Slash the VA! Make our veterans pay for increasing corporate profits!

Given the heavy-handed, mean-spirited, cruel, anti-democratic, un-Constitutional, and penny-wise (maybe) but pound-foolish actions of the current GOP/Trump/Musk administration, it is hard to know where even to begin to discuss it. Certainly many, many intelligent and well informed people, including luminaries such as politician Bernie Sanders and historian Heather Cox Richardson, as well as many news sources such as the Contrarian (established by reporters and editors fired by or resigned from Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post and the New York Times). Even in the narrower realm of health, we have outrages like the vaccine denier and proponent of ineffective and even dangerous therapies, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. heading the Department of Health and Human Services, and Mehmet Oz, RFK, Jr’s fellow traveler, nominated to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, presumably so those services can continue to be slashed. And even more narrowly, in health and medicine and social justice – well, all of these actions and cuts tie to social justice!

So, let’s look at the Veterans Administration (VA). The VA is tasked with providing health care for our veterans, those who have served in the military, many of whom have suffered very serious, life-threatening injuries, physical and mental (of course not counting those never got to be veterans because their lives were lost). Veterans have also had higher rates of cancers and lung diseases linked to the use of burn pits (horrific incinerators used “in country” to dispose of garbage, waste, bodies, munitions, toxic materials, using jet fuel as the source of fire, running 24/7 close to camps). The death of President Biden’s son Beau was linked to burn pit exposure, and finally during the last administration Congress passed the PACT act (Honoring Our Promise to Address Comrade Toxic Exposure) to compensate and care for those veterans whose diseases were likely caused by such exposure, often called “the Agent Orange of the Gulf wars”.

The VA was already highly stressed by underfunding and understaffing due to previous cuts made by the pro-veterans-in-words-only GOP Congress and that stress was dramatically increased by the hundreds of thousands (at least a quarter million) claims under the PACT act. Amazingly the VA clinical operation, also very short-staffed, was able to continue to provide health care to veterans. Although there were many complaints of waits and slowdowns, they were in fact much less than the routine waits and slowdowns in the non-VA health care sector (anyone tried to get a doctor’s appointment lately?) and virtually every measure of quality has shown that the VA has outperformed the civilian sector. Of course, its mission is to provide health care for veterans, not to make a profit; this distinguishes it from the civilian sector in which profit is “Job One” and accessible, quality, effective health care a distant second. The NY Times’ recent article titled ‘Chaos at the V.A.: Inside the DOGE Cuts Disrupting the Veterans Agency’ notes that the VA

…treats 9.1 million veterans, provides critical medical research and, according to some studies, offers care that is comparable to or better than many private health systems. Even Project 2025, the conservative governing blueprint assembled by Trump allies, said the V.A. had transformed into “one of the most respected U.S. agencies.

Many of the VA’s successes, as well as its challenges, are documented by journalist Suzanne Gordon in journals including these in Jacobin, Veterans Starting to Mobilize, and the American Prospect.

Then came Trump, Musk, and DOGE. Under the banner of “cutting government waste” the already far-too-lean staffing of the VA is proposed to be cut by another 80,000 jobs! This will certainly result in major delays in accessing care, in lower quality, and unconscionable disservice to our veterans. It seems like heartless cruelty, and of course it is. But the nauseating thing is that while it certainly is not about cutting waste, it is not even about the heartless cruelty. It is about one thing: transferring “government” dollars – that is, YOUR tax dollars (not Musk’s, or his companies’, they don’t pay taxes!) – to private corporations. THAT is the goal.

Think about it. Slash funding and positions from the VA, which will naturally lead to complaints about inadequate service (even the VA can only do so much when cut not only to, but deep into, the bone) and protests from veterans’ groups and maybe even GOP members of Congress. So, what will they do? We don’t even have to guess – they’ll do their favorite thing and privatize it! Contract out the care of veterans to private corporations so they can have the wonderful experiences all the rest of us have in trying to access quality care. Of course, they won’t be able to, maybe even less than the rest of us, but heck, those companies will make a lot of money!

And that is the goal. It is not saving government money, it is about transferring it to private corporations, as acknowledged by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. This will cost more, be less efficient, and have lower quality. This is the consistent track record of almost every government service that has been privatized – they almost never either save money or work better, they put taxpayer money in private pockets. In health care, it is even worse; it is almost impossible to think of an example where privatization has not cost far more and had worse service, accessibility, and quality outcomes. If the funding is the same, it is always worse.

