Operator, can you please page the Surgeon General on call?

The name of neurosurgeon and health journalist Sanjay Gupta was leaked in early January as Barack Obama’s choice for Surgeon General. His selection has caused controversy, and the formal nomination seems to have been delayed by the search for a Secretary of Health and Human Services after the withdrawal of Tom Daschle. While we’re waiting for Gupta to be confirmed, we can ask: what exactly is the Surgeon General supposed to do, and in this administration whose watchword is change, can the office be more useful?

More in Clinical Correlations.

Does Massachusetts's health care reform work?

As Massachusetts’ Secretary of Health and Human Services, JudyAnn Bigby, MD, is charged with overseeing the health-care program which covers nearly all of the Commonwealth’s residents (nearly 98%) while costing more than anyone expected (about 800 million dollars in 2008). On February 4th, Dr. Bigby spoke at NYU’s Medicine Grand Rounds, where she summarized the approach and accomplishments of Title 58, the health care legislation passed in 2006. The program had several goals: improving access, reforming the insurance market, and (it was hoped) improving outcomes. Bigby gave clear and convincing evidence for the first two goals, while the jury is still out on the third.

More in Clinical Correlations.

For the Sausage Factory: Various Health Care Proposals as Fodder for Compromise

Even in the midst of the presidential campaign, we should remember that there are a number of health care plans other than those proposed by McCain or Obama. Given the vagaries of politics, any given plan is very unlikely to be passed. Thus we should become familiar with the details of a variety of them, since any compromise will look like a hybrid.

More in Clinical Correlations.

More health care is not better

What explains the large variation in health care costs across the country? You would expect that the regions with the highest health care expenditures have the sickest patients, or have the highest prevalence of chronic health conditions.

But you would be wrong. Health care expenditures are highest where health care supply is the highest. As the number of hospital beds, doctors, and medical technologies (”supply-limited health care”) increases, the use of these goods increases as well.

More in Clinical Correlations, the blog of NYU Internal Medicine.

The Thirty-six Million Dollar Rectal Exam

In 2004, while working at a construction site, Brian Persaud was hit in the head by a large wooden plank, lost consciousness, and was taken to the emergency room at New York Presbyterian Hospital. There he received what he says was an unjustified digital rectal exam. Persaud brought suit against the hospital, and soon, four years later, the case will come to trial in the New York State Supreme Court. The arguments in the case are legal, but the underlying issues are also medical and ethical.

More at Clinical Correlations, the NYU Internal Medicine blog. (Thanks to D.M. Esq. for a quick legal education.)

Hillary Clinton's Health Care for All

Cost Containment, Individual Mandates, and Free Choice - Too Good to be True?
[See a comparison of the Giuliani and Clinton plans at Clinical Correlations.]

Hillary Clinton's health care plan is only a few pages long, but the difference between a health care plan and a piece of legislation is the difference between a paper airplane and a space station. Let's look at some of the details of her plan and see where complications might ensue. Clinton's proposed plan would require every individual to choose an insurance plan of some kind. Anyone could keep their current insurance if they were satisfied with it. If they weren't satisfied, two choices would be available: one a menu of private options offering the same benefits as the health insurance that members of Congress are provided with, the other a public plan similar to Medicare. Tax credits would be offered to working families to make it easier for them to afford insurance. How would this be paid for? One answer of Clinton's is a traditional claim of politicians from time immemorial: savings will be achieved through eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse - but with additional savings from the use of medical informatics.

The details aren't spelled out, and those are where the complications come in. (The following discussion owes a great deal to the blog Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review.) Through the two insurance options envisioned by Clinton - a private menu offering the same benefits as those available to members of Congress, and a government-run insurance plan similar to Medicaid - the government would do two things: establish an individual mandate (i.e., requirement) for health insurance - everybody would have to purchase some - and, second, place the government in direct competition with the private sector. How this competition would be legally implemented, and which side the eventual legislation would favor, is impossible to know. Clinton also promises a reduction in premiums. This will happen only if the promised reductions in waste, and increases in efficiency, translate into greater savings for the healthcare "consumer." Neither of these are guaranteed. In particular, Clinton mentions two routes to cutting costs which are trickier than one might imagine: preventive care and information technology. Preventing, you'd think, is cheaper in the long run than treating, and electronic medical records are cheaper than paper. But neither assumption has been borne out by the literature. (A third often proposed salvation, pay for doctors' performance, or for positive outcomes, is just as difficult - but it's not among Clinton's proposals.)

I mentioned earlier one of the key provisions of Clinton's plan: an individual mandate for health insurance. This is paired with other requirements that other participants in the system must follow. To quote:

• Insurance and Drug Companies: insurance companies will end discrimination based on pre-existing conditions or expectations of illness and ensure high value for every premium dollar; while drug companies will offer fair prices and accurate information.
• Individuals: will be responsible for getting and keeping insurance in a system where insurance is affordable and accessible.
• Providers: will work collaboratively with patients and businesses to deliver high-quality, affordable care.
• Employers: will help finance the system; large employers will be expected to provide health insurance or contribute to the cost of coverage; small businesses will receive a tax credit to continue or begin to offer coverage.
• Government: will ensure that health insurance is always affordable and never a crushing burden on any family and will implement reforms to improve quality and lower cost.
  

