this position) to mean essentially “no legislation regulating guns in any way”. That includes assault rifles, semi-automatic and maybe even automatic rifles, armor-piercing (“cop killer”) bullets, and any other weapon or gun modification that creative minds can come up with. Of course, it has been noted that none of these types of weapons were available at the time of the Constitution, when firearms were muzzle-loaded muskets, quite different from current weapons (see graphic).

The NRA take the position that there is qualitatively no difference, as noted by its President, Wayne LaPierre, after the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School: "Absolutes do exist. We are as ‘absolutist’ as the Founding Fathers and framers of the Constitution. And we’re proud of it!" Others (including me, in case you were wondering) would disagree, and say that clearly at some point the quantitative difference becomes qualitative. This is the only amendment they are absolutist about; the First Amendment says “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech…”, but it has long been settled that it is not OK to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

The other obviously important phrase is “A well regulated Militia”. Again, obviously, this has been the source of much discussion, with the NRA taking the position that “Militia” just means “everyone” (kind of a stretch), and (as far as I can tell) “well regulated” means, um, not regulated at all. Is this cherry picking the words one wants? Maybe, but I can’t imagine how it is possible to ignore completely the words “well regulated”. But does it matter? Yes, when we live in a country where

The 36,252 deaths from firearms in the United States in 2015 exceeded the number of deaths from motor vehicle traffic crashes that year (36,161). That same year, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 5 people died from terrorism. Since 1968, more individuals in the United States have died from gun violence than in battle during all the wars the country has fought since its inception.

-Bauchner et al., Death by Gun Violence—A Public Health Crisis, JAMA, October 9, 2017[1]

Those are staggering numbers, and certainly justify the assertion that it is a “public health crisis”.

The authors also note that “60.7% of the gun deaths in 2015 in the United States were suicides,” a fact often ignored. That is a majority. A large majority. If it were an election, 60.7% would be considered a landslide. But with guns it is a mudslide of death. I have written before about suicide (e.g, Suicide: What can we say? December 13, 2013, Suicide in doctors and others: remembering and preventing it if we can September 14, 2014, Prevention and the “Trap of Meaning” July 29, 2009) and its impact on myself and my family, with my son’s successful suicide-by-gun at the age of 24. My son, to my knowledge, had never used a gun before his final act. He lived in a state and city with strict gun control laws (some of which, sadly, have been eliminated by the courts). He was nonetheless able to go to another state, buy a carbine (terrific choice! No permit needed, even in those days, like a handgun would require, but short enough to reach the trigger with the barrel in his mouth!), and use it. It would be easier now, in that state and many others.

My son was apparently very committed to this act, and was successful despite some obstacles. But for many, many people it is the availability of guns that make a spur-of-the-moment decision lethal. I have noted before that nearly 95% of suicide attempts by gun are lethal while less than 5% by drug overdose are. My clinical experience is that many suicide survivors do not repeat their attempts (though many do). The successful suicide rate for young adult males in low gun control states is several times higher than in high gun control states. And on and on.

But the epidemic of suicide and murder and mass murders resulting from the easy availability of guns has not changed the legal landscape. After the Las Vegas massacre, there was a small ray of hope that maybe one of the most egregious products the white terrorist Stephen Paddock used, the “bump stocks” that effectively convert semi-automatic to automatic rifles, might be limited; even the NRA voiced some possible support. But never underestimate the cowardice and lack of moral fiber of the Congress; Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has suggested that this be done by regulation rather than legislation. This is absolutely because it will not require any congressperson to actually vote for it and thus be targeted by the zealots in the next election. Hopefully, not literally targeted by guns, but do not forget Gabby Giffords and Steve Scalise!

Dr. Bauchner, who is the editor-in-chief of JAMA, also joined the editors of several of the other most prestigious US medical journals, New England Journal of Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, and PLOS Medicine in an editorial that appeared in all their journals (this link is the the NEJM), ‘Firearm-Related Injury and Death — A U.S. Health Care Crisis in Need of Health Care Professionals’.[2] Again, this emphasizes the fact that guns are a public health epidemic in the US, and that there is little likelihood of anything being done at the federal level to stem its carnage. It recognizes that there is a variable response at the state level, with some states going as far as trying to legally prohibit physicians from asking about guns in the home (Florida; since struck down by the courts) while others have had stronger regulations. Many legislatures have also acted to prevent the cities in their states from acting independently to regulate guns in any way. One of the most insane was the state of Arizona suing to prevent the city of Tucson from destroying guns seized from criminals. The legislature mandated that they be sold – thus keeping them on the streets – and the Arizona Supreme Court upheld this, saying state law trumped local ordinances!

