Drug corporations from manufacturers to retailers are rotten down the line

Drugs, drugs, drugs. We hear a lot about drugs. Especially about the Opioid Crisis, which is a very serious problem in the US. But the other drug problem we hear about is also very serious: the cost of drugs and the inability of people to access the drugs that they need, not to mention to save their lives, because of the cost.

One such drug is insulin, needed by people with Type 1 diabetes to survive. Stories of people dying from, or almost dying from, lack of access to insulin, or having to go to Canada or Mexico to buy it, are both sad and galling.  It is particularly so in the case of insulin because its discoverers wanted it to be free. In 1923, Frederick Banting and his colleagues Charles Best and James Collip sold the patent to the University of Toronto for $1 each, worried that if they did not patent it drug companies would patent an inferior version of insulin (imagine that!) and people would die. The University of Toronto gave the patent royalty-free to drug companies, specifically Eli Lilly.

Unsurprisingly, that marked the end of being motivated by the public interest. As early as 1941, Lilly and two other companies were indicted for price fixing of insulin, and it has gone on from there. In 1982, Lilly was able to synthesize human insulin (previously insulin was made from beef or pork pancreas, which had a lot of reactions, although pork was closer to human and thus preferred). Of course, the price took off. With the complicity of the government, worse in administrations that believed corporate profit (especially for big donors) was more important than human lives, the price continued to rise. This has led us to story after story about people with diabetes, like Josh Wilkerson, dying because they could not afford $1,200 co-pays. Banting and Best are turning in their graves.

Yes, pharmaceutical manufacturers are greedy and evil, whether they make insulin or Epi-Pen or colchicine, or other drugs (like pyrimethamine – see Martin Shrkeli) and deserve every bit of anger, hatred, and scorn that has been visited on them. They are continually the #1 (or, sometimes, #1!) profitable industry in the US, making lots of money because, well, people need their products to live. But they are not the only part of the drug industry that is responsible for bleeding us for profit. They are complicit with insurance companies, who agree to pay the outrageous prices that they demand (because, after all, they just raise their premiums), and with our bought-and-paid-for Congress. For example, when Congress passed the Medicare Part D Drug Act in 2003 it contained a prohibition against Medicare, the nation’s largest insurer, negotiating drug prices, thus ensuring that American pay far more for drugs than people in other countries (there is a reason uninsured folks go to Canada or Mexico)! As I noted recently, the idea is often put forward that without drug company profit, innovation in pharmaceutical discovery would grind to a halt, but in fact nearly 2/3 of discoveries are made outside the US and most of those in the US are discovered through research funded by the National Institutes of Health.

But beyond the usual villains, pharmaceutical and insurance companies, we have the wholesalers, retailers, and “bundlers” of drugs also making out like bandits (they are bandits, even if, thanks to that bought-and-paid-for Congress, their schemes are often legal) from our health needs. The “bundlers”, called Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) are contracted by large insurers to negotiate for the “best prices” with pharmacy retailers. For a positive spin on what they do, see this piece from “The Balance”. However, they are also responsible for a lot of the high cost of drugs, especially for those with worse, or no, insurance. In addition, they have a lot of practices that enhance their profit at your expense, many explained in this piece from the Commonwealth Fund, such as jacking up the price charged to insurers and pocketing the difference (“spread pricing”) and pocketing rebates from manufacturers. The entire role of PBMs is complex and bewildering, but they play a critical role in the important process of profiting off of your illness.

More recently, we have seen exposure of the nefarious practices of the final link in the chain of getting you your needed medicines, the retail pharmacies themselves. Of course, the old mom-and-pop drugstore on the corner is almost a thing of the past, having been replaced by mega-chain pharmacies such as CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid and Duane Reed. (Of course, in many big cities they are still on every corner, not just competing with each other but with themselves; in places like New York City they are more ubiquitous than Starbucks!) These chains drove out the small drugstores by underpricing them, but having been successful in that, they have adopted practices that are frequently unethical, sometimes illegal, and always guaranteed to make them more profit. Indeed, two of the largest PBMs are now owned by these chains (Caremark by CVS and Envision by Walgreens), enhancing the vertical integration of the industry.

