Category Archives: Capitation

The genetic paradox: Yesterday’s solutions are today’s problems. Can U.S. healthcare shift gear faster than our genes?

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In a world where change is the only constant, the swift currents of modern life contrast starkly with the sluggish pace of genetic evolution—and of American healthcare, too.

Two relatively recent scientific discoveries demonstrate how the very genetic traits that once secured humanity’s survival are failing to keep up with the times, producing dire medical consequences. These important biological events offer insights into American medicine—along with a warning about what can happen when healthcare systems fail to change.

The Mysteries Of Sickle Cell And Multiple Sclerosis

For decades, scientists were baffled by what seemed like an evolutionary contradiction.

Sickle cell disease is a condition resulting from a genetic mutation that produces malformed red blood cells. It afflicts approximately 1 in 365 Black Americans, causing severe pain and organ failure.

Its horrific impact on people raises a question: How has this genetic mutation persisted for 7,300 years? Nature is a merciless editor of life, and so you would expect that across seven millennia, people with this inherited problem would be less likely to survive and reproduce. This curiosity seems to defy the teachings of Charles Darwin, who theorized that evolution discards what no longer serves the survival of a species.

Scientists solved this genetic puzzle in 2011, illuminating a significant evolutionary trade-off.

People living with sickle cell disease have two abnormal genes, one inherited from each parent. While the disease, itself, affects a large population (roughly 100,000 African Americans), it turns out that a far larger population in the United States carries one “abnormal” gene and one normal gene (comprising as many as 3 million Americans).

This so called “sickle cell trait” presents milder symptoms or none at all when compared to the full disease. And, unlike those with the disease, individuals who with one (but not both) abnormal genes possess a distinct evolutionary advantage: They have a resistance to severe malaria, which every year claims more than 600,000 lives around the globe.

This genetic adaptation (a resistance to malaria) kept people alive for many millennia in equatorial Africa, protecting them from the continent’s deadliest infectious disease. But in present-day America, malaria is not a major public-health concern due to several factors, including the widespread use of window screens and air conditioning, controlled and limited habitats for the Anopheles mosquitoes (which transmit the disease), and a strong healthcare system capable of managing and containing outbreaks. Therefore, the sickle cell trait is of little value in the United States while sickle cell disease is a life-threatening problem.

The lesson: Genetic changes beneficial in one environment, such as malaria-prone areas, can become harmful in another. This lesson isn’t limited to sickle cell disease.

A similar genetic phenomenon was uncovered through research that was published last month in Nature. This time, scientists discovered an ancient genetic mutation that is, today, linked to multiple sclerosis (MS).

Their research began with data showing that people living in Northern Europe have twice the number of cases of MS per 100,000 individuals as people in the South of Europe. Like sickle cell disease, MS is a terrible affliction—with immune cells attacking neurons in the brain, interfering with both walking and talking.

Having identified this two-fold variance in the prevalence of MS, scientists compared the genetic make-up of the people in Europe with MS versus those without this devastating problem. And they discovered a correlation between a specific mutated gene and the risk of developing MS. Using archeological material, the researchers then connected the introduction of this gene into Northern Europe with cattle, goat and sheep herders from Russia who migrated west as far back as 5,000 years ago.

Suddenly, the explanation comes into focus. Thousands of years ago, this genetic abnormality helped protect herders from livestock disease, which at the time was the greatest threat to their survival. However, in the modern era, this same mutation results in an overactive immune response, leading to the development of MS.

Once again, a trait that was positive in a specific environmental and historical context has become harmful in today’s world.

Evolving Healthcare: Lessons From Our Genes

Just as genetic traits can shift from beneficial to detrimental with changing circumstances, healthcare practices that were once lifesaving can become problematic as medical capabilities advance and societal needs evolve.

Fee-for-service (FFS) payments, the most prevalent reimbursement model in American healthcare, offer an example. Under FFS, insurance providers, the government or patients themselves pay doctors and hospitals for each individual service they provide, such as consultations, tests, and treatments—regardless of the value these services may or may not add.

In the 1930s, this “mutation” emerged as a solution to the Great Depression. Organizations like Blue Cross began providing health insurance, ensuring healthcare affordability for struggling Americans in need of hospitalization while guaranteeing appropriate compensation for medical providers.

FFS, which linked payments to the quantity of care delivered, proved beneficial when the problems physicians treated were acute, one-time issues (e.g., appendicitis, trauma, pneumonia) and relatively inexpensive to resolve.

Today, the widespread prevalence of chronic diseases in 6 out of 10 Americans underlines the limitations of the fee-for-service (FFS) model. In contrast to “pay for value” models, FFS, with its “pay for volume” approach, fails to prioritize preventive services, the avoidance of chronic disease complications, or the elimination of redundant treatments through coordinated, team-based care. This leads to increased healthcare costs without corresponding improvements in quality.

This situation is reminiscent of the evolutionary narrative surrounding genetic mutations like sickle cell disease and MS. These mutations, which provided protective benefits in the past, have become detrimental in the present. Similarly, healthcare systems must adapt to the evolving medical and societal landscape to better meet current needs.

Research demonstrates that it takes 17 years on average for a proven innovation in healthcare to become common practice. When it comes to evolution of healthcare delivery and financing, the pace of change is even more glacial.

In 1934, the Committee on the Cost of Medical Care (CCMC) concluded that better clinical outcomes would be achieved if doctors (a) worked in groups rather than as fragmented solo practices and (b) were paid based on the value they provided, rather than just the volume of work they did.

Nearly a century later, these improvements remain elusive. Well-led medical groups remain the minority of all practices while fee-for-service is still the dominant healthcare reimbursed method.

Things progress slowly in the biological sphere because chance is what initiates change. It takes a long time for evolution to catch up to new environments.

But change in healthcare doesn’t have to be random or painfully slow. Humans have a unique ability to anticipate challenges and proactively implement solutions. Healthcare, unlike biology, can advance rapidly in response to new medical knowledge and societal needs. We have the opportunity to leverage our knowledge, technology, and collaborative skills to address and adapt to change much faster than random genetic mutations. But it isn’t happening.

Standing in the way is a combination of fear (of the risks involved), culture (the norms doctors learn in training) and lack of leadership (the ability to translate vision into action).

Genetics teaches us that evolution ultimately triumphs. Mutations that save lives and improve health become dominant in nature over time. And when those adaptations no longer serve a useful purpose, they’re replaced.

I hope the leaders of American medicine will learn to adapt, embracing the power of collaborative medicine while replacing fee-for-service payments with capitation (a single annual payment to group of clinicians to provide the medical care for a population of patients.) If they wait too long, dinosaurs will provide them with the next set of biological lessons.

Retail giants vs. health systems: Fight will come down to ‘system-ness’

Posted on by • Posted in Capitation, Chronic Care Management, Continuous Care, Disease Management, Disruption, Disruptive Technology, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Innovation, Innovative Care Models, Retail Healthcare, Specialized Medicine, Systemness, Value-Based Contracting, Value-Based Healthcare • Leave a comment

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Value-based healthcare, the holy grail of American medicine, has three parts: excellent clinical quality, convenient access and affordability for all.

And as with the holy grail of medieval legend, the quest for value-based care has been filled with failure.

In the 20th century, U.S. medical groups and hospital systems could—at best—achieve two elements of value-based care, but always at the sacrifice of the third. Until recently, American medicine lacked the clinical knowhow, technology and operational excellence to accomplish all three, simultaneously. We now have the tools. The only thing missing is “system-ness.”

What Is System-ness?

System-ness is the effective and efficient coordination of healthcare’s many parts: outpatient and inpatient, primary and specialty care, financing and care delivery, prevention and treatment.

By bringing these disparate pieces together within a well-functioning system, healthcare providers have the opportunity to maximize clinical outcomes, weed out waste, lower overall costs and provide greater levels of convenience and access.

Who Are The Search Parties? 

In the future, system-ness will be the variable that determines whether healthcare transformation is led by (a) incumbent health systems like Kaiser Permanente and Geisinger Health or (b) the retail giants like Amazon, CVS and Walmart. The latter group has become an ever-growing threat in the healthcare arms race, quickly amassing their own (though still modest) systems of care through billion-dollar acquisitions.

Although both the incumbents and new entrants will struggle to implement value-based care on a national scale, the victor stands to earn hundreds of billions of dollars in added revenue and tens of billions in profits.

To better understand the power of system-ness, and the challenges all organizations will face in providing it, here are three examples of value-based-care solutions implemented successfully by Kaiser Permanente.

1. Preventing Problems, Managing Disease

Research demonstrates that preventive medicine and early intervention reduce heart attacks, strokes and cancer. Yet our nation falls far short in these areas when compared to its global peers.

One example is hypertension, the leading cause of strokes and a major contributor to heart attacks. With help from doctors, nearly all patients can keep high blood pressure under control. Yet, nationally, hypertension is controlled only 60% of the time.