But, of course, this is not an accidental outcome, it is the intention. Privatization is sold as saving money, but it always costs more, and as increasing quality but it always goes down. What it is successful at is moving public dollars to the private sector. So, it doesn’t save money by eliminating waste, it eliminates basic care and then “solves” the problem by spending even more money! The heartless cruelty is not the goal; it is simply the byproduct. It hurts our veterans, but this is not a concern to the heartlessly cruel, non-empathic (Musk thinks empathy is “destroying Western civilization”) greedheads making these decisions.

Something can be done. Veterans can rise up and protest and contact their Congressional representatives. So can the various “veterans service organizations” (VSOs) including the American Legion, VFW, and many others. Maybe even some GOP Congresspeople will take the initiative and actually do something to help veterans instead of just flapping their gums! (OK, that may be a bridge too far…)

Hospitals post their charges: almost indecipherable, but important!

The recent Trump administration order to have hospitals post their prices has been widely covered in the media, along with both headlines and articles that make it clear that these prices list are far from…clear! For example, Robert Pear’s article in the NY Times on January 13, 2019, titled “Hospitals Must Now Post Prices. But It May Take a Brain Surgeon to Decipher Them” , starts:

‘Vanderbilt University Medical Center, responding to a new Trump administration order to begin posting all hospital prices, listed a charge of $42,569 for a cardiology procedure described as “HC PTC CLOS PAT DUCT ART.”

Baptist Health in Miami helpfully told consumers that an “Embolza Protect 5.5” would cost them $9,818 while a “Visceral selective angio rad” runs a mere $5,538.’

The Arizona Star piece on Tucson hospitals had a more moderate title, “Hospitals post prices, but public can find it confusing”, but made the same points. As a physician (if not a brain surgeon!) I think I can figure out what most of these mean, but the point that they are making is that they are hard for almost everyone to understand. The reason, of course, is that they have simply posted online their “chargemasters”, the price list that they supply to insurers (including Medicare and Medicaid), which are based on the nationally used “procedure codes”; these are numbers which identify different treatments that are abbreviated as above. So, the charge at Baptist for a radiologist injecting dye into an artery supplying your intestines is only a little over $5,000, while Vanderbilt charges over $42,000 to do a surgical procedure to close a shunt artery in your heart that is vital to fetal circulation but normally closes spontaneously after birth. The question is, what does all this mean? And what are you and I supposed to do with this information?

Elisabeth Rosenthal, the emergency room physician turned NY Times reporter turned editor of Kaiser Health News, is more optimistic in her Times Op-Ed on January 22, 2019, “Donald Trump did something right”. She acknowledges the opacity of the posted charges to most people, but says it is a great step forward, because they are accessible, at least to those who are academic experts, and can be compared, both one hospital to another (“Maybe, just maybe, a hospital will think twice before charging a $6,000 “operating room fee” for a routine colonoscopy if its competitor down the street is listing its price at $1,000”), and to alternative treatments (“With access to list prices on your phone, you could reject the $300 sling in the emergency room and instead order one for one-tenth of the price on Amazon.”) Obviously, these would not be easily available on your phone now, but her hope and expectation is that third parties will develop apps that will take this nearly impenetrable information and make it easily accessible to people, as apps such as GoodRx® have done for drug prices. She emphasizes the magnitude of this change, since before now these prices have been closely-guarded secrets.

Rosenthal makes a number of other important points that illustrate the fact that this system is not only opaque, but deeply morally corrupt. Hospitals are run as businesses, to make money, even when they are ostensibly “non-profit”. Their CEOs and other executives are mostly businessmen, CPAs and MBAs – even when they are physicians, which sometimes happens, they are usually also MBAs – and are hired for their ability to run a money-making operation that happens to sell health care. And sell it, to your insurance company, at what often seems like deeply discounted prices because they are based on absurdly inflated chargemasters. “You don’t really want to change your charges if you have a Saudi sheikh come in with a suitcase full of cash who’s going to pay full charges,” says one CEO. More important, it allows them to reach agreements with insurers to pay a lot less than the official “price”, which in turn allows those insurance companies to brag to you about how much money they saved you. Rosenthal notes this is farcical, raising prices to make you think that you got a discount (‘If a supposedly $1,000 TV is “on sale” for $80, it’s not really a discount. It’s an absurd list price’), and that it emulates practices in other arenas, such as airlines overestimating their flight times to make it seem like they have a better on-time percent.