A New York Times exposé of January 31, 2020 by Ellen Gabler tells how retail pharmacies overwork their employees, sometimes with resultant errors such as patients getting the wrong medicines and often having adverse effects. It was titled “How Chaos at Chain Pharmacies is Putting Patients at Risk”, but this headline, while accurate, does not explain the real reason for the chaos, which is that these pharmacies are using an old and dishonorable technique made famous by Henry Ford in the early days of assembly lines called “speed up”. Speed-up, increasing the expectations for “production” (in this case, number of prescriptions filled per hour) has been a target of union contracts since the 1930s, but as the influence of unions has waned (with the collaboration of pro-corporate legislatures) these practices have increased. Pharmacists may be “professionals” (like nurses and doctors) but whatever your education and training, if you work for a large corporation who sets the rules and standard and has control, you are a worker, and need the protections that all workers should have. The most conscientious of these professionals have protested, often to the state boards that regulate them, as cited in the Gabler article:

In letters to state regulatory boards and in interviews with The New York Times, many pharmacists at companies like CVS, Rite Aid and Walgreens described understaffed and chaotic workplaces where they said it had become difficult to perform their jobs safely, putting the public at risk of medication errors.

They struggle to fill prescriptions, give flu shots, tend the drive-through, answer phones, work the register, counsel patients and call doctors and insurance companies, they said — all the while racing to meet corporate performance metrics that they characterized as unreasonable and unsafe in an industry squeezed to do more with less.

“I am a danger to the public working for CVS,” one pharmacist wrote in an anonymous letter to the Texas State Board of Pharmacy in April.

“The amount of busywork we must do while verifying prescriptions is absolutely dangerous,” another wrote to the Pennsylvania board in February. “Mistakes are going to be made and the patients are going to be the ones suffering.

So is the problem being addressed? You can be sure that it is, by the corporations that run these pharmacies. How? The complaints of the pharmacists are being taken care of in the way that big corporations often do, that is, ignoring them and deleting mention of them from their reports. In a follow up on February 21, 2020, “At Walgreens, complaints of medication errors go missing”, Ms. Gabler writes:

Pharmacy employees at Walgreens told consultants late last year that high levels of stress and “unreasonable” expectations had led them to make mistakes while filling prescriptions and to ignore some safety procedures.

But when the consultants presented their findings at Walgreens’s corporate offices this month, there was no reference to the errors and little mention of other concerns the employees had raised.

That’s because senior leaders at Walgreens had directed the consultants to remove some damaging findings after seeing a draft of their presentation, a review of internal emails, chat logs and two versions of the report shows.

In one instance, Amy Bixler, the director of pharmacy and retail operations at Walgreens, told them to delete a bullet point last month that mentioned how employees “sometimes skirted or completely ignored” proper procedures to meet corporate metrics, according to the chat logs and the draft report.

Good for you, Ms. Bixler! Took care of that problem! You should get a nice bonus this year!

If these practice are of concern to you, they should be. So should the price gouging up and down the line in the pharmaceutical industry, the drive to profit for manufacturers, PBMs, insurance companies, and retail pharmacies to make lots of money off you, or you die. “Your money or your life!” is an old cliché attributed to highwaymen. It should be the mantra of the pharmaceutical industry in this age of unfettered capitalism.

But no highwayman ever had the reach or power or ownership of politicians that these folks do. 

Opioids, deaths, and capitalism: It's the capitalism, people!

The opioid epidemic is real. Far more opioids (the term that includes opiates, naturally-derived from opium, and synthetic drugs) are consumed than could conceivably be used for medical reasons, whether for short-term use post-surgery or injury, or chronic use for terminal diseases like cancer. The explanation, at one level, is the excessive use of opioids for pain relief for chronic conditions (like back pain, for which other drugs are often more effective) or excessive duration for what should be short-term (acute) reasons, and the fact that they are very addictive. This last has led to the creation of new addicts, who have been placed on prescription opioids for pain, and means that they can be used to substitute for opiates (such as heroin) for those who became addicted to street drugs. This is especially true with the increased availability of extremely potent synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl (50-80 times more potent than morphine), but can go both ways; when those who have become addicted to prescription opioids find the supply drying up, they often move to heroin.