We see similarly poor rates of performance when it comes to prevention and screening for cancers of the colon, breast and lung.

Undoing these troubling trends requires system-ness. In Kaiser Permanente, 90% of patients had their blood pressure controlled and were screened for cancer. Getting there required a comprehensive electronic health record, a willingness for every doctor (regardless of specialty) to focus on prevention, leadership that communicated the value of prevention and a salary structure that rewarded group excellence.

2. Continuous Care, Without Interruption  

Most doctors’ offices are open Monday to Friday during normal business hours—only one-fourth of the time that a medical problem might occur.

At night and on weekends, patients have no choice but to visit ERs. There, they often wait hours for care, surrounded by people with communicable diseases. Their non-emergent problems generate bills 12-times higher than if they’d waited to be seen in a doctor’s office.

There’s a better way. In large-enough medical groups, hundreds of clinicians can provide round-the-clock care on a rotating, virtual basis—using video to assess patients and make evidence-based recommendations.

This approach, pioneered by physicians in the Mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical group, solved the patient’s problem immediately 70% of the time without a trip to the ER and, for the other 30%, enabled coordination of medical care with the ER staff.

3. Specialized Medicine, Immediate Attention

When a primary care physician needs added expertise (from a dermatologist, urologist or orthopedist), it’s usually the responsibility of the patient to make their own specialty appointments, check with insurance for coverage and provide their medical records.

This takes hours or days to coordinate and can delay care by weeks, resulting in avoidable complications.

But in a well-structured system, there’s no need to wait. Using telehealth tools at Kaiser Permanente, primary care doctors can connect instantly with dozens of different specialists—often while the patient is still in the exam room. Once connected, the specialist evaluates the patient and provides immediate expertise.

This way, care is not only faster and less expensive, but also better coordinated. Data from within Kaiser Permanente show that these virtual consultations resolve the patient’s problem 40% of the time without having to schedule another appointment. For the other 60%, the diagnostic process can begin immediately.

The Foundations For System-ness

Few organizations in the U.S. can or do offer these system-based improvements. Doing so requires skilled physician leadership, a shift in the financial model and a willingness to accept risk.

In fact, most organizations across the U.S. that claim to operate “value-based” systems actually rely on doctors who are scattered across the community, disconnected from each other and paid on the basis of volume (fee-for-service) rather than value (capitation).

As a result, patient care is fragmented and uncoordinated, leading to repeated tests and ineffective treatments, thus increasing medical costs and compromising medical outcomes.

Value-based care (superior quality, access and affordability) requires teams of clinicians working together as one—all paid on a capitated basis.

Without capitation, dermatologists will insist on seeing every patient in their office where they can bill insurance five-times more than with a tele-dermatology visit. And gastroenterology specialists will insist that all patients have colonoscopy rather than recommending low-risk patients do a safe, convenient, at-home colon cancer screening (called a fecal immunochemical test or “FIT”) at 5% of the cost.

In these cases, individual doctors don’t consciously make care inconvenient for patients. Rather, it is the only choice they have when working in a fee-for-service payment model. Ultimately, system-ness is best achieved when health systems are integrated, prepaid, tech-enabled and physician-led. 

Amazon, CVS, Walmart Know About Systems

These three companies are global leaders in “system-ness,” at least in retail. Combined, they have a market cap of $1.88 trillion, employ 3.4 million Americans and are looking to take a slice of U.S. healthcare’s $4.3 trillion annual expenditures.

Already, they manage complex order-entry and fulfillment systems. They use technology to streamline everything from customer service to supply-chain management. They are led through a clear and effective reporting structure.

In terms of competing for healthcare’s holy grail, these are huge competitive advantages compared to today’s uncoordinated, individualized, leaderless healthcare industry.

As retailers vie to bring their system knowhow to American medicine, they are acquiring the pieces needed to compete with the healthcare incumbents. They’ve spent tens of billions of dollars on medical groups that are committed to value-based care (One Medical, Oak Street Health, etc.). They’ve also spent massive sums on home-health companies (Signify) and on pharmacies (PillPak), along with expanding their in-store, at-home and online care options. Many of these care-delivery subsidiaries are focused on Medicare Advantage, the capitated half of Medicare where financial success is dependent on high quality medical care provided at lower cost.

What’s more, all these retailers have a national presence with brick-and mortar facilities in nearly every community in the country—a leg up on nearly every existing health system.

Who Will Win—And Why?

Trying to pick the victor in the battle to transform American medicine at this point is like selecting the winner of a heavy-weight championship boxing match after three evenly matched rounds. Intangibles like stamina, courage and willingness to absorb pain have yet to be tested.  

In The Innovator’s Dilemma, the late Clayton Christensen examined historical battles between incumbent organizations and new entrants. After analyzing dozens of industries, he concluded new entrants routinely become the victors because the incumbents move too slowly and fail to embrace the need for major change.

And from that perspective, if I had to wager, I’d put my money on the retail giants.

But there’s an even more worrisome potential outcome: neither those inside nor outside of healthcare will make the necessary investments or accept the risk of leading systemic change. As a result, the movement toward value-based healthcare will stall and die.

In that context, purchasers of healthcare (businesses, the government and patients) will encounter a difficult reality: over the next eight years, medical costs will nearly double, creating an unaffordable and unsustainable scenario. As a result, our nation will likely experience reduced medical coverage, increased rationing, ever-longer delays for care and a growth in health disparities.

If that day arrives, our country will regret its inaction.

What Kaiser’s Acquisition Of Geisinger Means For Us All

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Healthcare’s most recent billion-dollar deal took the industry by surprise, leaving medical experts and hospital leaders grappling to comprehend its implications.

In case you missed it, California-based Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals, which make up the insurance and facilities half of Kaiser Permanente, announced the acquisition of Geisinger, a Pennsylvania-based health system once acknowledged by President Obama for delivering “high-quality care.”

Upon regulatory approval, Geisinger will become the first organization to join Risant Health, Kaiser Foundation’s newly created $5 billion subsidiary. According to Kaiser, the aim is to build “a portfolio of likeminded, nonprofit, value-oriented, community-based health systems anchored in their respective communities.” 

Having spent 18 years as CEO of The Permanente Medical Group, the half of Kaiser Permanente responsible for the delivery of medical care, I took great interest in the announcement. And I wasn’t alone. My phone rang off the hook for weeks with calls from reporters, policy experts and healthcare executives.

After hundreds of conversations, here are the three most common questions I received about the acquisition—and the implications for doctors, insurers, health-system competitors and patients all over the country.

Question 1: Why did Kaiser acquire Geisinger?

Most callers wanted to know about Kaiser’s motivation, figuring there must’ve been more to the acquisition than the press release indicated. Although I don’t have inside information, I believe they were right. Here’s why:

Kaiser Permanente has a long and ongoing reputation for delivering nation-leading care. The organization has consistently earned the highest quality and patient-satisfaction rankings from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), Leapfrog Group, JD Power and Medicare.

And yet, despite a 78-year history, dozens of hospitals and 13 million members across eight states, Kaiser Permanente is still considered a coastal—not national—health system. It maintains a huge market share in California and a strong presence in the Mid-Atlantic states, yet the organization has failed repeatedly to replicate that success in other geographies.

With that context, I see two compelling reasons why the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals wish to become a national brand:

  1. Influence. Elected officials and regulatory bodies often turn to healthcare’s biggest players to set legislative agendas and carve out national policy. At that table, there are a limited number of seats. By shedding its reputation as a “local” health system, Kaiser could earn one.
  2. Survival. In recent years, companies like Amazon, CVS and Walmart have been scooping up organizations that provide primary care, telehealth, home health and specialty care services. These “retail giants” are spending up to $13 billion per acquisition. And they’re consuming already-successful healthcare companies like One Medical, Oak Street Health, Signify, Pill Pack and many others. Like an army preparing for war, these corporate behemoths are amassing the components needed to battle the traditional healthcare incumbents and ultimately oust them entirely.

The Geisinger deal expands Kaiser’s footprint, adding 600,000 patients, 10 hospitals and 100 specialty and primary care clinics. These assets lend gravitas, even though Geisinger also comes with a 2022 operating loss of $239 million.

The lesson to draw from this first question is clear: size matters. The days of solo physicians and stand-alone hospitals are over. Nostalgia for medicine’s folksy, home-spun past is understandable but futile. To survive, healthcare players must get bigger quickly or team up with someone who can. That insight leads to the next question and lesson.

Question 2: How much value will Kaiser give Geisinger?

Almost everyone I’ve spoken with understands Kaiser’s desire for greater national influence, but they’re less sure how this deal will affect Geisinger Health.

Geisinger’s Pennsylvania-based hospitals and clinics have been locked in territorial battles for years with surrounding health systems. More recently, the pandemic, combined with staffing shortages and national inflation, have challenged Geisinger’s clinical performance and eroded its bottom line.

