Monthly Archives: May 2018

California Hospital Giant Sutter Health Faces Heavy Backlash On Prices

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http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/quality/california-hospital-giant-sutter-health-faces-heavy-backlash-prices?utm_source=silverpop&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20180516_HLM_Daily_resend%20(1)&spMailingID=13521389&spUserID=MTY3ODg4NTg1MzQ4S0&spJobID=1401466260&spReportId=MTQwMTQ2NjI2MAS2

 

The state’s top cop is suing Sutter, accusing one of the nation’s biggest health systems of systematically overcharging patients and illegally driving out competition.

Cooking dinner one night in March, Mark Frizzell sliced his pinkie finger while peeling a butternut squash and couldn’t stop the bleeding.

The 51-year-old businessman headed to the emergency room at Sutter Health’s California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. Sutter charged $1,555 for the 10 minutes it treated him, including $55 for a gel bandage and $487 for a tetanus shot.

“It was ridiculous,” he said. “Health insurance costs are through the roof because of things like this.”

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra couldn’t agree more. The state’s top cop is suing Sutter, accusing one of the nation’s biggest health systems of systematically overcharging patients and illegally driving out competition in Northern California.

For years, economists and researchers have warned of the dangers posed by large health systems across the country that are gobbling up hospitals, surgery centers and physicians’ offices — enabling them to limit competition and hike prices.

Becerra’s suit amounts to a giant test case with the potential for national repercussions. If California prevails and is able to tame prices at Northern California’s most powerful, dominant health system, regulators and politicians in other states are likely to follow.

“A major court ruling in California could be a deterrent to other hospital systems,” said Ge Bai, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University who has researched hospital prices nationwide. “We’re getting to a tipping point where the nation cannot afford these out-of-control prices.”

Reflecting that sense of public desperation, Sutter faces two other major suits — from employers and consumers — which are wending their way through the courts, both alleging anticompetitive conduct and inflated pricing. Meanwhile, California lawmakers are considering a bill that would ban some contracting practices used by large health systems to corner markets.

Sutter, a nonprofit chain, is pushing back hard, denying anticompetitive behavior and accusing Becerra in court papers of a “sweeping and unprecedented effort to intrude into private contracting.” Recognizing the broader implications of the suit, both the American Hospital Association and its California counterpart asked to file amicus briefs in support of Sutter.

In his 49-page complaint, Becerra cited a recent study finding that, on average, an inpatient procedure in Northern California costs 70 percent more than one in Southern California. He said there was no justification for that difference and stopped just short of dropping an expletive to make his point.

“This is a big ‘F’ deal,” Becerra declared at his March 30 news conference to unveil the lawsuit. In an interview last week, he said, “We don’t believe it’s fair to allow consolidation to end up artificially driving up prices. … This anticompetitive behavior is not only bad for consumers, it’s bad for the state and for businesses.”

To lessen Sutter’s market power, the state’s lawsuit seeks to force Sutter to negotiate reimbursements separately for each of its hospitals — precluding an “all or nothing” approach — and to bar Sutter employees from sharing the details of those negotiations across its facilities. Becerra said Sutter has required insurers and employers to contract with its facilities systemwide or face “excessively high out-of-network rates.”

Heft In The Marketplace

Overall, Sutter has 24 hospitals, 36 surgery centers and more than 5,500 physicians in its network. The system boasts more than $12 billion in annual revenue and posted net income of $958 million last year.

The company’s heft in the marketplace is one reason why Northern California is the most expensive place in the country to have a baby, according to a 2016 report. A cesarean delivery in Sacramento, where Sutter is based, cost $27,067, nearly double what it costs in Los Angeles and New York City.

For years, doctors and consumers have also accused Sutter of cutting hospital beds and critical services in rural communities to maximize revenue. “Patients are the ones getting hurt,” said Dr. Greg Duncan, an orthopedic surgeon and former board member at Sutter Coast Hospital in Crescent City, Calif.

Sutter says patients across Northern California have plenty of providers to choose from and that it has held its average rate increases to health plans to less than 3 percent annually since 2012. It also says it does not require all facilities to be included in every contract — that insurers have excluded parts of its system from their networks.

As for emergency room patients like Frizzell, Sutter says its charges reflect the cost of maintaining services round-the-clock and that for some patients urgent-care centers are a less costly option.

“The California Attorney General’s lawsuit gets the facts wrong,” Sutter said in a statement. “Our integrated network of high-quality doctors and care centers aims to provide better, more efficient care — and has proven to help lower costs.”

Regulators in other states also have sought to block deals they view as potentially harmful.

In North Carolina, for instance, the state’s attorney general and treasurer both expressed concerns about a proposed merger between the University of North Carolina Health Care system and Charlotte-based Atrium Health. The two dropped their bid in March. The combined system would have had roughly $14 billion in revenue and more than 50 hospitals.

Last year, in Illinois, state and federal officials persuaded a judge to block the merger between Advocate Health Care and NorthShore University HealthSystem. The Federal Trade Commission said the new entity would have had 60 percent market share in Chicago’s northern suburbs. Still, Advocate won approval for a new deal with Wisconsin’s Aurora Health Care last month, creating a system with $11 billion in annual revenue.