At a higher level, Rosenthal points out what is wrong is that these inflated charges do make a difference. Your co-pays and deductibles, if you are insured, are based upon the amount that your insurer pays, so that if they have agreed to pay only 20% of the listed charge, $200 for the TV set instead of $1000, you still may pay more than if you bought it for $80 cash. And certainly more than if the insurer were paying 20% of the old list price, say $500. You pay. You always pay. (See, for example, how insulin manufacturers and insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers, each following their own profit incentives, have made insulin – a life saving treatment for millions of people with diabetes – often unaffordable: Danielle Ofri, “The Insulin Wars”.)

And, of course, there is the nasty little glitch that it is the most vulnerable and most needy, those who are uninsured as well as sick, and often poor, that get charged the full list price, the $1000 for the TV, or the ostensible “uninsured discount”:

When Wanda Wickizer had a brain hemorrhage in 2013, a Virginia hospital billed her $286,000 after a 20 percent “uninsured” discount on a hospital bill of $357,000 — the list price, according to chargemaster charges. Medicare would have paid less than $100,000 for her treatment.

Wait. Medicare? Medicare would have paid a quarter of their list price and a third of what this uninsured person got billed with the “discount”? Yes. And that is a place to start. Hospitals – or the third-party app developers that will let you see these prices on your phone – should be required to list the Medicare-approved payment right next to what they will charge you, or your insurer. That would measurably increase the “light of day”.

Of course, some doctors and hospitals do not want to accept Medicare for this reason – they can charge more money to insurance companies, who pass it on to you in premiums (in addition to your co-pays and deductibles) while claiming to be saving you money. There is a solution to this also, although Rosenthal does not mention it. It is to have everyone in the same insurance program, a single payer, an improved and expanded Medicare for All. This would set the rates and pay them, without co-pays or deductibles for necessary services. Everyone in the same plan would mean that the better educated, wealthier, and generally more empowered would ensure that it worked for them – and thus would work for everyone else, middle-class, poor, and even homeless.

Yes, hospitals and other service providers (physicians, nursing homes, etc.) and drug companies and insurance companies would make less profit. I’m sure that your heart goes out to them (maybe the next requirement could be the posting of the salaries of the C-suite executives at hospitals…). But, after all, what the health care system should be run for, and is run for in every other developed country, is the health of the people, not the profit of corporations.

Amazing, huh? And it could be that way here!

Chemotherapy, Quality of Life, and Corporate Profit

“In reality, only 2 major reasons exist for administering chemotherapy to most patients with metastatic cancer: to help them live longer and/or to help them live better.”

So begins “Chemotherapy Near the End of Life: First—and Third and Fourth (Line)—Do No Harm”[1], an editorial by Charles D. Blanke and Erik K. Fromme in JAMA Oncology commenting on an important new study in the same issue by Prigerson and colleagues, Chemotherapy Use, Performance Status, and Quality of Life at the End of Life”.[2]  The study, a fairly large randomized controlled trial, discovered that giving last-ditch chemotherapy for “solid tumors” in patients estimated to have less than 6 months to live did neither. Not only was survival time not increased (although the editorialists note that this study was not designed to look at survival), but quality of life (QOL) was not improved. Indeed, and incredibly important, the group that had the best quality of life before receiving this final round of chemotherapy had the greatest drop in QOL, ending up pretty much as bad as the rest of the group. Blanke and Fromme observe that that this may be because they had “further to fall”. This is likely true, but surely the goal is not to give “treatment” that facilitates that fall.

So why do we do it? Were “we”, doctors especially, ignorant of this? Certainly the strength of the results – especially the fact that those whose pre-treatment QOL was the best were those who were most harmed – was a surprise in that it had never been published before, but that “palliative” chemotherapy at the end of life, intended entirely to improve QOL, often does the opposite – is something that every doctor who cares for patients with cancer, including but not limited to oncologists, has seen. Many of us, including many palliative care specialists, usually recommend against such treatment to patients and their families, often to have our voices drowned out by the encouragement from others (particularly some oncologists).

The truth is that the answer, as with so many things involving people, is complex. People do not usually want to die, and frequently grasp at any straw offered to them. Even when they themselves are not sure that they wish to go on, even when their disease makes them unable to make a decision, their family members often take on the role of demanding more treatment. This rarely if ever comes from a desire to cause more suffering for a loved one, but rather hoping that a miracle will occur. When this is encouraged by the physician who offers some sort of hope it is more likely to happen. The distinction between the outcomes of palliation and longer life is not always clear to patients or their families, and indeed “improvement” and “longer life” may mean different things to the doctor saying it (tumor gets smaller, life expectancy extended by weeks) and those hearing it.