Assuming Kaiser plans to invest roughly $1 billion in each of the four to five health systems it’s planning to acquire, that surge in cash inflow will provide Geisinger with temporary financial safety. But the bigger question is how will Kaiser improve Geisinger’s value-proposition enough to grow its market share?

In public comments, Kaiser leaders spoke of the acquisition as an opportunity for Risant to “improve the health of millions of people by increasing access to value-based care and coverage, and raising the bar for value-based approaches that prioritize patient quality outcomes.”

Many of the experts I spoke with understand Kaiser’s value intent. But they question how Kaiser can could deliver on that promise since The Permanente Medical Group (TPMG) wasn’t involved in the deal.

If, hypothetically, Kaiser and Permanente leaders were to strike a deal to collaborate in the future, TPMG’s physician leaders could bring tremendous knowledge, experience and expertise to the table. Otherwise, I agree with those who’ve expressed doubt that Kaiser, alone, will be able to significantly improve Geisinger’s clinical performance.

Health plans and insurance companies play an important role in financing medical care. They possess rich data on performance and can offer incentives that boost access to higher-quality care. But insurers don’t work directly with individual doctors to coordinate medical care or advance clinical solutions on behalf of patients. And without strong physician leadership, the pace of positive change slows to a crawl. As a example, research conducted within The Permanente Medical Group found that it takes only three years to turn a proven clinical advance into standard practice—that’s nearly six times faster than the national average.

For decades, the secret sauce for Kaiser Permanente has been the cohesive success of its three parts: Kaiser Health Plan, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and The Permanente Medical Group.

And KP’s results speak for themselves:

  • 90% control of hypertension for members (compared to 60% for the rest of the country)
  • 30% fewer deaths from heart attack and stroke (compared to the rest of the country)
  • 20% fewer deaths from colon cancer

The big lesson: insurance, by itself, doesn’t drive major improvements in medicine. It must be a combined effort between forward-looking insurers and innovative, high-performing clinicians.

But there’s another takeaway here for doctors everywhere: now is the time to join forces with other clinicians in your community. Together, you can collaborate to improve clinical quality. You can augment access and make care more affordable for patients. Simultaneously, this is the time for the insurers and the retail giants to figure out which medical groups can deliver the best care and make the best partners. Neither side will flourish alone. And this leads to a third question and lesson.

Question 3: Will the deal work?

Almost all of my conversations ended with this query. I say it’s too early to tell. But as I look years down the road, one part of the deal, in particular, gives me doubt.

Today, Geisinger uses a hybrid reimbursement model—blending both “value-based” care payments with traditional “fee-for-service” insurance plans. In addition to offering its own coverage, it contracts with a variety of other insurance companies. Rarely have I seen this scattered approach succeed.

Most healthcare observers understand the inherent flaw in the “fee for service” (FFS) model is also its greatest appeal to providers: the more you do the more you earn. FFS is how nearly all financial transactions take place in America (i.e., provide a service, earn a fee). In medicine, however, this financial model results in frequent over-testing and over-treatment with minimal if any improvement in clinical outcomes, according to researchers.

The “value-based” alternative to FFS involves prepaying for care—a model often referred to as “capitation.” In short, capitation involves a single fee, paid upfront for all the medical care provided to a defined population of patients for one year based on their age and health status. The better an organization at preventing disease and avoiding complications from chronic illness, the greater its success in both clinical quality and affordability.

Within the small world of capitated healthcare payments, there’s an important element that often gets overlooked. It makes a big difference who receives that lump-sum payment.

In the case of Kaiser Permanente, capitated payments are made directly to the medical group and the physicians who are responsible for providing care. In almost every other health system, an insurance company collects capitated payments but then pays the medical providers on a fee-for-service basis. Even though the arrangement is referred to as capitated, the incentives are overwhelmingly tied to the volume of care (not the value of that care).

In a mixed-payment model, doctors and hospitals invariably prioritize the higher paying FFS patients over the capitated ones. When I think about these conflicting incentives, I’m reminded of a prominent medical group in California. It had a main entrance for its fee-for-service patients and a second, smaller one off to the side for capitated patients.

I doubt the time spent with the patient—or the overall care provided—was equal for both groups. When income is based on quantity of care, not quality, clinicians focus more on treating the complications of chronic disease and medical errors rather than preventing them in the first place. Geisinger has walked this tightrope in the past, but as economic pressures mount, I fear doctors will find the two sets of incentives conflicting and difficult to navigate.

The big lesson: as financial pressures mount, the most effective approaches of the past will likely fail in the future. All healthcare organizations will need to make a decision: keep trying to drive volume and prices up through FFS or shift to capitation. Getting caught in the middle is a prescription for failure.

Examining the healthcare acquisitions made by Amazon and CVS, it’s clear these giants have decided to move aggressively toward a model more like Kaiser Permanente’s—one that brings insurance, pharmacy, physicians and sophisticated IT systems under one roof. These companies, along with Walmart, are aggressively marching down a path toward capitation, focusing on Medicare Advantage (the value-based option for Americans 65+) as an entry point.

So far, Geisinger has hedged its bets by maintaining a hybrid revenue stream. I doubt they can do so successfully in the future. That brings us to a final question.

The biggest question remaining  

Over the next decade, hospital systems, insurers and retailers will battle for healthcare supremacy. The most recent Kaiser-Geisinger deal reflects an industry that’s undergoing massive change as health systems face intensifying pressure to remain relevant.  

The most important issue to resolve is whether these shifts will ultimately help or harm patients. I’m optimistic for a positive outcome.

Whether or not the retail giants displace the incumbents, they will redefine what it takes to win. For all their faults, companies like Amazon and Walmart care a lot about meeting the needs of customers—a mindset rarely found in today’s healthcare world. As these companies grow ever larger, they’ll place consumer-oriented demands on doctors and hospitals. This will require care providers to deliver higher quality care at more affordable prices.

The retailers will only do deals with the best of the best. And they’ll kick the underachievers to the curb. They’ll use their sophisticated IT systems to better coordinate and innovate medical care. Insurers, hospitals and doctors who fail to keep up will be left behind.

Over time, patients will find themselves with far more choices and control than they have today. And I’m optimistic that will be good for the health of our nation.

15 innovative ideas for fixing healthcare from 15 brilliant minds

Posted on by • Posted in Capitation, Change Agent, Change Mindset, Competition, Disruption, Disruptive Technology, Empowering Patients, Empowerment, Fixing Healthcare, Health Equity, Healthcare Reform, Innovation, Innovative Care Models, Integrated Delivery System, Leadership, Life Expectancy, Medical Education, Mortality, Payment Models, Payment Reform, Physician Burnout, Prior Authorization, Quality of Care, Risk Management, Risk-Based Compensation, Risk-Based Contracting, Social Determinants of Health, Thought Leaders • Leave a comment

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After 18 years as CEO in Kaiser Permanente, I set my sights on improving the heatlh of the nation, hoping to find a way to achieve the same quality, technology and affordability our medical group delivered to 5 million patients on both coasts.

That quest launched the Fixing Healthcare podcast in 2018, and it inspired interviews with dozens of leaders, thinkers and doers, both in and around medicine. These experts shared innovative ideas and proven solutions for achieving (a) superior quality, (b) improved patient access, (c) lower overall costs, and (d) greater patient and clinician satisfaction.

This month, after 150 combined episodes, three questions emerged:

  • Which of the hundreds of ideas presented remain most promising?
  • Why, after five years and so many excellent solutions, has our nation experienced such limited improvements in healthcare?
  • And finally, how will these great ideas become reality?

To answer the first question, I offer 15 of the best Fixing Healthcare recommendations so far. Some quotes have been modified for clarity with links to all original episodes (and transcripts) included.

Fixing the business of medicine

1. Malcolm Gladwell, journalist and five-time bestselling author: “In other professions, when people break rules and bring greater economic efficiency or value, we reward them. In medicine, we need to demonstrate a consistent pattern of rewarding the person who does things better.”

2. Richard Pollack, CEO of the American Hospital Association (AHA): “I hope in 10 years we have more integrated delivery systems providing care, not bouncing people around from one unconnected facility to the next. I would hope that we’re in a position where there’s a real focus on ensuring that people get care in a very convenient way.”

Eliminating burnout

3. Zubin Damania, aka ZDoggMD, hospitalist and healthcare satirist: “In the culture of medicine, specialists view primary care as the weak medical students, the people who couldn’t get the board scores or rotation honors to become a specialist. Because why would you do primary care? It’s miserable. You don’t get paid enough. It’s drudgery. We must change these perceptions.”

4. Devi Shetty, India’s leading heart surgeon and founder of Narayana Health: “When you strive to work for a purpose, which is not about profiting yourself, the purpose of our action is to help society, mankind on a large scale. When that happens, cosmic forces ensure that all the required components come in place and your dream becomes a reality.”

5. Jonathan Fisher, cardiologist and clinician advocate: “The problem we’re facing in healthcare is that clinicians are all siloed. We may be siloed in our own institution thinking that we’re doing it best. We may be siloed in our own specialty thinking that we’re better than others. All of these divides need to be bridged. We need to begin the bridging.” 