But, like most things, it is complicated. The biggest complication is that many of those who have become “hooked” on opioids are suffering in pain, and opioid withdrawal is, to put it mildly, not fun. The pain relief is greater than that of other pain relievers, for many (but not all) problems, but opioids increase tolerance, so the doses people need to take to relieve their pain, or get their high, continually increases. The “consensus” pendulum has swung, from the message that people are not getting sufficient pain relief (“pain is the fifth vital sign”) to “doctors are creating addicts by overprescribing opioids”. Patients – people -- are caught in the middle.

Another complication is, as is usual in any big issue in the US, race. Opiate addiction and problems were a focus more of criminalization than treatment when it was perceived as mainly a problem for minority populations. The increasing revelation of white, albeit often poorer, less educated, and more rural, white people suffering from the prevalence of opioid abuse, has changed the discussion. Not that this is unimportant – the message that for the first time in a century a portion of the population – middle aged white people – have an increasing death rate (discussed in Rising white midlife mortality: what are the real causes and solutions?, November 14, 2015, and based on the work of Case and Deaton, “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century”) is shocking. So is the finding that poor white women born in 1950 will live shorter lives than their mothers born in 1920 (“Life expectancy, socialism, and the determinants of health”, February 14, 2016). None of this to deny or ignore the fact that death rates for minorities, although dropping are still higher than those of whites.

The New York Times has had a series of exposé articles on the opioid crisis, and a recent installment completely pulls back the curtain on the marketing and sales practices of opioid manufacturers. “3,271 Pill Bottles, a Town of 2,831: Court Filings Say Corporations Fed Opioid Epidemic” reveals that many manufacturers, not simply Purdue, the maker of Oxy-Contin®, and many pharmacies including all the big chains, have been complicit in the spread of this epidemic. Its content is damning, and the evil acts of these companies are made public, and the information needed to ascertain the reason for the problem is clear.

But the Times does not explicitly call it out. That is because the problem is capitalism, specifically “unfettered” capitalism, essentially unregulated capitalism that not only permits, but encourages, anything that will make more money, regardless of the cost, including (and perhaps especially) the human cost. These corporations are responding to the pressure of Wall St. and their stockholders not only to make more money, but to “exceed expectations”. The value of a stock is not based on whether the company is actually earning a profit, but whether it is earning enough of a profit to please the casino players. This is augmented by the incentives for often huge bonuses for the top management based upon – how much profit the company makes. There are no bonuses for actually helping more people, or even not killing them, or not destroying the world. Sorry, you who die from opioids or suicide, you are collateral damage. Oh, yes, you also, future generations.

To be clear, this is not a result of Republican or Trumpian policies, although they have been both more open about it and have further pushed the envelope with their gargantuan tax cuts for corporations and the 0.1%. It has been the policy of every government at least since Reagan in the 1980s, Clinton and Obama certainly included. Of course, every US government has been pro-capitalist, but for much of the 20^th century, starting with (Republican) Teddy Roosevelt, there were both implicit and explicit limits set. Even conservative economic guru Milton (“the only goal of a business is to maximize shareholder profit”) Friedman believed that monopolies were ultimately not a problem because technology and the market would take them down. He was wrong; there are no limits to what they will do for more money.

So we have Americans dying by the tens of thousands from opiate and opioid overdose, and from the “suicides of despair”. We have children being separated from their parents and migrants being housed in prisons because it makes money for the private prison industry, a major donor to politicians. (Kudos to Illinois for being the first state to ban private prisons.) We have the environment being irreparably destroyed for the profit of some companies, with government complicity. We have wars being fought across the globe, killing hundreds of thousands, and each being the potential spark that could destroy the world more quickly through nuclear war. We continue to increase the defense budget although we already spend several-fold more than all our potential adversaries put together, because it is the way that the federal government subsidizes US industries.