The results of this study showing the decrease in QOL for those who were “best off” prior to treatment should be sobering and decrease the use of end-of-life chemotherapy, but there continue to be critics of the work. Some oncologists, typified by the one quoted by Pam Belluck in the New York Times article on the study (“Benefit of End-Stage Chemotherapy Is Questioned”, July 23, 2015) who “noted that patients were seen between 2002 and 2008, before some newer chemotherapy drugs with fewer side effects or the ability to directly target certain tumors or cancer-causing mutations,” still hold out hope. He may be right, but, of course, all studies are done in the past, and the “things are better now than then” refrain is almost always the one we hear from people unhappy with the results; in all probability, things, for end-of-life cancer patients, are not really better now.

The one clearly unacceptable reason for doing such therapy is the financial benefit to the manufacturers of these chemotherapeutic agents, but also to a lesser degree the providers – mainly the hospitals but also sometimes the doctors – who administer them. This is a major consideration, not generally addressed in the articles about this study. “Costs aside,” Blanke and Fromme write, “we feel the last 6 months of life are not best spent in an oncology treatment unit or at home suffering the toxic effects of largely ineffectual therapies for the majority of patients.” The costs that they are holding aside are the costs of the drugs, the implication is that it is the cost to the patient (or their insurer), a negative to be weighed against the potential benefit (or not) of the therapy. In this sense, it is one item on the scale. But the cost to the patient or insurer is the source of enormous profits to the pharmaceutical companies that make these incredibly expensive drugs, and they are heavily marketed to physicians by those multi-billion-dollar corporations. Their marketing campaigns push the slightest, least-convincingly-demonstrated-by-research potential benefits, and almost never talk (audibly) about the possible, probable, likely negative effects of treatment. 

While these companies are the greatest financial beneficiaries, so are the hospitals and cancer centers that administer them. The reason that there are so many cancer centers is only in part because cancer is a bad disease; it is largely because it is a very profitable disease to treat because the markup paid by insurers (led by Medicare) for administering chemotherapy is very high. Doctors (particularly oncologists) benefit most directly when they are owners of such cancer centers, but to a lesser degree when they receive high salaries from their employer that are made possible by the huge profits on cancer treatment.

It is an ugly thought that your receiving cancer drugs may be in large part because the manufacturers stand to make a lot of money from it, but there it is. And it is not just cancer treatment; a recent article in the Business section of the NY Times from July 24, 2015 by Andrew Pollack, “New Drug Sharply Lowers Cholesterol, but It’s Costly”,  describes the introduction of a new “recombinant DNA” drug called alirocumab (Praluent) that dramatically lowers cholesterol levels, but will cost $14,600 a year! This may be a wonder drug for the relatively small number of people who have familial hypercholesterolemia, but the indications will unquestionably be pushed by physicians with encouragement from the manufacturer. Every time there is the least evidence that a drug, initially intended for the most severely affected patient, can be used for a larger group, there is more potential for enormous profit.  The evidence that just lowering cholesterol as much as can be done is linearly linked to reducing heart attack and stroke is limited. “’This is treating a lab value,’ said Dr. Rita Redberg, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, referring to lowering cholesterol for its own sake. ‘I don’t think we should rush into it.’”

“’We came to a price that is reflective of value, not what the market will bear,’ said Elias Zerhouni, head of research and development at Sanofi [one of the two companies that make alirocumab], who said his own brother had suffered three heart attacks and needed new options to control cholesterol.” I am sorry about his brother, but if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. It is absolutely about the price that the market will bear. The sad part is that there may be some who are more willing to believe this because Dr. Zerhouni used to be the head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a higher-profile but undoubtedly less well-paid position. Revolving door, anyone?

Alirocumab is likely to be beneficial to some patients but will undoubtedly be used in many more and is unconscionably priced. It’s fine for a company to make profit on its drugs, but predatory pricing and rapacious profit is not. Most disturbing is the thought that people who do not need and will not benefit from a drug, and may even be harmed by it, may receive it mainly so these companies can profit.

The line I quote from Blanke and Fromme at the start of this piece refers to chemotherapy for metastatic cancer, but in fact can be applied far more generally: 

In reality, only 2 reasons exist for administering therapy to patients: to help them live longer and/or to help them live better.

Let’s keep that, and not corporate profit, as our touchstone.

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[1] Blanke CD, Fromme EK, “Chemotherapy Near the End of Life: First—and Third and Fourth (Line)—Do No Harm”, JAMA Oncology, published online 7/23/15, doi: 10.1001/jamaoncol.2015.2379

[2] Prigerson HG, et al., “Chemotherapy Use, Performance Status, and Quality of Life at the End of Life”, JAMA Oncol. Published online July 23, 2015. doi:10.1001/jamaoncol.2015.2378