Making medicine equitable

6. Jen Gunter, women’s health advocate and “the internet’s OB-GYN”: “Women are not listened to by doctors in the way that men are. They have a harder time navigating the system because of that. Many times, they’re told their pain isn’t that serious or their bleeding isn’t that heavy. We must do better at teaching women’s health in medicine.”

7. Amanda Calhoun, activist, researcher and anti-racism educator: “A 2015 survey showed that white residents and medical students still thought Black people feel less pain, which is wild to me because Black is a race. It’s not biological. This is actually an historical belief that persists. One of the biggest things we can do as the medical system is work on rebuilding trust with the Black community.”

Addressing social determinants of health

8. Don Berwick, former CMS administrator and head of 100,000 Lives campaign: “We know where the money should go if we really want to be a healthy nation: early childhood development, workplaces that thrive, support to the lonely, to elders, to community infrastructures like food security and transportation security and housing security, to anti-racism and criminal-justice reform. But we starve the infrastructures that could produce health to support the massive architecture of intervention.”

9. David T. Feinberg, chairman of Oracle Health: “Twenty percent of whether we live or die, whether we have life in our years and years in our life, is based on going to good doctors and good hospitals. We should put the majority of effort on the stuff that really impacts your health: your genetic code, your zip code, your social environment, your access to clean food, your access to transportation, how much loneliness you have or don’t have.”

Empowering patients

10. Elisabeth Rosenthal, physician, author and editor-in-chief of KHN: “To patients, I say write about your surprise medical bills. Write to a journalist, write to your local newspaper. Hospitals today are very sensitive about their reputations and they do not want to be shamed by some of these charges.”

11. Gordon Chen, ChenMed CMO: “If you think about what leadership really is, it’s influence. Nothing more, nothing less. And the only way to achieve better health in patients is to get them to change their behaviors in a positive way. That behavior change takes influence. It requires primary care physicians to build relationship and earn trust with patients. That is how both doctors and patients can drive better health outcomes.”

Utilizing technology

12. Vinod Khosla, entrepreneur, investor, technologist: “The most expensive part of the U.S. healthcare system is expertise, and expertise can relatively be tamed with technology and AI. We can capture some of that expertise, so each oncologist can do 10 times more patient care than they would on their own without that help.”

13. Rod Rohrich, influential plastic surgeon and social media proponent: “Doctors, use social media to empower your audience, to educate them, and not to overwhelm them. If you approach social media by educating patients about their own health, how they can be better, how can they do things better, how they can find doctors better, that’s a good thing.”

Rethinking medical education

14. Marty Makary, surgeon and public policy researcher: “I would get rid of all the useless sh*t we teach our medical students and residents and fellows. In the 16 years of education that I went through, I learned stuff that has nothing to do with patient care, stuff that nobody needs to memorize.”

15. Eric Topol, cardiologist, scientist and AI expert: “It’s pretty embarrassing. If you go across 150 medical schools, not one has AI as a core curriculum. Patients will get well versed in AI. It’s important that physicians stay ahead, as well.”

Great ideas, but little progress

Since 2018, our nation has spent $20 trillion on medical care, navigated the largest global pandemic in a century and developed an effective mRNA vaccine, nearly from scratch. And yet, despite all this spending and scientific innovation, American medicine has lost ground.  

American life expectancy has dropped while maternal mortality rates have worsened. Clinician burnout has accelerated amid a growing shortage of primary care and emergency medicine physicians. And compared to 12 of its wealthiest global peers, the United States spends nearly twice as much per person on medical care, but ranks last in clinical outcomes.

Guests on Fixing Healthcare generally agree on the causes of stagnating national progress.

Healthcare system giants, including those in the drug, insurance and hospital industries, find it easier to drive up prices than to prevent disease or make care-delivery more efficient. Over the past decade, they’ve formed a conglomerate of monopolies that prosper from the existing rules, leaving them little incentive to innovate on behalf of patients. And in this era of deep partisan divide, meaningful healthcare reforms have not (and won’t) come from Congress.  

Then who will lead the way?

Industry change never happens because it should. It happens when demand and opportunity collide, creating space for new entrants and outsiders to push past the established incumbents. In healthcare, I see two possibilities:   

1. Providers will rally and reform healthcare

Doctors and hospitals are struggling. They’re struggling with declining morale and decreasing revenue. Clinicians are exiting the profession and hospitals are shuttering their doors. As the pain intensifies, medical group leaders may be the ones who decide to begin the process of change.

The first step would be to demand payment reform.

Today’s reimbursement model, fee-for-service, pays doctors and hospitals based on the quantity of care they provide—not the quality of care. This methodology pushes physicians to see more patients, spend less time with them, and perform ever-more administrative (billing) tasks. Physicians liken it to being in a hamster wheel: running faster and faster just to stay in place.

Instead, providers of care could be paid by insurers, the government and self-funded businesses directly, through a model called “capitation.” With capitation, groups of providers receive a fixed amount of money per year. That sum depends on the number of enrollees they care for and the amount of care those individuals are expected to need based on their age and underlying diseases.

This model puts most of the financial risk on providers, encouraging them to deliver high-quality, effective medical care. With capitation, doctors and hospitals have strong financial incentives to prevent illnesses through timely and recommended preventive screenings and a focus on lifestyle-medicine (which includes diet, exercise and stress reduction). They’re rewarded for managing patients’ health and helping them avoid costly complications from chronic diseases, such as heart attacks, strokes and cancer.

Capitation encourages doctors from all specialties to collaborate and work together on behalf of patients, thus reducing the isolation physicians experience while ensuring fewer patients fall through the cracks of our dysfunctional healthcare system. The payment methodology aligns the needs of patients with the interests of providers, which has the power to restore the sense of mission and purpose medicine has lost.

Capitation at the delivery-system level eliminates the need for prior authorization from insurers (a key cause of clinician burnout) and elevates the esteem accorded to primary care doctors (who focus on disease prevention and care coordination). And because the financial benefits are tied to better health outcomes, the capitated model rewards clinicians who eliminate racial and gender disparities in medical care and organizations that take steps to address the social determinants of health.

2. Major retailers will take over

If clinicians don’t lead the way, corporate behemoths like Amazon, CVS and Walmart will disrupt the healthcare system as we know it. These retailers are acquiring the insurance, pharmacy and direct-patient-care pieces needed to squeeze out the incumbents and take over American healthcare.

Each is investing in new ways to empower patients, provide in-home care and radically improve access to both in-person and virtual medicine. Once generative AI solutions like ChatGPT gain enough computing power and users, tech-savvy retailers will apply this tool to monitor patients, enable healthier lifestyles and improve the quality of medical care compared to today.

When Fixing Healthcare debuted five years ago, none of the show’s guests could have foreseen a pandemic that left more than a million dead. But, had our nation embraced their ideas from the outset, many of those lives would have been saved. The pandemic rocked an already unstable and underperforming healthcare system. Our nation’s failure to prevent and control chronic disease resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths from Covid-19. Outdated information technology systems, medical errors and disparities in care caused hundreds of thousands more. As a nation, we could have done much better.

With the cracks in the system widening and the foundation eroding, disruption in healthcare is inevitable. What remains to be seen is whether it will come from inside or outside the U.S. healthcare system.

CMS: Many value-based payment models under review after several already delayed, withdrawn

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https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payer/cms-many-value-based-payment-models-under-review-after-several-already-delayed-withdrawn?mkt_tok=Mjk0LU1RRi0wNTYAAAF7xhFjCYYrcnuVdlm24dWXRCZftR2Lm6UlPap0SiAhXWnzyu3WWglzJ6xCfXgLju2zuEgHFODC9SDIiCXtmLDURzeZB_RU0oW49EyaQlncBiL56gU&mrkid=959610

Many of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation’s value-based care payment models are undergoing a review, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

The statement to Fierce Healthcare comes after CMS quietly updated and delayed several payment models, including pulling a controversial model that ties payments to geographic health outcomes.

“CMS remains steadfast in its commitment to transforming the healthcare system into one that rewards value and care coordination,” the agency said. “The CMS Innovation Center and its alternative payment models help execute that commitment.”

The agency added it hopes to design models that support the adoption of value-based care.

“Many of the CMS Innovation Center’s models are currently under review, and we look forward to providing updates when available,” CMS said.

CMS did not return a request for comment on how many models are under review or which ones are being scrutinized.

The statement comes after CMS has quietly updated the webpages for two payment models to note major changes. The agency made an update to the webpage for the Geographic Direct Contracting Model that said it was currently under review.

A request for applications for the model was posted Jan. 1, and the first performance period was expected to start in 2022 and run through 2024.

The model was intended to improve quality and lower costs for Medicare beneficiaries across a region, and providers in that region can enter into value-based payment arrangements.

Providers can build integrated relationships and invest in population health to better coordinate care, the agency said when the model was released last December.