Why do we do these things? Our oligarchs (a term the media seems to reserve only for foreigners, especially Russians, even though the US has so many more of them) demand it, and pay for it, essentially through kickbacks. They care not for the future, even for their grandchildren, or for whether there is a world.

They must be stopped. Our health, and our lives, depend upon it.

The Political is Personal: Corporate power, social isolation, and the health of the nation -- Part 2

This talk was presented at the 29th Conference on Primary Care Access, Monterey, CA April 16, 2018

Many officials and policymakers pay lip service to the importance of health, but most of the actual support (spelled M-O-N-E-Y) is for treatments for individuals, often with uncommon diseases. Being on the “frontiers of knowledge” is much sexier than rather than the old, pedestrian “taking care of people”. And such policies ensure enormous profit for drug manufacturers, who, like military contractors, are guaranteed huge returns while most Americans are not even guaranteed subsistence.

We abhor the individual excesses of Martin Shkreli and Turing jacking up the price of pyrimethamine (Daraprim ®) from $13.50 to $750 a pill (he has been sent to prison but not for this action against the health of the people; rather he committed the much worse sin of defrauding investors), or Heather Bresch and Mylan raising the price of Epi-Pen ® from $100 to $600, or the manufacturers of colchicine (URL Pharma), with the complicity of the FDA, being allowed to patent a drug that was identified as effective for gout in Egyptian papyri in 1500 BC and raise the price from a few cents to $5 a pill. And what is there to say about the scammer Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos and its A-List Board of Directors?

The Atlantic recently told us the history of the creation and marketing of Oxy-Contin ® by the Sackler brothers. When they bought Purdue, they inherited an expiring patent for extended-release morphine. So they not only developed extended-release oxycodone and marketed it, taking advantage of the public (and physicians’) caution about morphine, they greatly broadened the indications for this drug, which is just as addictive, from cancer and sickle-cell and the like to any chronic pain, especially back pain. Thus, we almost all are eligible users, and we see the results with our nation’s opioid crisis.

If we are still practicing, we see the results of the “breakthroughs” in recombinant DNA “-ab” drugs (actually, anyone who watches TV will see the ads for them), promising (occasionally with some validity) new hope for sufferers from cancer, auto-immune disease, and a variety of neurologic conditions. The TV ads do not contain, and I hope that we as physicians are aware of, the prices, often $30,000 to $100,000 a year or more, far more than the average family income in the US. The frequency of serious side effects, including death, from these drugs is very real – many are immune system stimulants that frequently, not rarely, cause autoimmune hepatitis, pancreatitis and the like – and these are not clearly portrayed on TV, or in marketing to physicians.

Even when the individual is partially shielded from the cost by insurance, the out-of-pocket costs to patients can still be enormous. In any case, no matter who is paying, the pharmaceutical companies are making out like the bandits they are, and less and less money within the whole system is actually available for population health, for prevention, for public health, for treatment of common diseases like hypertension and diabetes. And even for those conditions, we keep seeing newer – and always more expensive – drugs. While all the new diabetes drugs have some use for some individuals, many people with diabetes are still getting inadequate basic treatment with metformin, insulin, and good counseling and support for diet and exercise.

And what can be said about “precision medicine” (sometimes called “personalized medicine”)? Tens, or hundreds, of millions of dollars spent or promised by the federal government, promoted by former President Obama as part of the “moonshot on cancer”, the idea that every individual will have a relatively unique treatment based upon learning and understanding her genetic makeup. The promise is that we will be able to prescribe treatments for cancer and other horrible diseases as precisely as we target antibiotics to the culture results (and, I imagine, overprescribe them as we do with antibiotics). Pursuit of the money being allocated for these “cures”, as well as the cachet of being “scientific industry leaders”, has become a major motivator of medical school deans and chancellors, with every academic medical center developing Institutes for precision or personalized medicine.

What, by the way, has been the outcome? Not much, so far. Two genes have been shown to, themselves alone, cause cancers, and they have been well-known for a long time, BRCA-1 and BRCA-2. And the amazing precision/personalized medicine treatments? Well, get mammography earlier and more often and maybe consider prophylactic bilateral mastectomy. Where are the precision cocktails that cure each person? Do not fret; billions more will be spent on looking for them for years to come.