Antitrust experts say states can deliver a meaningful counterpunch to health care monopolies, but they warn that these cases aren’t easy to win and it could be too little, too late in some markets.

“How do you unscramble the egg?” said Zack Cooper, an assistant professor of economics and health policy at Yale University. “There aren’t a lot of great solutions.”

A Seven-Year Investigation

California authorities took their time sounding the alarm over Sutter — a fact Sutter is now using against the state in court.

The state attorney general’s office, under the leadership of Democrat Kamala Harris, now a U.S. senator, started investigating Sutter seven years ago with a 2011 subpoena, court documents show. Sutter said the investigation appeared to go dormant in March 2015, just as Harris began ramping up her Senate campaign.

Becerra, a Democrat and former member of Congress, was appointed to replace Harris last year, took over the investigation and sued Sutter on March 29. His aggressive action comes as he prepares for a June 5 primary against three opponents.

Sutter faces a separate class-action suit in San Francisco state court, spearheaded by a health plan covering unionized grocery workers and representing more than 2,000 employer-funded health plans. The plaintiffs are seeking to recoup $700 million for alleged overcharges plus damages of $1.4 billion if Sutter is found liable for antitrust violations. Sutter also has been sued in federal court by five consumers who blame the health system for inflating their insurance premiums and copays. The plaintiffs are seeking class-action status.

San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Curtis E.A. Karnow granted Becerra’s request to consolidate his case with the grocery workers’ suit, which is slated for trial in June 2019.

The judge sanctioned Sutter in November after finding that Sutter was “grossly reckless” in intentionally destroying 192 boxes of evidence that were relevant to antitrust issues. As a result, Karnow said, he will consider issuing jury instructions that are adverse to Sutter.

In a note to employees, Sutter chief executive Sarah Krevans said she deeply regretted the situation but “mistakes do happen.”

In an April 27 court filing, Sutter’s lawyers criticized the state for piggybacking onto the grocery workers’ case. “The government sat on its hands for seven years, exposing the public to the alleged anticompetitive conduct. … Rather than driving the agenda, the Attorney General seeks to ride coattails.”

Outside court, California legislators are taking aim at “all or nothing” contracting terms used by Sutter and other hospital chains. The proposed law stalled last year amid opposition from the hospital industry. But consumer and labor groups are seeking to revive it this year.

In the meantime, Frizzell said he will probably wind up at one of Sutter’s hospitals again despite his disgust over his ER bill. “Most of the hospitals here are Sutter,” he said. “It’s difficult to avoid them.”

Cartoon – If at first you don’t succeed (Today’s Version)

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When M&As Go Wrong

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Considering a merger? Make sure the prospective partner’s financial liabilities and operational challenges are apparent by the time the due diligence phase is completed.

When providers identify a potential M&A candidate and perform due diligence, there are no guarantees that a formal agreement will be concluded. In fact, there are a number of financial and operational ways that a potential deal can be derailed.

According to the 2018 HealthLeaders Media Mergers, Acquisitions, and Partnerships Survey, respondents report that the top three financial reasons an M&A involving their organization was abandoned before or during the due diligence phase are concerns about assumption of liabilities (21%), costs to support the transaction were too high (19%), and concerns about price (19%).

Note that the full extent of a prospective organization’s financial liabilities may not be apparent until the due diligence phase is completed, which may explain why this aspect plays a major role as a deal breaker.

Operational challenges

Respondents say that the top three operational reasons that an M&A involving their organization was abandoned before or during the due diligence phase are incompatible cultures (30%), concerns about governance (24%), and concerns about the operational transition plan (21%).

Interestingly, based on net patient revenue, a greater share of large organizations (47%) than small (25%) and medium (17%) organizations mention incompatible cultures, an indication of some of the challenges providers face when integrating large organizations with disparate cultures.

Pamela Stoyanoff, MBA, CPA, FACHE, executive vice president, chief operating officer at Methodist Health System, a Dallas-based nonprofit integrated healthcare network with 10 hospitals and 28 family health centers, says that organizational culture exists both at the senior leadership level as well as throughout an organization, and problems can arise because sometimes they can be different.

“You have two senior leadership teams sitting in a room trying to agree on deal points and reach a philosophical agreement. Oftentimes, you have cultural compatibility at the senior level (those who are consummating the deal) but find that culture throughout the remaining levels of the organization is not as conducive to a merger. That is something you don’t necessarily see until later, after the deal is done,” she says.

 

How to Make a Dent in Crazy-High Drug Prices

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https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-11/high-drug-prices-can-be-lowered-without-government-controls

 

Some of the most expensive medicines are among the least effective. Why does that make sense?

There’s no good reason to pay a lot for prescription drugs that don’t work well. But that’s what lots of Americans are doing.

Some drug prices far outweigh any reasonable measure of the drug’s benefit. This is frequently the case for new cancer therapies. For example, the cancer drug Erbitux costs about $10,000 per month and extends life by an average of about three months when used to treat patients with recurrent or metastatic squamous-cell carcinoma of the head and neck. And the launch price of new cancer drugs is going up 12 percent a year even though the drugs aren’t getting commensurately better. In one recent estimate, the cost of extending a cancer patient’s life by one year is increasing by $8,500 every year.