But the model has gotten pushback from some provider groups. The National Association of Accountable Care Organizations has criticized the model, saying it could confuse patients who may not know whether they are participating in a direct contracting entity.

CMS also quietly pushed back the first performance period for the Kidney Care Choices model, which aims to improve the quality of dialysis care.

The model had an implementation period for 2020 that enabled participants to create the necessary infrastructure for the model, which aims to bundle care from treatment of chronic kidney disease all the way through kidney transplantation and post-transplant care.

Starting Jan. 1, 2021, providers were supposed to start taking on financial accountability including capitated payments.

But CMS posted an update on the webpage for the model, saying the start of the financial performance period will now be Jan. 1, 2022. The agency did not give a reason for the delay.

CMS’ review comes on the heels of a separate analysis conducted under the Trump administration on the value generated by the payment models. The analysis found bundled payment models that gave providers an amount of money for an entire episode of care had mixed results, while global budget models, which give providers a fixed amount for the total number of services given over a certain period of time, were given a more positive review.

It remains unclear whether that analysis is playing any role into the review undertaken by the Biden administration.

Notes for the 39th Annual J.P Morgan Healthcare Conference, 2021

Posted on by • Posted in Biotech, Capitation, Chronic Care Management, Chronic Conditions, Chronic Diseases, Clinical Research, Innovation, Market Consolidation, Medical Group, Medicare Advantage, Mental Health, Mergers & Acquisitions, Pandemic, Pharmaceutical Industry, Pharmacy Benefits Management, Private Equity, Real-Time Claims Adjudication, Real-Time Quality Information, Risk-Based Contracting, Telemedicine, Value-Based Contracting, Value-Based Healthcare • Leave a comment

https://www.sheppardhealthlaw.com/articles/healthcare-industry-news/

2021 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference | Zoetis

Sitting in the dark before 6 am in my Los Angeles house with my face lit up by yet another Zoom screen, wearing a stylish combination of sweatpants, dress shirt and last year’s JPM conference badge dangling around my neck for old times’ sake, I wonder at the fact that it’s J.P. Morgan Annual Healthcare Conference week again and we are where we are. Quite a year for all of us – the pandemic, the healthcare system’s response to the public health emergency, the ongoing fight for racial justice, the elections, the storming of the Capital – and the subject of healthcare winds its way through all of it – public health, our healthcare system’s stability, strengths and weaknesses, the highly noticeable healthcare inequities, the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid and vaccines, healthcare politics and what the new administration will bring as healthcare initiatives.

I will miss seeing you all in person this year at the J.P. Morgan Annual Healthcare Conference and our annual Sheppard Mullin reception – previously referred to as “standing room only” events and now as “possible superspreader events.” What a difference a year makes. I admit that I will miss the feeling of excitement in the rooms and hallways of the Westin St. Francis and all of the many hotel lobbies and meeting rooms surrounding it. Somehow the virtual conference this year lacks that je ne sais quoi of being stampeded by rushing New York-style street traffic while in an antiquated San Francisco hotel hallway and watching the words spoken on stage transform immediately into sharp stock price increases and drops. There also is the excitement of sitting in the room listening to paradigm shifting ideas (teaser – read the last paragraph of this post for something truly fascinating). Perhaps next year, depending on the vaccine…

So, let’s start there. Today was vaccine day at the JPM Conference, with BioNTech, Moderna, Novovax and Johnson & Johnson all presenting. Lots of progress reported by all of the companies working on vaccines, but the best news of the day was the comment from BioNTech that the UK and South Africa coronavirus variants likely are still covered by the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. BioNTech’s CEO, Prof. Uğur Şahin, M.D., promised more data and analysis to be published shortly on that.

We also saw continued excitement for mRNA vaccines, not only for COVID-19 but also for other diseases. There is a growing focus (following COVID-19 of course) on vaccines for cancer through use of neoantigen targets, and for a long list of infectious disease targets.  For cancer, though, there continues to be a growing debate over whether the best focus is on “personalized” vaccines or “off the shelf” vaccines – personalized vaccines can take longer to make and have much, much higher costs and infrastructure requirements. We expect, however, to see very exciting news on the use of mRNA and other novel technologies in the next year or two that, when approved and put into commercialization, could radically change the game, not only as to mortality, but also by eliminating or significantly reducing the cost of care with chronic conditions (which some cancers have become, thanks to technological advancement). We are fortunate to be in that gap now between “care” and “cure,” where we have been able with modern medical advances to convert many more disease states into manageable chronic care conditions. Together with today’s longer lifespans, that, however, carries a much higher price tag for our healthcare system. Now, with some of these recent announcements, we look forward to moving from “care” to “cure” and substantially dropping the cost of care to our healthcare system.

Continuing consolidation also was a steady drumbeat underlying the multiple presentations today on the healthcare services side of the conference – health plans, health systems, physician organizations, home health. The drive to scale continues, as we have seen from the accelerated pace of mergers and acquisitions in the second half of 2020, which continues unabated in January 2021. There was today’s announcement of the acquisition by Amerisource Bergen of Walgreens Boots Alliance’s Alliance Healthcare wholesale business (making Walgreens Boots Alliance the largest single shareholder of Amerisource Bergen at nearly 30% ownership), following the announcement last week of Centene’s acquisition of Magellan Health (coming fast on the heels of Molina Healthcare’s purchase of Magellan’s Complete Care line of business).

On the mental health side – a core focus area for Magellan Health – Centene’s Chief Executive Officer, Michael Neidorff, expressed the common theme that we have been seeing in the past year that mental health care should be integrated and coordinated with primary and specialty care. He also saw value in Magellan’s strong provider network, as access to mental health providers can be a challenge in some markets and populations. The behavioral/mental health sector likely will see increased attention and consolidation in the coming year, especially given its critical role during the COVID-19 crisis and also with the growing Medicaid and Medicare populations. There are not a lot of large assets left independent in the mental health sector (aside from inpatient providers, autism/developmental disorder treatment programs, and substance abuse residential and outpatient centers), so we may see more roll-up focus (such as we have seen recently with the autism/ABA therapy sector) and technology-focused solutions (text-based or virtual therapy).

There was strong agreement among the presenting health plans and capitated providers (Humana, Centene, Oak Street and multiple health systems) today that we will continue to see movement toward value-based care (VBC) and risk-based reimbursement systems, such as Medicare Advantage, Medicare direct contracting and other CMS Innovation Center (CMMI) programs and managed Medicaid. Humana’s Chief Executive Officer, Bruce Broussard, said that the size of the MA program has grown so much since 2010 that it now represents an important voting bloc and one of the few ways in which the federal government currently is addressing healthcare inequities – e.g., through Over-the-Counter (OTC) pharmacy benefits, benefits focused on social determinants of health (SDOH), and healthcare quality improvements driven by the STARS rating program. Broussard also didn’t think Medicare Advantage would be a negative target for the Biden administration and expected more foreseeable and ordinary-course regulatory adjustments, rather than wholesale legislative change for Medicare Advantage.

There also was agreement on the exciting possibility of direct contracting for Medicare lives at risk under the CMMI direct contracting initiative. Humana expressed possible interest in both this year’s DCE program models and in the GEO regional risk-based Medicare program model that will be rolling out in the next year. Humana sees this as both a learning experience and as a way to apply their chronic care management skills and proprietary groups and systems to a broader range of applicable populations and markets. There is, however, a need for greater clarity and transparency from CMMI on program details which can substantially affect success and profitability of these initiatives.

Humana, Centene and Oak Street all sang the praises of capitated medical groups for Medicare Advantage and, per Michael Neidorff, the possibility of utilizing traditional capitated provider models for Medicaid membership as well. The problem, as noted by the speakers, is that there is a scarcity of independent capitated medical groups and a lack of physician familiarity and training. We may see a more committed effort by health plans to move their network provider groups more effectively into VBC and risk, much like we have seen Optum do with their acquired fee for service groups. Privia Health also presented today and noted that, while the market focus and high valuations today are accorded to Medicare lives, attention needs to be paid to the “age in” pipeline, as commercial patients who enroll in original Medicare and Medicare Advantage still would like to keep their doctors who saw them under commercial insurance. Privia’s thesis in part is to align with patients early on and retain them and their physicians, so as to create a “farm system” for accelerated Medicare population growth. Privia’s Chief Executive Officer, Shawn Morris, also touted Privia’s rapid growth, in part attributable to partnering with health systems.

As written in our notes from prior JPM healthcare conferences, health systems are continuing to look outside to third parties to gain knowledge base, infrastructure and management skills for physician VBC and risk arrangements. Privia cited their recent opening of their Central Florida market in partnership with Health First and rapid growth in providers by more than 25% in their first year of operations.