Is there a problem with this? Taken in isolation, pursuing effective treatments for terrible diseases that affect a significant (if relatively small) proportion of our population is not intrinsically a bad thing. But nothing is done in isolation. Those dollars that NIH spends on looking for these treatments, those insurance company dollars spent paying for outrageously overpriced drugs, the infrastructure development in our academic medical center that continues to support high-tech, high-specialization research and care, are dollars not being used for population health, public health, prevention and primary care, not being used to actually, effectively and broadly implement the treatment strategies that we know work so that they are not only available to but used for the benefit of everyone.

This is what we, as family doctors and primary care providers, and public health workers, can do. It is important, cost effective, and will make a real difference in the health of the population. But because it is cost-effective, it is not profitable for those corporations that have great influence in public policy, and so it continues to be recognized mostly with words and not resources.

Some years ago the VCU Center for Human Needs developed the County Health Calculator. You can click on any state, or any county, and find out the number of deaths per year, number of people with diabetes, cost of diabetes, percent of people with greater than a high school education, and percent of people with an income of at least twice the poverty level. You can compare to the best and worst county or state, and a neat slider lets you see how many lives and dollars would be saved if you had higher or lower percents. Here is Monterey County, CA, where we are. Despite the impression that might be generated by Reese Witherspoon’s HBO show “Big Little Lies”, it is not the richest or best-educated county in the state, but closer to the middle.  Allocating more of our money to addressing core societal functions, like education and poverty, will make a big difference in health, much more than any individually-directed medical care.

It should be obvious that the emphasis in medicine and health care to focus on individual treatments, despite (and maybe because of) huge costs (and remember, costs are someone’s profits!), rather than on interventions to improve the health of our overall population, is totally related to the political and social conditions and circumstances I spoke about at the beginning. We not only feel we are alone, we are actively being encouraged and directed to feel alone, and that we just need to look out for ourselves, and the treatments for our diseases, and our housing and food and children’s education and tax burden, and not for anyone else.

This serves the dual purpose of 1) pursuing, as I hope I have demonstrated for medical care (and others have also demonstrated for military contracting and other areas), strategies that maximize corporate profits, as well as 2) limiting the probability that people will organize together to attack the core structure of cynicism, exploitation, and greed that has become so ubiquitous that we can often not imagine any other way of society being organized.

I have talked about a number of issues, which I think are all related to our health, as individuals and as a nation. I have talked about social isolation, consumerism, a health system that is organized mainly for profit, the excesses of pharmaceutical manufacturers, “precision” or “personalized” medicine, and community health. Changing all of this is about changing society, but I think we, as health professionals, definitely have something to contribute. Whenever we think about these issues, whenever we are confronted by the false idea that we are each alone, that we cannot band together, that we should not care for the others in our society, that there is not value in social cohesion, we need to resist it and increase our efforts to work with others. As physicians and health workers, especially in public health and primary care, we need to continue to demand that most health dollars are spent on the strategies that benefit the health of most of the people.

       While policymakers and subspecialists and deans talk about “personalized medicine”, we as family doctors and other primary care providers, talk about personal medicine.  We are talking about the interactions between people – the medical term for whom is “patients” -- who need to be heard, and validated, and supported, with doctors and other providers who have enough time to do so. This is where the magic of personal medicine happens, not mainly in the provision of ever-more-expensive dangerous drugs and procedures. It is what we know how to do, and need to continue to teach others to do, and it is where we need to direct our efforts. It will not be easy, given the poor pay and resultant shortages of primary care doctors, and the mega-mergers that employ strategies such as retail clinics, currently being adopted. These strategies combine two major themes I have mentioned –  it is “corporate profit meets social isolation and instant gratification”, where people are encouraged to no longer value the relationships that come from continuity and community-based practices. 

We may well be on the road to 1984, even though it’s 34 years late. But I think we can still band together and resist going all the way there.

