This week we caught up with a benefits consultant colleague to get her perspective on how employers are thinking about health benefits as they come out of the pandemic. “It seems like employers and health systems have switched places in their enthusiasm for direct contracting,” she shared.
Prior to the pandemic, employer interest in working directly with a health system around a narrow network product to deliver coordinated care was growing, but there were few systems offering attractive solutions. Now more health systems are ready, but the number of employees working remotely has created a new obstacle for direct contracting.
One chief people officer for a large employer noted that while some employees have relocated permanently, others are still hopping from one Airbnb to another: “It’s at the point where I have no idea where half of our people are living on any given day.” In this new “employee diaspora”, some firms are seeing ten percent or more of their formerly office-based workforce now located outside the market, creating challenges for a geographically concentrated network to meet their needs.
How many companies will allow permanent telework, and how many employees will take them up on it, remains to be seen (our colleague suggested we’ll know more in the fall, after the return to school anchors many families in place). But for now, the best employer partners for direct contracting efforts are likely mid-sized regional employers, who are more likely to retain a local workforce, and face fewer obstacles to making benefit design changes.
A topic that’s come up in almost every discussion we’ve had with health system executive teams and boards recently is workforce strategy. Beyond the immediate political debate about whether temporary unemployment benefits are exacerbating a shortage of workers, there’s a growing recognition that the healthcare workforce is approaching something that looks like a “perfect storm”.
The workforce is mentally and physically exhausted from the pandemic, which has taken a toll both professionally and personally. Many workers are rethinking their work-life balance equations in the wake of a difficult year, during which working conditions and family responsibilities shifted dramatically. That, along with broader economic inflation, is driving demands for higher wages and a more robust set of benefits.
Meanwhile, many health systems are shifting into cost-cutting mode, due to COVID-related shifts in demand patterns and continued downward pressure on reimbursement rates, forcing a renewed focus on workforce productivity.
These combined forces threaten to create a negative spiral, which could lead to even worse shortages and deteriorating workplace engagement. It’s striking how quickly the “hero” narrative has shifted to a “crisis” narrative, and we agree completely with one health system board member who told us recently that workforce strategy is now the number one issue on his agenda.
No easy answers here, but we’ll continue to report on innovative approaches to addressing these difficult challenges.
During Pride Month we feel it’s especially important to shine a light on the significant health disparities faced by transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals.
Transgender healthcare has been under growing attack in recent months; while the Biden administration formally reinstated Affordable Care Act protections for transgender Americans against discrimination in healthcare, 20 states have introduced anti-trans bills since the start of the year, most featuring provisions that bar physicians from providing trans children with gender-affirming care.
The graphic above shows that transgender individuals are twice as likely as the broader LGBTQ+ population to delay care for fear of discrimination. Trans individuals deal with myriad types of medical discrimination, from being misgendered in routine interactions to being denied treatment. And trans people of color report experiencing this mistreatment even more frequently. Transgender people are also more likely to be uninsured or to delay care for financial reasons, in part because their unemployment and uninsured rates are higher than the national average. Even when they do find supportive providers, nearly 40 percent report that their insurance will not cover essential elements of transitional care, such as hormone therapy.
It’s incumbent on doctors and health systems to strengthen their policies for treating trans individuals. Trans-specific training for clinicians and staff is a great place to start. Even simple shifts in operations—like including preferred name and pronouns on patient records and providing equal access to public restrooms—are small but important steps to providing a safer, more inclusive healthcare experience and reducing transgender health disparities.
Ballad Health, a not-for-profit health system operating in Virginia and Tennessee, announced this week that it had reached an agreement with RIP Medical Debt, a charity that uses donations to relieve debt created by healthcare bills, to pay off $287M of outstanding debt owed by its patients.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the purchase will eliminate the debt of 82,000 low-income patients, many of whom qualified for Ballad’s charity care program but did not take advantage of it. The terms of the purchase were not disclosed, but RIP Medical Debt, which says it has relieved over $4.5B in medical debt nationally, typically pays between one and 1.25 percent of the owed amount for recent debt, and as little as 0.03 percent for older debt. That’s similar to what typical debt-purchasing businesses pay. But unlike those businesses, however, RIP Medical Debt says its debt eradication service has no tax consequences for recipients, effectively wiping away large sums that patients might have owed for years.
Since its creation as the result of a 2018 merger, Ballad has faced a mandate to increase the financial aid it provides to low-income patients, but has still come under criticism for aggressive collection practices, including the use of lawsuits against patients who owe the system. The deal with RIP Medical Debt is intended to reduce the amount of debt outstanding—as Ballad CEO Alan Levine told the Journal, “We’re wiping the slate clean.”