That being said, the real market sizzle remains with Medicare Advantage and capitation, percent of premium arrangements and global risk. The problem for many buyers, though, is that there are very few assets of size in this line of business. The HealthCare Partners/DaVita Medical Group acquisition by Optum removed that from the market, creating a high level of strategic and private equity demand and a low level of supply for physician organizations with that expertise. That created a focus on groups growing rapidly in this risk paradigm and afforded them strong valuation, like with Oak Street Health this past year as it completed its August 2020 initial public offering. Oak Street takes on both professional and institutional (hospital) risk and receives a percent of premium from its contracting health plans. As Oak Street’s CEO Mike Pykosz noted, only about 3% of Medicare dollars are spent on primary care, while approximately two-thirds are spent on hospital services. If more intensive management occurs at the primary care level and, as a result, hospitalizations can be prevented or reduced, that’s an easy win that’s good for the patient and the entire healthcare system (other than a fee for service based hospital). Pykosz touted his model of building out new centers from scratch as allowing greater conformity, control and efficacy than buying existing groups and trying to conform them both physically and through practice approaches to the Oak Street model. He doesn’t rule out some acquisitions, but he noted as an example that Oak Street was able to swiftly role out COVID-19 protocols rapidly and effectively throughout his centers because they all have the same physical configuration, the same staffing ratio and the same staffing profiles. Think of it as a “franchise” model where each Subway store, for example, will have generally the same look, feel, size and staffing. He also noted that while telehealth was very helpful during the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 and will continue as long as the doctors and patients wish, Oak Street believes that an in-person care management model is much more effective and telehealth is better for quick follow-ups or when in-person visits can’t occur.

Oak Street also spoke to the topic of Medicare Advantage member acquisition, which has been one of the more difficult areas to master for many health plans and groups, resulting in many cases with mergers and acquisitions becoming a favored growth vehicle due to the difficulties of organic membership growth. Interestingly, both Oak Street and Humana reported improvements in membership acquisition during the COVID-19 crisis. Oak Street credited digital marketing and direct response television, among other factors. Humana found that online direct-to-consumer brokers became an effective pathway during the COVID-19 crisis and focused its energy on enhancing those relationships and improving hand-offs during the membership enrollment process. Humana also noted the importance of brand in Medicare Advantage membership marketing.

Staying with Medicare Advantage, there is an expectation of a decrease in Medicare risk adjustment revenue in 2021, in large part due to the lower healthcare utilization during the COVID crisis and the lesser number of in-person visits during which HCC-RAF Medicare risk adjustment coding typically occurs. That revenue drop however likely will not significantly decrease Medicare Advantage profitability though, given the concomitant drop in healthcare expenses due to lower utilization, and per conference reports, is supposed to return to normal trend in 2022 (unless we see utilization numbers fall back below 90% again). Other interesting economic notes from several presentations, when taken together, suggest that while many health systems have lost out on elective surgery revenue in 2020, their case mix index (CMI) in many cases has been much higher due to the COVID patient cases. We also saw a number of health systems with much lower cash days on hand numbers than other larger health systems (both in gross and after adjusting for federal one-time stimulus cash payments), as a direct result of COVID. This supports the thesis we are hearing that, with the second wave of COVID being higher than expected, in the absence of further federal government financial support to hospitals, we likely will see an acceleration of partnering and acquisition transactions in the hospital sector.

Zoetis, one of the largest animal health companies, gave an interesting presentation today on its products and service lines. In addition to some exciting developments re: monoclonal antibody treatments coming on line for dogs with pain from arthritis, Zoetis also discussed its growing laboratory and diagnostics line of business. The animal health market, sometime overshadowed by the human healthcare market, is seeing some interesting developments as new revenue opportunities and chronic care management paradigms (such as for renal care) are shifting in the animal health sector. This is definitely a sector worth watching.

We also saw continuing interest, even in the face of Congressional focus this past year, on growing pharmacy benefit management (PBM) companies, which are designed to help manage the pharmacy spend. Humana listed growth of its PBM and specialty pharmacy lines of business as a focus for 2021, along with at-home care. In its presentation today,  SSM Health, a health system in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Illinois, and Missouri, spotlighted Navitus, its PBM, which services 7 million covered lives in 50 states.

One of the most different, interesting and unexpected presentations of the day came from Paul Markovich, Chief Executive Officer of Blue Shield of California. He put forth the thesis that we need to address the flat or negative productivity in healthcare today in order to both reduce total cost of care, improve outcomes and to help physicians, as well as to rescue the United States from the overbearing economic burden of the current healthcare spending. Likening the transformation in healthcare to that which occurred in the last two decades with financial services (remember before ATMs and banking apps, there were banker’s hours and travelers cheques – remember those?), he described exciting pilot projects that reimagine healthcare today. One project is a real-time claims adjudication and payment program that uses smart watches to record physician/patient interactions, natural language processing (NLP) to populate the electronic medical record, transform the information concurrently into a claim, adjudicate it and authorize payment. That would massively speed up cash flow to physician practices, reduce paperwork and many hours of physician EMR and billing time and reduce the billing and collection overhead and burden. It also could substantially reduce healthcare fraud.

Paul Markovich also spoke to the need for real-time quality information that can result in real-time feedback and incentivization to physicians and other providers, rather than the costly and slow HEDIS pursuits we see today. One health plan noted that it spends about $500 million a year going into physician offices looking at medical records for HEDIS pursuits, but the information is totally “in the rearview mirror” as it is too old when finally received and digested to allow for real-time treatment changes, improvement or planning. Markovich suggested four initiatives (including the above, pay for value and shared decision making through better, more open data access) that he thought could save $100 billion per year for the country. Markovich stressed that all of these four initiatives required a digital ecosystem and asked for help and partnership in creating one. He also noted that the State of California is close to creating a digital mandate and statewide health information exchange that could be the launching point for this exciting vision of data sharing and a digital ecosystem where the electronic health record is the beginning, but not the end of the healthcare data journey.

The Future of Hospitals in Post-COVID America (Part 1): The Market Response

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Click to access CBC_72_08052020_Final.pdf

 

[Readers’ Note: This is the first of two articles on the Future of Hospitals in Post-COVID America. This article
examines how market forces are consolidating, rationalizing and redistributing acute care assets within the
broader industry movement to value-based care delivery. The second article, which will publish next month,
examines gaps in care delivery and the related public policy challenges of providing appropriate, accessible
and affordable healthcare services in medically-underserved communities.]

In her insightful 2016 book, The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore,
Michelle Wucker coins the term “Gray Rhinos” and contrasts them with “Black Swans.” That distinction is
highly relevant to the future of American hospitals.

Black Swans are high impact events that are highly improbable and difficult to predict. By contrast, Gray
Rhinos are foreseeable, high-impact events that we choose to ignore because they’re complex, inconvenient
and/or fortified by perverse incentives that encourage the status quo. Climate change is a powerful example
of a charging Gray Rhino.

In U.S. healthcare, we are now seeing what happens when a Gray Rhino and a Black Swan collide.
Arguably, the nation’s public health defenses should anticipate global pandemics and apply resources
systematically to limit disease spread. This did not happen with the coronavirus pandemic.

Instead, COVID-19 hit the public healthcare infrastructure suddenly and hard. This forced hospitals and health systems to dramatically reduce elective surgeries, lay off thousands and significantly change care delivery with the adoption of new practices and services like telemedicine.

In comparison, many see the current American hospital business model as a Gray Rhino that has been charging toward
unsustainability for years with ever-building momentum.

Even with massive and increasing revenue flows, hospitals have long struggled with razor-thin margins, stagnant payment rates and costly technology adoptions. Changing utilization patterns, new and disruptive competitors, pro-market regulatory rules and consumerism make their traditional business models increasingly vulnerable and, perhaps, unsustainable.

Despite this intensifying pressure, many hospitals and health systems maintain business-as-usual practices because transformation is so difficult and costly. COVID-19 has made the imperative of change harder to ignore or delay addressing.

For a decade, the transition to value-based care has dominated debate within U.S. healthcare and absorbed massive strategic,
operational and financial resources with little progress toward improved care outcomes, lower costs and better customer service. The hospital-based delivery system remains largely oriented around Fee-for-Service reimbursement.

Hospitals’ collective response to COVID-19, driven by practical necessity and financial survival, may accelerate the shift to value-based care delivery. Time will tell.

This series explores the repositioning of hospitals during the next five years as the industry rationalizes an excess supply of acute care capacity and adapts to greater societal demands for more appropriate, accessible and affordable healthcare services.

It starts by exploring the role of the marketplace in driving hospital consolidation and the compelling need to transition to value-based care delivery and payment models.

COVID’s DUAL SHOCKS TO PATIENT VOLUME

Many American hospitals faced severe financial and operational challenges before COVID-19. The sector has struggled to manage ballooning costs, declining margins and waves of policy changes. A record 18 rural hospitals closed in 2019. Overall, hospitals saw a 21% decline in operating margins in 2018-2019.

COVID intensified those challenges by administering two shocks to the system that decreased the volume of hospital-based activities and decimated operating margins.