The frustration of actually trying to get health care: the other meaning of access

I have written about the quality of care that people in the US receive, and about access to and the cost of care, but another very important issue is the actual process of obtaining appropriate care. This is a major source of frustration for patients and their families, and can drive anger against the system, against doctors, against insurers, against the government. People who experience this frustration and anger want it to change, and sometimes want to lash out, offering an opportunity to be intentionally misled by influential others for their political ends. The demonization of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) is a good example. Obamacare actually did lots of good things, starting with insuring tens of millions who did not previously have coverage; it also forbid insurers from charging more to those with pre-existing conditions, and allowed children to stay on their parents’ plans until they are 26. Actually, it did little or nothing bad, if the criterion is access to care. A few people saw increased premiums, mainly the healthy young and those who previously had such terrible policies that they were both cheap and essentially worthless. While the Republican congress tried to repeal it, it turned out that, surprise, people would be worse off without it.

On the other hand, frustration with the obstacles to obtaining appropriate care are real, every day, and in-your-face for patients and their families. I have recently been experiencing these from the perspective of the patient (or family) rather than that of the provider, as I work at getting care for my 92-year-old father. My experience with the provider perspective helps me to understand the situation from both sides, and hopefully to try to figure out which obstacles are rational and which are simply unnecessary.

Let me start by largely absolving any of my father’s individual providers; all those involved with him – physicians both general and specialist, physical therapists, and more recently the nurses, social workers, and nurse practitioners through the palliative care agency – are committed, caring and hard-working. They do their best to help him, to be available, to respond when a problem, minor or urgent, arises. However, there are obstacles in the way. Many services require a referral from a physician, from calling in prescriptions, to ordering lab tests or x-rays (and getting the results), to getting physical or occupational therapy, to enrolling in palliative care. While none of these individually may seem to be burdensome for the doctor, there can be many for any individual patient, multiplied by the number of patients a physician sees who need these services. While it is sometimes the specialist who makes such a referral or fills out such a form, it most often “rolls downhill” to the primary care provider. That provider has to have a very large number of patients to get by and make a living, so the phone messages and faxes and lab results pile up while s/he is spending all day actually seeing his/her patients. Rationalizing the delivery of care means trying to get nurses or other staff to deal with as many as possible, but lots of these require a doctor (or other licensed provider, such as a nurse practitioner) to interpret, approve, or sign off on.  And having more staff costs more money, and means (particularly for the primary care provider, whose reimbursement is much lower than for many specialists) having more patients. Thus, a vicious circle, often compared (from the provider’s point of view) to running on a hamster wheel; for patients, this often seems like obstructionism.

Of course, it often is obstructionism, but rarely on the part of the individual provider. The reason is, unsurprisingly, money. For the providers of care, or more usually the companies for which they work (whether for-profit or not), the issue is reimbursement by insurers, including Medicare and Medicaid. There are rules that must be followed, forms that must be filled out, referrals that must be signed, and procedures to go through, or payment will not be forthcoming. And then the provider, whether physician, nurse practitioner, physical therapist, pharmacist, or social worker, whether self-employed or working for a company, doesn’t get paid. And, depending on how often this occurs, will make less, fire staff, or go broke. In addition, insurance companies themselves often create obstacles to payment (such as the time-honored one of just refusing to pay the first time or two, because maybe the provider will give up), but this is more often true for costly surgeries than lower-cost preventive and treatment services. And sometimes the practices seem almost incomprehensible as in insurers requiring patients to use brand-name rather than generic drugs and thus have to pay more out of pocket (“Take the generic, patients are told. Until they are not”, NY Times, August 6, 2017); one word, not used in the article but clearly described: kickback.

To be fair, many of the rules that seem to be obstructions are not only about saving money; they are about both preventing fraud and even patient safety. There absolutely are major fraudsters out there, doctors and home-health companies and nursing homes and every sort of medical support provider (even hospitals), who try to and often succeed in bilking Medicare (and other insurers) out of millions of dollars in inappropriate (“do you want a scooter at no cost to you?” – but someone else is paying!) or truly fraudulent (there is no patient) care. In fact, some care, even if you want it, even if someone is willing to provide it (if they get paid), is not appropriate for you, or your family member. Medicare and other insurers do set criteria, and require that it be documented. This can actually be good, not only for all of us as taxpayers but for our health and safety.