As a recent analysis by Axios and Johns Hopkins University showed,most nonprofit hospital systems have tried to reduce aggressive collections in recent years, with just 10 hospitals accounting for 97 percent of court actions against patients between 2018 and 2020. While it’s shocking to hear of a private charity having to step in to relieve patients of crippling medical debt in our nation’s $3.6T healthcare industry, absent larger structural solutions to the broken reimbursement system, it’s at least heartening to know that such services are available. But it’s a Band-Aid solution—more radical treatment remains undelivered.
On Thursday, Grand Rapids-based Spectrum Health and Southfield-based Beaumont Health signed a letter of intent to merge, in a combination that would create a 22-hospital, $12B company that would become Michigan’s largest health system.
Spectrum CEO Tina Freese Decker will lead the combined company, while Beaumont CEO John Fox will assist with the merger, then depart. The proposed deal would not only create a system spanning much of Michigan, but would also allow for theexpansion of Spectrum’s health plan, Priority Health, which accounted for more than $5B of the system’s $8B in revenue, into the Detroit market.
This is the third proposed merger since 2019 for Beaumont, which saw its planned combinations with Ohio-based Summa Health fall apart early in the pandemic; the system’s planned merger with Illinois-based Advocate-Aurora Health was called off in 2020 amid pushback from the system’s medical staff. Both deals fell apart due to challenges in communication and cultural compatibility—which will likely also be the greatest potential stumbling blocks for a Spectrum-Beaumont partnership.
The recently abandoned combination between NC-based Cone Health and VA-based Sentara Healthcare also appears to have fallen apart due to cultural challenges, as have many other recent health system deals. Yet despite a string of cautionary tales, health system mergers continue apace—a sign of the pressure industry players are under to seek scale in order to contend with the growing ranks of disruptive (and well-funded) competitors.
Ruling by a decisive 7-2 margin, in what dissenting Justice Samuel Alito described as the third in “our epic Affordable Care Act trilogy”, the Supreme Court rejected the latest—and likely the last—effort to overturn the 2010 health reform law. Holding that the states and individuals that brought the latest challenge to the law did not have “standing”—the legal right to sue—the high court effectively closed the book on a decade-long series of challenges to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Those efforts have included two previous Supreme Court cases, numerous promises to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, and the neutering of the law’s “individual mandate” to buy health insurance, which led to this latest case, Texas v. California.
At issue in the case was whether, by zeroing out the penalty for not purchasing insurance, Congress effectively removed the ACA’s status as a taxation measure, which the Court had previously held as central to the constitutionality of the law. In Alito’s dissenting opinion, the full implications of the issue are laid out: in his view, by invalidating the mandate, Congress rendered the entire law unconstitutional, meaning that it should be overturned. But a majority of seven Justices, including Kavanaugh and Barrett (both appointed by President Trump) disagreed, joining Justice Breyer in his opinion thatno harm had been done to the states that brought the suit, and ordering that the case be returned to the lower court for dismissal.
More than ten years after the passage of the ACA, it now (finally) seems as though the law is here to stay. Bolstering its central provisions—subsidized individual insurance coverage, expanded Medicaid benefits, protections for those who purchase insurance—is a centerpiece of the Biden administration’s policy program, featured first in the American Rescue Plan Act, and now in the recovery legislation currently being debated. Republicans, who had long opposed the ACA, barely mentioned it during the last presidential campaign, instead turning their focus to thwarting Democrats’ plans to expand coverage by lowering the Medicare eligibility age or implementing a government-run “public option”.
Given the evenly split makeup of the Senate, however, we continue to believe the greatest hurdle such proposals will face is not Republican opposition, but reluctance on the part of conservative Democrats, like Sen. Joe Manchin (WV), whose votes will be needed for any legislation to pass.
With the Supreme Court calling a third strike against challenges to the ACA, and the new administration eager to advance its other priorities (infrastructure, childcare, jobs), for the first time in over a decade, we might just be in for a period of relative calm on the healthcare policy front.
In what has become something of a Washington tradition, the Supreme Court again upheld the Affordable Care Act on Thursday, in the third major case from Republican challengers to reach the high court.
The margin this time was larger, 7-2, as the High Court appears less and less interested in revisiting the health care law through the judiciary.
Democrats hailed the ruling as a boost to their signature law, and Republicans were left to figure out a path forward on health care amid another defeat.
Here are five takeaways:
This could be the last gasp of repeal efforts
It is impossible to ever fully rule out another lawsuit challenging the health law or another repeal push if Republicans win back Congress.
But after more than 10 years of fighting the Affordable Care Act, GOP efforts at fighting the law are seriously deflated, as many Republicans themselves acknowledge.