Given this situation, the joint editorial suggests that there are many things that physicians can and should do, including (quoted):

·        Educate yourself. Read the background materials and proposals for sensible firearm legislation from health care professional organizations. Make a phone call and write a letter to your local, state, and federal legislators to tell them how you feel about gun control. Now. Don’t wait. And do it again at regular intervals. Attend public meetings with these officials and speak up loudly as a health care professional. Demand answers, commitments, and follow-up. Go to rallies. Join, volunteer for, or donate to organizations fighting for sensible firearm legislation. Ask candidates for public office where they stand and vote for those with stances that mitigate firearm-related injury.

·        Meet with the leaders at your own institutions to discuss how to leverage your organization’s influence with local, state, and federal governments. Don’t let concerns for perceived political consequences get in the way of advocating for the well-being of your patients and the public. Let your community know where your institution stands and what you are doing. Tell the press.

·        Educate yourself about gun safety. Ask your patients if there are guns at home. How are they stored? Are there children or others at risk for harming themselves or others? Direct them to resources to decrease the risk for firearm injury, just as you already do for other health risks. Ask if your patients believe having guns at home makes them safer, despite evidence that they increase the risk for homicide, suicide, and accidents. [this is what the Florida law would have made illegal]

·        Don’t be silent.

The first (JAMA) editorial says:

Guns kill people….the key to reducing firearm deaths in the United States is to understand and reduce exposure to the cause, just like in any epidemic, and in this case that is guns.

The fact is that while physicians have influence and moral authority, so do other health professionals, and, in fact, so do all of us. So the advice must pertain to all of us.

Don’t be silent.

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[1] Bauchner H, Rivara FP, Bonow RO, Death by gun violence—a public health crisis, JAMA online Oct 9, 2017, doi:10.100/jama.2017.16446

[2] Taichman DB, Bauchner H, Drazen JM, Laine C, Peipert L, Firearm-Related Injury and Death — A U.S. Health Care Crisis in Need of Health Care Professionals’, October 9, 2017DOI: 10.1056/NEJMe1713355

Trump's "bad doctors": mostly greedy and bad for the public's health

My recent post, Doctors and health reform: maybe they do stand for health!, March 25, 2017, lauded the positions of many medical organizations, including the American Medical Association (AMA) for their positions in opposition to the American Health Care Act (AHCA), the Trump-Ryan bill that never even got to a vote, and apparently was never even available to House members to read before the vote was scheduled.  But I also pointed out some “bad” doctors, defined as those who advocate policies that are bad for the health of the American people. They argue that they are really for health, but this means mostly health care, especially medical care, for those who can afford it. There is no small tinge of racism as well as classism in these positions, because poor people and minorities are those most likely to be left out, and because, well, these perpetrators don’t care.

The prime example I cited was Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price, who, as a representative from a wealthy suburban Atlanta House district, continuously railed against the Affordable Care Act (ACA), as well as, in fact, Medicare. Dr. Price is an orthopedic surgeon, and my essay noted that this specialty is over-represented in the cohort of opponents of expansion of access, possibly because their high average income puts them in an elite economic group, and many are more concerned with their self-interest than the health of the overall population. Price was not the only bad doctor I mentioned; I also cited the “tone-deaf” comments of Rep. Roger Marshall of Kansas, an obstetrician-gynecologist. “Tone deaf”, of course, is a mild and polite term for his racist, classist comments, summarized as “the poor just don’t want health care”. Tone deaf, by the way, is also the term commonly used to describe the demeaning commercialization of the Black Lives Matter protest movement evident in Pepsi’s commercial featuring Kendall Jenner, now mercifully withdrawn. That was a result of the strong and sustained protest of a large number of people, especially on social media.