But often it isn’t good. It sometimes makes care that is appropriate, evidence-based, and desired, hard to get. It takes a long time. It takes lots of phone calls, and hours on hold or waiting for calls back. It has messages lost in piles, or over the weekend. It should not happen, but it does. And it is frustrating. The “Triple Aim” guiding progressive health care has received a lot of attention. It is to deliver high-quality care in a cost effective manner that is satisfying to patients. To document the last, many hospitals, provider groups, and companies send out “patient satisfaction” surveys, which are at best cosmetic and at worst destructive. People don’t fill them out “right”; they tend to reflect an overall impression that leads people to mark each of the ostensibly-separate questions “great” or “terrible”. Also, in forming this global impression, folks understandably often overvalue the things that they can assess (like the quality of food or attractiveness of the facility) compared to things that they cannot (such as the actual quality of care). This is, by the way, where providing good customer service makes a big difference, and while some places are getting better, the medical care industry is generally weak in this critical area.

As in almost everything, those with the least get the least. The uninsured, the poorly insured, and the just poor, provide the least incentive to providers (getting paid) to meet their needs. Government regulations that require certain services for Medicare or Medicaid without paying for them result in greater strain on those providers who provide care to people in these groups. Many providers, especially in some fields or medical specialties or geographic areas, try to avoid them. They locate in wealthier neighborhood, don’t take folks who are uninsured (or on Medicaid, and sometimes even Medicare), or offer indulgent, wonderful “concierge” services for those who can pay a significant retainer. Thus works the “market” in health care. A terrible way to go.

A universal health insurance system won’t make all these problems go away; even with it, systems can still be poor, providers can be uncaring. But it will help a lot. Because everyone is covered, there is no “vendor lock”; the market can function well because people choose their providers based on service, not because they are forced to because they are locked in to a limited pool. Information flows between primary care and specialists and therapists and labs and imaging because if it doesn’t folks are free to take their business elsewhere. The way competition should work; competition on providing the best product and service.

And, because we would all be in it together, in the same system, the most empowered will make sure it works for them, and thus, hopefully, for us all.

Pre-existing conditions and profit-taking: the causes of our healthcare problems

Elisabeth Rosenthal, the editor-in-chief of Kaiser Health News and author of “An American Sickness” (discussed in this blog on April 15, 2017, United Airlines, health care, and a system designed to privilege the powerful) has an op-ed in her old newspaper, the New York Times, on May 29, 2017 titled “We all have pre-existing conditions”. That is a good and accurate title, but a little different from the print title “The cost of pre-existing conditions”.  That cost is high, to the people with those conditions, and less obviously, to the overall society. This includes their families and friends, of course, but also their employers. When a potentially treatable condition excludes you from having health insurance, you are less likely to get it treated, and more likely to get sick and miss work. The spectrum of conditions that insurance companies used in the pre-ACA era to exclude people was broad. Rosenthal notes specific examples including having had an abnormal Pap smear, a history of being on anti-depressants, a history of taking thyroid medication, and being on post-menopausal hormone treatment. Of course, once you are excluded and have no insurance, you don’t seek care for other conditions either, either pre-existing or those that develop later or might have not been recognized. Not only could insurers exclude you for having a pre-existing condition, but there was no regulation of what or how significant that condition had to be. We have heard stories of people being denied treatment for cancer because, on signing up, they had “failed to report” a pre-existing history of treatment for things as minor as an ingrown toenail or acne!

The ACA, also known as Obamacare, changed that. It eliminated the ability of insurance companies to exclude people based on their pre-existing conditions, thus rendering moot the question of what conditions could be excluded. It also prevented those insurance companies from charging more money to people with those pre-existing conditions by requiring “community rating”; they had to set their rates based upon the overall actuarial risk of the entire community in which they sell insurance. The same principle is why those of us who receive our health insurance via employers, especially large employers, usually have lower rates for better coverage – because the risk pool is everyone who works for that company, and while many are sick, many more are younger and healthier (after all, this excludes all the people who are not working). Thus, the requirement that the individual policies sold under ACA had to be based on the community rating was critical for many Americans to be able to get even close to affordable health insurance.