“It’s been my public view for some time that the Affordable Care Act is largely baked into the health care system in a way that it’s unlikely to change or be eliminated,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (Mo.), a member of Senate GOP leadership.
Asked if he still wanted to repeal and replace the law, which was the GOP rallying cry for years, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said instead, “I think I want to make sure it works,” before attacking former President Obama’s promises about the law’s benefits.
Even Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who helped bring the lawsuit against the health law as attorney general of Missouri, said Thursday that the Supreme Court had made clear “they’re not going to entertain a constitutional challenge to the ACA.”
Supporters of the law said it is now even more entrenched, despite years of GOP attacks.
“The war appears to be over and the Affordable Care Act has won,” said Stan Dorn, senior fellow at the health care advocacy group Families USA.
Still, not all Republicans are throwing in the towel on at least verbally attacking the law.
“The ruling does not change the fact that Obamacare failed to meet its promises and is hurting hard-working American families,” said House GOP leaders Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Steve Scalise (La.) and Elise Stefanik (N.Y.).
And there is at least one ACA-related lawsuit still working its way through the lower courts. Kelley v. Becerra challenges provisions of the health law around insurance plans covering preventive care including birth control.
The Supreme Court was fairly united
The margin of victory for the health law was fairly large, with even more conservative justices such as Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts ruling to uphold the law, joining the opinion from liberal Justice Stephen Breyer.
The court’s other two liberals, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, also joined the majority of seven. Two conservatives, Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, dissented and would have struck down the law.
Through the three major Supreme Court cases on ObamaCare, the margin of victory has risen from 5-4 to 6-3 to 7-2.
“There’s a real message there about the Supreme Court’s willingness to tolerate these kinds of lawsuits,” Andy Pincus, a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, said of the growing margin of victory.
The case was decided on fairly technical grounds. The Court ruled that the challengers did not have standing to sue, given that the penalty for not having health insurance at the center of the case had been reduced to zero, so it was not causing any actual harm that could be the basis for a lawsuit.
Republicans did get some vindication in that Democrats had fiercely attacked Barrett during her confirmation hearings for being a vote to overturn the health law, when in fact she ended up voting to maintain the law.
The ACA is stabilizing
The early years of the Affordable Care Act were marked with the turbulence of a website that failed at launch, premium increases, and major insurers dropping out of the markets given financial losses.
Now, though, the markets are far more stable. For example, 78 percent of ACA enrollees now have the choice of three or more insurers, up from 57 percent in 2017, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Democrats, now in control of the House, Senate and White House, were able to pass earlier this year expansions of the law’s financial assistance to help further bring down premium costs.
The Biden administration announced earlier this month that a record 31 million people were covered under the ACA, including both the private insurance marketplaces and the expansion of Medicaid.
“We are no longer in the Affordable Care Act, ‘How’s it going to go? Is it going to survive?’ mode,” said Frederick Isasi, executive director of Families USA. “We really are in a whole new phase. It really is: ‘How do we improve it?’”
Republicans face questions on their health care message
The Republican health care message for years was summed up with the simple slogan “repeal and replace.”
But now those efforts have failed in Congress, in 2017, and have failed for a third time in the courts.
That leaves uncertainty about what the Republican health care message is. The party has famously struggled to unite around an alternative to the ACA, so there is no consensus alternative for the party to turn to.
The statement from McCarthy, Scalise, and Stefanik calling the ACA “failed,” shows that party leaders are not fully ready to accept the law.
The leaders added that “House Republicans are committed to actually lowering health care costs,” which has been a possible area for the party to focus that is not simply about repealing the ACA.
But any discussion of health care costs is fraught with complications. Republicans, for example, overwhelmingly oppose House Democrats’ legislation to allow the government to negotiate lower drug prices, arguing it would harm innovation from the pharmaceutical industry.
Grassley reached a bipartisan deal on somewhat less sweeping drug pricing legislation with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) in 2019, but that bill went too far for many Republicans as well.
Democrats want to go farther, but face an uphill climb
With the ACA further entrenched, and control of the House, Senate and White House, Democrats are looking at ways to build on the health law.
The main health care proposal from the presidential campaign, a government-run “public option” for health insurance, has faded from the conversation and is not expected to be a part of a major legislative package on infrastructure and other priorities Democrats are pushing for this year.
While the health care industry has largely made its peace with the ACA, pushing for a public option or lowering health care costs means taking on a fight with powerful industry groups.
Progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have instead poured their energy into expanding Medicare benefits to include dental, vision, and hearing coverage, and lowering the eligibility age to 60.
Allowing the government to negotiate lower drug prices also could make it into the package.
“Now, we’re going to try to make it bigger and better — establish, once and for all, affordable health care as a basic right of every American citizen,” said Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.). “What a day.”
HENRY KOTULA 