What "fair prices," "high quality," and "large employers" are taken to mean has been a source of debate even before the first Clinton health plan. How will affordable coverage be mandated when some estimates place the cost of family health coverage at $12,000 per year? If twenty-five employees is the cutoff definition for "large business" (as the Clinton campaign has indicated), what would smaller businesses be required to provide?

The two other pillars of Clinton's proposal are making health care affordable and fiscal responsibility. Health care affordability would be made possible by tax credits for families and for small employers, and for limiting the cost of premiums as a percentage of income. Affordability in this case means - affordable for the end consumers of health care, individuals or employers. This is different from affordability for the Payer of all Payers, the federal government, and, by extension, the individual taxpayer.

What about fiscal responsibility? The Clinton plan predicts that "most savings [will] come through lowering spending due to quality and modernization." As Robert Laszewski of the Health Care Policy blog says, this could be Clinton's most dangerous assumption. If quality and modernization cannot ensure savings by themselves, (a much safer assumption), if providers and payers cannot agree on cost-limiting measures, if more taxes on the higher brackets (i.e. the rich) will not be enough to balance the books (as Clinton assumes), what will happen to the Clinton plan?

Laszewski points out that "from thirty thousand feet," all Democratic healthcare plans look the same: lots of new spending to guarantee access for all Americans to some sort of health care plan, whether public, private, or in between. Republican plans, for their part, tend to invoke individual mandates, a vibrant free market of competing health care choices, and technological efficiency. Informed consumers with the proper incentives would know to allocate their resources efficiently. (Whether Medicare Part D proves this assumption is open to question.) If Clinton's health plan stakes out a centrist position in between these two, in what direction will the "sausage factory" of legislation push the finished product? We'll see . . . if she gets that far.

Yet another DNR
Do Not Reimburse.

A recent article in the New York Times publicized changes in Medicare subsidies. In the article’s own words, “Medicare will no longer pay the extra costs of treating preventable errors, injuries and infections that occur in hospitals, a move [that] could save lives and millions of dollars.” This change was widely discussed, no less so in our hospitals.

But the devil is in the details. What is a preventable error? How was the list modified, and whose idea was this in the first place? What are the implications for our daily practice?

Learn more in Clinical Correlations.

Incrementalism versus single-payer health care reform
Different routes to the same solution.

Cross-posted to Clinical Correlations (with some edits there)

Health insurance positions: The obvious imperfections of our current health care system have inspired a number of solutions. They can be organized into two broad categories, incremental or single-payer. Each of these solutions is advocated by a single-issue lobbying group. National medical organizations support these solutions in greater or lesser measure.

Advocacy groups: Physicians for a National Health Program provides information about the benefits and practical implications of a single-payer health care system. The list of members of its advisory board includes their organizational affiliations, but (as its name indicates) the group is composed of physicians, not medical organizations or professional societies.

Incrementalism is represented by the National Coalition for Covering the Uninsured, a broad-based coalition of a number of organizations, including the AMA, the American Hospital Association, the American Public Health Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and other organizations. Given the divergent range of interests and philosophies represented by this list, it's no surprise that the NCCU's plan involves a number of less wide-reaching improvements in the current system, including transparent pricing; personal Medical Savings Accounts; and the expansion of public programs to cover the very poor.

Professional organizations: Many medical organizations act as both professional societies and as advocacy (i.e. lobbying) groups. Their "home" positions may in many cases differ from their compromise positions hammered out in coalitions with others. The American College of Physicians, on its Web site, advertises its support for the Health CARE Act, a proposal which would increase federal matching funds to those states expanding Medicaid coverage to all those beneath the federal poverty level, and which would also provide increase federal funding to those states which increase coverage for uninsured children.

For its part, the American Medical Association "will strongly advocate for incremental measures to expand coverage," and in keeping with this advocacy is a member of the HCCU. In the long term, says its Web site, it will continue to push for the adoption of a market-based plan to expand coverage, "relying upon incentives and voluntary approaches." Similarly, the American College of Surgeons endorses universal access to care "within our current pluralistic health care system," i.e. to be incremental in the pursuit of change, with some features being implemented on a state by state basis. The ACS further emphasizes that "reducing health care costs [through improving information technology] is much more desirable than containing costs by rationing care."

Compared to other professional organizations, the American Academy of Family Physicians is full-throated in its advocacy of a plan to ensure health care coverage for all. On its web site, it lists those services which should be covered for all who reside in the United States (a relevant distinction in these days of proposed immigration reform). Assured services with no co-payment include prenatal/maternity care; well baby/child care; evidence-based childhood and adult immunizations; and evidence-based periodic evaluation and screening services. Other assured services, including outpatient physician services and outpatient prescription medications, would require 20% co-payment. The AAFP is also the rare organization which specifies a funding mechanism: a national, broad-based tax. Under the AAFP plan, coverage would be rationed by a "resource-based relative value system."

Differences and similarities: The differences in advocacy positions - taken on their own and as participants in coalitions - of the American professional medical organizations remind practicing physicians, and especially physicians in training, that the current health-care system can justify various solutions. Advocacy can also be modified in coalition for the sake of practical lobbying.

Personally, I think a single-payer system is the only solution that would fix the gaping inequities in our system -- but I also realize that there are many ways of getting there. PNHP might better fit idealists, and NCCU, realists, but they have a goal in common: reducing the numbers of the uninsured. Perhaps the coalitions can themselves coalition to put the problem of the uninsured higher on the agenda of the 2008 elections.