Some drugs for non-cancer conditions are also unreasonably expensive. The cystic fibrosis drugs Kalydeco, Orkambi and Symdeko each cost almost $1 million for each year of extended life in reasonably good health. (Though there is debate on this point, spending more than about $200,000 per year of life extension is generally considered pricey by health-care economists.)

The mismatch of drug prices and benefits results from a peculiar confluence of American health-care practices, reinforced by American health-care politics. Though political leaders, including President Donald Trump, frequently rail against high drug prices, there has been no meaningful government action on the issue, something that could change with the president’s promised announcement on the issue.

The U.S. health-care system relies heavily on insurance companies. They help determine drug prices by deciding what they’ll cover and how. When faced with requests to pay extremely high prices for new drugs that don’t have good substitutes, they have only two choices: decline to cover the drug, or impose high cost-sharing and other restrictions on patients. Both approaches reduce patients’ access to the drug as well as the drug manufacturer’s potential profit.

There’s no formal mechanism to determine whether a drug manufacturer should accept a lower price for a larger market, which would in turn encourage insurers to cover the drug for more patients.

That’s because Americans have been reluctant to weigh the cost of a lifesaving drug against its practical benefits, as if doing so would become an unseemly exercise in putting a price on human life. Unlike speed limits, industrial-safety rules and other measures that trade off safety and cost — a 20-mile-an-hour speed limit on interstate highways would save many lives, after all — medical technology is thought to be exempt from cost-benefit calculation.

Now that’s beginning to change. Drug manufacturers and payers are starting to consider — and in a few cases, implement — innovative contracts that ground drug prices in the value those drugs provide. But not all such arrangements are as good as they seem.

Approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2017, Amgen Inc.’s Repatha was the first of a new class of biologic drugs intended to reduce heart attacks and strokes. After accounting for the discounts that insurers obtain in negotiations with drug manufacturers, Repatha’s price was about $9,000 per year, nearly twice the average health-insurance premium for a working-age adult. But Amgen cut a deal with the insurer Harvard Pilgrim to rebate the price paid for the drug for any patient that had a heart attack or stroke while using it.

This deal sounds great — why pay for a drug if it doesn’t work? — but there’s less to it than meets the eye. About 7 percent of patients taking the drug are expected to have a heart attack or stroke, so Amgen won’t be on the hook for many rebates. The net effect of the outcomes-based contract is the equivalent to, at most, a few hundred dollars in price reduction. Amgen was probably convinced that this level of discount was worth the good publicity it got from the deal, but it’s peanuts relative to the $9,000 price tag.

This is typical of other contracts that attempt to link payment to the benefits provided. A survey of them in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law pointed to another reason drug manufacturers may be reluctant to reduce prices to private insurers: regulations require Medicaid programs to receive discounts at least as large as those afforded to private insurers.

But the biggest problem is that it’s hard to generate enough reliable cost-effectiveness information to give insurers the leverage to say “no” to unreasonably expensive drugs. Any insurer that tries will open itself up to attack from pharmaceutical manufacturers and patient-advocacy organizations. By statute, Medicare cannot consider costs when it makes coverage decisions, so it has no incentive to lead in this area. Any insurer that does the work on its own to make cost-effectiveness part of its coverage decisions would be generating information at its own expense that another insurer could copy for free.

The nonprofit and privately financed Institute for Clinical and Economic Review 1 has proposed a way to solve that problem. Largely funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, 2 it is an independent organization that weighs the benefits of medical technologies against their prices.

For each new drug that comes to market, the organization conducts a clinical and economic analysis that’s available to the public. It then suggests to payers and manufacturers a price range that’s aligned with benefits and budgets.

There’s evidence that the exercise is helping insurers cut better deals. For example, Dupixent, the first cure for eczema, was expected to launch last year at a price of $60,000 per year of treatment. At a cost this high, many insurers would have imposed onerous cost-sharing requirements on patients before covering it.

Instead, Dupixent manufacturers Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Sanofi sought a value-based price from ICER before setting the list price for the drug. Then, during negotiations with payers, the companies argued that the outside assessment established a fair price that warranted lower cost sharing and fewer barriers for patient access.

A similar story arose with Praluent, for high cholesterol. Regeneron and Sanofi struck a deal with the pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts to reduce Praluent’s price to one that ICER believed aligned better with benefits. In exchange, patients will get easier access to the drug.

By providing cost-effectiveness analysis to the market, ICER is not facilitating what many patient advocates and drug manufacturers fear — reducing access to lifesaving treatments. Instead, it is helping to expand it through voluntary exchange in a market, not government price control.

Bringing information to the market that demonstrates that proposed launch prices are way out of line may shame drug manufacturers into coming to the bargaining table. Working with payers to remove barriers to access in exchange for lower prices helps seal the deal. It’s a carrot and stick approach that addresses the worst drug-pricing excesses. Finally.