For many, the cost on the individual marketplace was still too high. For those whose pre-existing conditions had previously made them unable to get insurance, it was often still a boon. For those who were younger and healthier, though, who had had cheaper policies or gone without coverage altogether, they now had to pay more. After all, community rating means an average, so those at lower risk will pay more than they would have with individual rating, and certainly more than with no insurance since the ACA had the “individual mandate” requiring them to get coverage. The bigger problem is that in some geographic areas, many (or most or in some cases all) insurers decided that the benefit of offering insurance (i.e., making money) was not worth the risk of paying out for actual medical care. This is especially true in rural areas, where low population density and a higher proportion of older and therefore sicker people make for a poor risk/return ratio.

The problem, of course, for those younger and healthier people who chose to forgo coverage or, after the individual mandate, to buy the cheapest and crappiest policies, is that they can get sick. They can discover that they have cancer, whatever their age. Or get into a car accident, requiring many surgeries and long treatment and rehabilitation (did they have car insurance?). Or be burned in a fire started by smoking (did they have homeowner’s insurance? Did they opt to not pay the higher premiums that they can legally be charged for being smokers?) Or they can have a premature baby that needs treatment in a neonatal ICU.  Or, particularly for the older group who knew they had a problem like hypertension, diabetes, or arthritis but were hoping they’d stay relatively asymptomatic, they can have a downturn – have a stroke or a heart attack or a serious infection or pain so bad that they can no longer work. And then they find that the “affordable” (i.e., crappy) health insurance that they bought is almost as bad as none.

So we have a conundrum. To work, health insurance has to include everyone, the sick as well as the healthy. But the healthy, especially those with lower incomes, don’t want to pay what seems to be the unfairly high rates that they have to in order for the whole system to be fair. The older and less healthy may want health insurance, but still be dissuaded by the high premiums. The sick need the coverage, but again, without the healthier paying in, the cost for them is too high, and results in either their being unable to afford it or the insurers being unwilling to cover them even if it means leaving an entire market.

Let’s look at some facts:
1.      The US spends more on health care than any other county, by far.
2.      The US has, on a population basis, worse health outcomes than most other developed countries, far worse than many.

This is the true conundrum. How can we pay so much for so little? It is because we pay an enormous percent of our “health care” expenses for drug company (and drug “middlemen”, pharmacy benefits managers) profits, insurance company profits, and income for for-profit and function-like-for-profit non-profit hospitals. As documented by Eric Lipton and Katie Thomas in the May 29, 2017 Times (“Drug lobbyists’ battle cry over prices: blame the others”), there is plenty of blame to go around! In addition, the percent that is actually spent on health care on treatments (and sometimes cures) is primarily for far advanced disease, not prevention and early diagnosis and treatment. We spend almost nothing on public health and prevention.

We keep telling ourselves lies (our healthcare system is the best in the world, the ACA is the problem, drug companies need to charge so much because they spend so much on research and development, etc.) but fewer and fewer of us are believing it. Many of the people who are worst affected voted for Donald Trump and for Republican congressmen who have devised the AHCA (American Health Care Act) that will “solve” the problem by essentially eliminating health insurance coverage for 23 million Americans, 14 million in the first year alone, according to estimates by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The AHCA is basically a tax-cut-for-the-1% bill, with the money coming from the health care coverage for the rest of us.

Is there any way out of this conundrum? Yes. We have the money, obviously; we are spending it. Fifty percent of health care spending is already government, 60% if you include the lost taxes from the employer portion of health insurance. We make the community being rated everyone in the US. We all have one health plan. We are all covered. We all get all necessary services. We don’t lose coverage by leaving or jobs for any reason, from family needs to an entrepreneurial start-up. The old and vulnerable among us are covered and have their needs met, and the healthy among us win by staying healthy and having coverage when we need it. We pay for it by eliminating the profit centers, and not by cutting taxes on the wealthiest of us.

It can be done. It has been done. In every other developed country. We have the resources to do it here. We must need to stand up to the entrenched and powerful profiteers.