Price and Marshall are abetted by the non-physician politicians in Congress and the administration who also would deny health care to a lot of people, and even, through changes in Medicare and Medicaid, make the coverage of many people who now feel moderately secure in their insurance status greatly at risk and much more expensive. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Vice President Mike Pence met with the “Freedom” Caucus of the House to discuss just how regressive a health care bill would have to be to get their support. Pretty bad, it turns out. Its chairman, Rep. Mark Meadows of NC, is quoted by the NY Times as saying “Lower premiums have to be our first and only priority. By repealing community rating and the essential health benefits, it allows for lower premiums across the board.” Well, lower premiums are something everyone wants (except probably insurance companies) but there are different ways to get there. “Repealing community rating” means that insurers would no longer have to cover people who have chronic disease and are often older (and, ironically, often Trump and Freedom Caucus voters) at the same rates as less sick people. Those people would not have lower premiums; their premiums would either be fantastically higher, as they were before the ACA passed (and when many of them were without coverage) or be altogether unavailable. This is not something that the vast majority of Americans want. Similarly, “essential health benefits” are, well, essential. Like, for example, maternity care, and preventive health care. The fact that Rep. Meadows used that word and didn’t replace it with some euphemism, illustrates how tone-deaf he is.

But not all doctors who I would characterize as “bad” are reactionaries who are trying to figure out how to deny health care to the American people. Some are just traditionally greedy, seeking to fill their own pockets with as much money as possible. This is not a problem limited to the right; even folks who are progressive on social policies can be guilty of “going where the money is”. An excellent example is Trump’s nominee to head the FDA, Dr. Scott Gottlieb. Gottlieb, like many researchers, has been highly paid (at least on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars) by drug manufacturers. Gottlieb assures us that this will not affect his decision making at FDA, and that he can be trusted, as in the title of the NY Times article of April 5, 2017, in which he “deflected” criticism. While some Democrats, like Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, noted that he had ‘“unprecedented financial entanglements with the industries he would regulate,”’ Republicans like Lamar Alexander of Tennessee agreed with Dr. Gottlieb that “his experience with the pharmaceutical industry would be an asset in regulating it.” This is terrific tortured fox-guarding-the-henhouse logic, like having Goldman Sachs financiers regulating Wall Street, or petroleum company flaks running EPA (which we, in fact, have). This concept worked fine on “It Takes a Thief”, but not so much in real life.

Taking huge amounts of money from drug companies may be morally reprehensible (or not, depending on your view; in mine it is), but more concerning are the positions that Gottlieb has taken. While he is open (he says now) to lowering drug prices by importing drugs from Canada, something Trump has occasionally voiced support for, he has previously written against it (when he was in the pay of the drug companies). The issue is what the policies pursued by the FDA, HHS, CMS, and the overall Trump administration and Congress regarding the people’s health will be. Disrespect for preventive care (“essential services”) and environmental pollution bodes very poorly for public health, as the core principle of “cut benefits” does for medical care. And, as always, the most vulnerable – from poverty, age, illness, geographic region – will suffer the most.  It would be really good if we could count on doctors like Price, Marshall and Gottlieb to protect the health of the people, but don’t count on it. We are going to need huge public protest, at least as big as those that ending up canceling the Pepsi commercial.

Well, it could be worse. Another physician, Dr. Bashar al-Assad, is gassing his own people with chemical weapons. And there was also Dr. Josef Mengele. So far, none of Trump’s nominees are in that league.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will the GOP "solve" access to health care? No, unless you can redefine "access"!

An editorial in the New York Times on February 20, 2017 (“Ryancare: You can pay more for less!”) does a very good job of concisely demonstrating what the new Republican plan is likely to do to access to health care, the cost of health insurance, and what it covers. The key to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s plan for replacement of Obamacare involves “…flat tax credits unrelated to income, that could be applied to the purchase of insurance” (Paul Krugman, “Death and tax cuts”, NY Times February 24, 2016). As Krugman makes clear, the credits would be insufficient for low and middle income families to buy insurance, but would be a small benefit to high income households. The obvious result would be the loss of health insurance for millions of Americans who gained it through either the ACA exchanges and accompanying subsidies or through Medicaid expansion.

Giving tax credits or deductions is a long-standing Republican strategy that pretends to be equitable but in reality always benefits the financially better off. Ivanka Trump (the President’s daughter who is not, it should be observed, elected or even appointed to anything) has her pet project, tax deductions for childcare. Again, this sounds good, especially to the more well-off, two-income couples who would benefit (but don’t get your hopes up; the $500 billion tab makes it unlikely to pass even with the First Daughter’s support), but would be of less benefit to the poor. The one thing that is certain about Republican and Trump policy is that it will benefit the better-off; the problem with such deductions, from their point of view, is that it is costly and doesn’t benefit a narrow enough slice of the highest income individuals and corporations (sorry, Ivanka).