The first shock was immediate. To prepare for potential surges in COVID care, hospitals emptied beds and cancelled most clinic visits, outpatient treatments and elective surgeries. Simultaneously, they incurred heavy costs for COVID-related equipment (e.g. ventilators,PPE) and staffing. Overall, the sector experienced over $200 billion in financial losses between March and June 20204.

The second, extended shock has been a decrease in needed but not necessary care. Initially, many patients delayed seeking necessary care because of perceived infection risk. For example, Emergency Department visits declined 42% during the early phase of the pandemic.

Increasingly, patients are also delaying care because of affordability concerns and/or the loss of health insurance. Already, 5.4 million people have lost their employer-sponsored health insurance. This will reduce incremental revenues associated with higher-paying commercial insurance claims across the industry. Additionally, avoided care reduces patient volumes and hospital revenues today even as it increases the risk and cost of future acute illness.

The infusion of emergency funding through the CARES Act helped offset some operating losses but it’s unclear when and even whether utilization patterns and revenues will return to normal pre-COVID levels. Shifts in consumer behavior, reductions in insurance coverage, and the emergence of new competitors ranging from Walmart to enhanced primary care providers will likely challenge the sector for years to come.

The disruption of COVID-19 will serve as a forcing function, driving meaningful changes to traditional hospital business models and the competitive landscape. Frankly, this is long past due. Since 1965, Fee-for-Service (FFS) payment has dominated U.S. healthcare and created pervasive economic incentives that can serve to discourage provider responsiveness in transitioning to value-based care delivery, even when aligned to market demand.

Telemedicine typifies this phenomenon. Before COVID, CMS and most health insurers paid very low rates for virtual care visits or did not cover them at all. This discouraged adoption of an efficient, high-value care modality until COVID.

Unable to conduct in-person clinical visits, providers embraced virtual care visits and accelerated its mass adoption. CMS and
commercial health insurers did their part by paying for virtual care visits at rates equivalent to in-person clinic visits. Accelerated innovation in care delivery resulted.

 

THE COMPLICATED TRANSITION TO VALUE

Broadly speaking, health systems and physician groups that rely almost exclusively on activity-based payment revenues have struggled the most during this pandemic. Vertically integrated providers that offer health insurance and those receiving capitated payments in risk-based contracts have better withstood volume losses.

Modern Healthcare notes that while provider data is not yet available, organizations such as Virginia Care Partners, an integrated network and commercial ACO; Optum Health (with two-thirds of its revenue risk-based); and MediSys Health Network, a New Yorkbased NFP system with 148,000 capitated and 15,000 shared risk patients, are among those navigating the turbulence successfully. As the article observes,

…providers paid for value have had an easier time weathering the storm…. helped by a steady source of
income amid the chaos. Investments they made previously in care management, technology and social
determinants programs equipped them to pivot to new ways of providing care.

They were able to flip the switch on telehealth, use data and analytics to pinpoint patients at risk for
COVID-19 infection, and deploy care managers to meet the medical and nonclinical needs of patients even
when access to an office visit was limited.

Supporting this post-COVID push for value-based care delivery, six former leaders from CMS wrote to Congress in
June 2020 calling for providers, commercial insurers and states to expand their use of value-based payment models to
encourage stability and flexibility in care delivery.

If value-based payment models are the answer, however, adoption to date has been slow, limited and difficult. Ten
years after the Affordable Care Act, Fee-for-Service payment still dominates the payer landscape. The percentage of
overall provider revenue in risk-based capitated contracts has not exceeded 20%

Despite improvements in care quality and reductions in utilization rates, cost savings have been modest or negligible.
Accountable Care Organizations have only managed at best to save a “few percent of Medicare spending, [but] the
amount varies by program design.”

While most health systems accept some forms of risk-based payments, only 5% of providers expect to have a majority
(over 80%) of their patients in risk-based arrangements within 5 years.

The shift to value is challenging for numerous reasons. Commercial payers often have limited appetite or capacity for
risk-based contracting with providers. Concurrently, providers often have difficulty accessing the claims data they need
from payers to manage the care for targeted populations.

The current allocation of cost-savings between buyers (including government, employers and consumers), payers
(health insurance companies) and providers discourages the shift to value-based care delivery. Providers would
advance value-based models if they could capture a larger percentage of the savings generated from more effective
care management and delivery. Those financial benefits today flow disproportionately to buyers and payers.

This disconnection of payment from value creation slows industry transformation. Ultimately, U.S. healthcare will not
change the way it delivers care until it changes the way it pays for care. Fortunately, payment models are evolving to
incentivize value-based care delivery.

As payment reform unfolds, however, operational challenges pose significant challenges to hospitals and health
systems. They must adopt value-oriented new business models even as they continue to receive FFS payments. New
and old models of care delivery clash.

COVID makes this transition even more formidable as many health systems now lack the operating stamina and
balance sheet strength to make the financial, operational and cultural investments necessary to deliver better
outcomes, lower costs and enhanced customer service.

 

MARKET-DRIVEN CONSOLIDATION AND TRANSFORMATION

Full-risk payment models, such as bundled payments for episodic care and capitation for population health, are the
catalyst to value-based care delivery. Transition to value-based care occurs more easily in competitive markets with
many attributable lives, numerous provider options and the right mix of willing payers.

As increasing numbers of hospitals struggle financially, the larger and more profitable health systems are expanding
their networks, capabilities and service lines through acquisitions. This will increase their leverage with commercial
payers and give them more time to adapt to risk-based contracting and value-based care delivery.

COVID also will accelerate acquisition of physician practices. According to an April 2020 MGMA report, 97% of
physician practices have experienced a 55% decrease in revenue, forcing furloughs and layoffs15. It’s estimated the
sector could collectively lose as much as $15.1 billion in income by the end of September 2020.

Struggling health systems and physician groups that read the writing on the wall will pro-actively seek capital or
strategic partners that offer greater scale and operating stability. Aggregators can be selective in their acquisitions,
seeking providers that fuel growth, expand contiguous market positions and don’t dilute balance sheets.

Adding to the sector’s operating pressure, private equity, venture investors and payers are pouring record levels of
funding into asset-light and virtual delivery companies that are eager to take on risk, lower prices by routing procedures
and capture volume from traditional providers. With the right incentives, market-driven reforms will reallocate resources
to efficient companies that generate compelling value.

As this disruption continues to unfold, rural and marginal urban communities that lack robust market forces will
experience more facility and practice closures. Without government support to mitigate this trend, access and care gaps
that already riddle American healthcare will unfortunately increase.

 

WINNING AT VALUE

The average hospital generates around $11,000 per patient discharge. With ancillary services that can often add up to
more than $15,000 per average discharge. Success in a value-based system is predicated on reducing those
discharges and associated costs by managing acute care utilization more effectively for distinct populations (i.e.
attributed lives).

This changes the orientation of healthcare delivery toward appropriate and lower cost settings. It also places greater
emphasis on preventive, chronic and outpatient care as well as better patient engagement and care coordination.
Such a realignment of care delivery requires the following:

 A tight primary care network (either owned or affiliated) to feed referrals and reduce overall costs through
better preventive care.

 A gatekeeper or navigator function (increasingly technology-based) to manage / direct patients to the most
appropriate care settings and improve coordination, adherence and engagement.

 A carefully designed post-acute care network (including nursing homes, rehab centers, home care
services and behavioral health services, either owned or sufficiently controlled) to manage the 70% of
total episode-of-care costs that can occur outside the hospital setting.

 An IT infrastructure that can facilitate care coordination across all providers and settings.

Quality data and digital tools that enhance care, performance, payment and engagement.

Experience with managing risk-based contracts.

 A flexible approach to care delivery that includes digital and telemedicine platforms as well as nontraditional sites of care.

Aligned or incentivized physicians.

Payer partners willing to share data and offload risk through upside and downside risk contracts.

Engaged consumers who act on their preferences and best interests.

 

While none of these strategies is new or controversial, assembling them into cohesive and scalable business models is
something few health systems have accomplished. It requires appropriate market conditions, deep financial resources,
sophisticated business acumen, operational agility, broad stakeholder alignment, compelling vision, and robust
branding.

Providers that fail to embrace value-based care for their “attributed lives” risk losing market relevance. In their relentless pursuit of increasing treatment volumes and associated revenues, they will lose market share to organizations that
deliver consistent and high-value care outcomes.

CONCLUSION: THE CHARGING GRAY RHINO

America needs its hospitals to operate optimally in normal times, flex to manage surge capacity, sustain themselves
when demand falls, create adequate access and enhance overall quality while lowering total costs. That is a tall order
requiring realignment, evolution, and a balance between market and policy reform measures.

The status quo likely wasn’t sustainable before COVID. The nation has invested heavily for many decades in acute and
specialty care services while underinvesting, on a relative basis, in primary and chronic care services. It has excess
capacity in some markets, and insufficient access in others.

COVID has exposed deep flaws in the activity-based payment as well as the nation’s underinvestment in public health.
Disadvantaged communities have suffered disproportionately. Meanwhile, the costs for delivering healthcare services
consume an ever-larger share of national GDP.