As summarized in MedPage’s Washington Watch Policy Papers on ACA Repeal: Many Question, Few Answers, no one, outside the Republicans pushing it, has any belief that the Ryan plan will provide coverage for most of the people who gained coverage from the components of the ACA, not to mention those who remained uninsured even with ACA in place, mostly poor people in states that did not expand Medicaid and undocumented people, as well as those who risked the penalties for violating the individual mandate rather than buy health insurance that they felt they could not afford. The first two groups are completely left out of any “replacement” plan (and of course undocumented people were never part of Obamacare). None of these plans will in any way benefit the middle and lower income people who voted for Trump in part because they wanted to get rid of Obamacare, which was costing them too much, and get the terrific, affordable health care coverage that the President promised them in the campaign. It is not going to happen, and people are beginning to understand that; CNBC reports that Obamacare is getting more popular in the first month of Trump’s presidency.

All that has been revealed so far about the content of a Republican “plan” indicates that it will cover fewer people than the ACA currently does. Some of this has to do with the mechanism of funding, with “tax credits” replacing direct subsidies for lower-income people. There is even a debate among Republican lawmakers about whether those tax credits should be “refundable” or not; if they are, then people will get the amount designated for the tax credit even if that amount is greater than the amount they would have owed in Federal income tax. Thus, it would be a subsidy, and thus many “conservative” (their word) Republicans oppose it. For a very large percentage of those who would be buying insurance and need help, the amount would likely be greater than the amount of Federal tax they owe. Of course, this depends upon how much the tax credit is determined to be; one thing, however, is that there is essentially no chance that it will be enough to actually purchase insurance.

Which brings up another big part of the way Republicans talk about health coverage. They use the term “access” rather than coverage, and have defined it in such a way that it is different from coverage; people, they say, will have the option of buying health coverage, not be forced to, the way that the ACA’s individual mandate did. This requires a conscious effort to ignore the crucial “ability to pay for it” as part of access, and makes the idea of “option” insincere. Something is not an option if you cannot afford it. Sen. Bernie Sanders said, in a good takedown of this use of “access”, that he had access to purchase a $10 million house; he just didn’t have the money to do it!

Insurance companies are a big part of the problem for ACA. The absence of a “public option”, not to mention a single-payer plan, meant that the law had to build in a way for insurance companies to be able to make money. To be able to profit, they have to either be able to charge a lot for coverage (or deny it altogether) for sick people, which was the pre-ACA status quo, or have a large pool of healthy low-cost people buying insurance. Thus, especially given ACA’s elimination of their ability to refuse insurance to people with pre-existing conditions, the individual mandate, requiring everyone to buy insurance, was needed. Despite the mandate, though, not enough healthy people bought insurance, and there was no rate cap, so it quickly has become unaffordable for many. Of course, we could have done what other developed countries do – have either a single-payer system where we have everyone automatically in the risk pool and everyone is actually covered, or have a highly regulated system, where benefit packages and rates are set by the government and insurance companies are non-profit, so compete on customer service. We actually have examples of both in the US. Medicare is a single payer plan (and while Medicare Part A, hospital, is paid for by the Medicare trust fund, Part B, doctor and outpatient bills, require individuals to pay, with high-income  people paying a supplement), as is the military health care system and the VA. Medicare supplement (Medigap) plans are regulated with regard to benefits; there are a number of plans lettered Type A to Type N (except there is no E, H, or I) with different benefit packages. The degree of comprehensiveness does not follow the alphabet (F is the best, K probably the worst) but at least they are standardized so all Type A, C, F, or K plans offer the same benefits regardless of which company you buy from, and so you can shop based on price.

I do not think that we are going to have such a simple situation as a highly-regulated marketplace, and certainly not single payer. We are likely going to back as far away from comprehensive coverage and affordable health care as the Republican Congress and President can get away with, which means as far as the American people will allow. Of course, the American people (other than the small number of, but incredibly powerful, wealthy ideological conservatives) do not want to lose their health coverage; they just want to pay less. Or not pay until they are sick. For them, and maybe for their families. For others, maybe not so much; some studies have found that as many as 2/3 of Americans support Medicare for All, while for Dr. Paul Gordon on his “Bike Listening Tour” across the US in 2016, one of his most upsetting findings (at least among the mostly white, rural, northern people he interviewed) was people’s lack of concern for others. Or at least “the other”, folks not like them.

It’s a real shame. We could have comprehensive quality care for everyone, at a more reasonable cost. Too bad the ideologues and the greedy are in control.