Transformational change is hard for incumbent organizations. Every industry, from computer and auto manufacturing to
retailing and airline transportation, confronts gray rhino challenges. Many companies fail to adapt despite clear signals
that long-term viability is under threat. Often, new, nimble competitors emerge and thrive because they avoid the
inherent contradictions and service gaps embedded within legacy business models.

The healthcare industry has been actively engaged in value-driven care transformation for over ten years with little to
show for the reform effort. It is becoming clear that many hospitals and health systems lack the capacity to operate
profitably in competitive, risk-based market environments.

This dismal reality is driving hospital market valuations and closures. In contrast, customers and capital are flowing to
new, alternative care providers, such as OneMedical, Oak Street Health and Village MD. Each of these upstart
companies now have valuations in the $ billions. The market rewards innovation that delivers value.

Unfortunately, pure market-driven reforms often neglect a significant and growing portion of America’s people. This gap has been more apparent as COVID exacts a disproportionate toll on communities challenged by higher population
density, higher unemployment, and fewer medical care options (including inferior primary and preventive care infrastructure).

Absent fundamental change in our hospitals and health systems, and investment in more efficient care delivery and
payment models, the nation’s post-COVID healthcare infrastructure is likely to deteriorate in many American
communities, making them more vulnerable to chronic disease, pandemics and the vicissitudes of life.

Article 2 in our “Future of Hospitals” series will explore the public policy challenges of providing appropriate, affordable and accessible healthcare to all American communities.

 

 

 

Covid-19 has decimated independent US primary care practices—how should policymakers and payers respond?

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Capitation, Clinical Outcomes, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Economic Crisis, Economy Reopening, Fee for Service Reimbursement, Infection Control, Infection Control Plan, Infectious Virus, Mortality, National Strategy, Outcomes, Pandemic, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), Physician, Physician Practice Management, Primary Care, Primary Care Delivery Model, Public Health, Public Safety, Quarantine, Social Distancing • Leave a comment

Covid-19 has decimated independent US primary care practices—how should policymakers and payers respond? 

9 ways Covid-19 may forever upend the U.S. health care industry - STAT

The coronavirus pandemic has torn through the global economy, suppressing consumer demand and industrial production. As countries look to an eventual recovery, but in a very different environment characterized by continuing distancing measures and loss of public confidence, businesses in many sectors, such as hospitality and retail, are asking how they can adapt to survive these new economic conditions. Yet perhaps surprisingly, those feeling threatened include independent primary care practices in the United States. Despite the USA being one of the most expensive healthcare systems in the world, many primary care practices are now facing financial collapse. Some estimates suggest that primary care practices will lose up to $15 billion during 2020 as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic.

Covid-19 has highlighted a fundamental weakness in how primary care is paid for in the USA. Many practices are financed by fee-for-service (FFS) reimbursement. Put bluntly, providers make money from office visits, diagnostic tests, and procedures. This has long been criticized for encouraging an expansion of what is considered disease and overtreatment, contributing to the high cost of the American health system. However, it can only work as long as patients keep coming, and they are no longer doing so, at least not in sufficient numbers for many primary care practices to remain viable. The imposition of social distancing policies has seen a severe reduction in office visits, and with it a substantial decline in revenue. The pandemic has taught Americans that the financial model that underpins primary care needs to be reformed. It needs to move from a per-visit reimbursement to a per-patient reimbursement, in other words primary care capitation, as used in many other countries, including the UK.

If the existing reimbursement model is not reformed, the clinical and financial implications for struggling primary care practices, which could play a key role in the continuing coronavirus pandemic, will be far-ranging. From a clinical standpoint, primary care practices that need to lay off staff or close will not be able to respond effectively to an influx of patients who have been delaying care since the pandemic began. Given that primary care is often the entry point into the healthcare system, this could lead to severe reductions in access to routine health care as well as referrals to specialty providers for advanced complaints. From a financial standpoint, many of these independent practices may consider consolidation with larger health systems, something that has been shown to increase prices without improving quality in the long run.

To overcome these issues, insurers and primary care practices could work together to construct capitated payment models. In capitated contracts, providers are paid a risk-adjusted sum for each patient enrolled in the practice. Payment to providers is not reliant on volume of office visits, but rather delivering cost-effective care focused on the health of primary care patients.

As we noted above, this system is already widely used internationally, but there are also good examples in the USA. For example, Iora Health is a venture-backed primary care company that partners with insurers to obtain a flat $150 per-member-per-month (PMPM) fee for taking care of its patients. They also receive bonuses for reducing total cost of care (TCOC). As a result, they have been able to use their dollars for health-related interventions, such as hiring health coaches. They have also demonstrated significant reductions in hospitalizations and health spending along with high patient satisfaction scores. Most importantly, they were able to quickly adapt to the needs of their patient population in the pandemic using alternative models of care, such as online consultations, without the added stress of losing revenue.

There are also many other promising examples of both public and private payers designing capitated contracts for independent primary care practices. In the public sector, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) introduced the multi-payer Primary Care First (PCF) Model. Under PCF, primary care practices will receive a risk-adjusted population-based payment for patients as well as a flat fee for any office visits performed. In addition, there are bonuses for practices to limit hospitalizations, an expensive component of delivering care. However, this is still an experimental program that is supposed to begin in 2021, which may be too late for primary care practices that are already facing financial strain from the pandemic.

In the private sector, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina (BCBS NC) has created the Accelerate to Value program for independent primary care practices. Through this program, BCBS NC is offering independent primary care practices a supplemental stabilization payment, based on the number of members a particular practice serves. In return, it is asking them to remain open for patients and deliver care appropriate to the circumstances created by the pandemic. In the longer term, it also asks them to join an accountable care organization (ACO) and consider accepting capitation for future reimbursement. 

While CMS and BCBS can offer blueprints for a path towards primary care capitation, there will be challenges to implement capitation at scale across the nation’s primary care system. A key defining aspect of the US healthcare system is its multitude of payers, from commercial to Medicaid to Medicare. For primary care capitation to succeed, practices will need to pursue multi-payer contracts that cover a critical mass of the patients they serve. Independent practices will also have to adapt to a fixed budget model where excess healthcare utilization could actually lead to financial losses, unlike in fee-for-service.

Ultimately, it is important to recognize that no payment model will be a panacea for healthcare providers during the pandemic and afterwards. However, the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted clear deficiencies in the American fee for service system that have existed for almost a century. Covid-19 has created an opportunity for policymakers and providers to look anew at a model that is already implemented widely in other countries, and in parts of the US. At some point there will have to be an inquiry into the many failures that have characterized the American response to covid-19. Given the magnitude of the catastrophe that has befallen the US, in stark contrast to the relative successes achieved in many other countries, it will be essential to challenge many things once taken for granted. One must be the fee for service system that has so clearly undermined the resilience of the US health system. Covid-19 has provided an almost unprecedented opportunity to create a healthcare system that rewards providers caring for patients in a coordinated manner, rather than prioritizing expensive and often wasteful healthcare provision.

 

 

 

 

Navigating a Post-Covid Path to the New Normal with Gist Healthcare CEO, Chas Roades

Posted on by • Posted in Affordability, Board, Board Assessment, Board Competency, Board Engagement, Brand Loyalty, Branding, Business to Consumer Model, Capitation, Cash, Cash Reserves, Competition, Consumer Loyalty, Consumer Trust, Consumerism, Coronavirus, Corporate Overhead, Corporate Strategy, Cost Management, Cost Reduction, Crisis, Crisis Management, Cross Subsidy Model, Debt Service, Decision Making, Demographics, Disruption, Disruptive Technology, Economic Crisis, Economic Stimulus, Efficiency, Elective Procedures, Elective Surgery, Fee for Service Reimbursement, Financial Incentives, Financial Viability, Financially Distressed, Focus, Governance, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Health Insurance Industry, Health Policy, Health System, High Deductible Health Plans, High Drug Prices, High Prices, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Job, Job Market, Job Search, Job Security, KPI Dashboards, Labor Spend Management, Leadership, Leadership Alignment, Leadership Trust, Market Consolidation, Market Power, Market Share, Market Trends, Market Uncertainty, Medical Group, Member Health, Mergers & Acquisitions, Net Income, Nonoperating Income, Objectivity, Operating Expense Reduction, Operating Expenses, Operating Income, Operating Margin, Operating Performance, Operating Revenue, Out of Pocket Expenses, Pandemic, Physician, Physician Employment, Physician Independent Network (IPA), Physician Multispecialty Network, Physician Practice Management, Price Transparency, Pricing, Primary Care Delivery Model, Primary Care Loyalty, Private Equity, Profit Model, Quality, Quality of Care, Safety, Strategic Alignment, Strategic Leadership, Strategy, Streamlining Operations, Supply Chain, Surprise Bills, Telemedicine, Trust, Trusted Brand, Truth, Value, Value Creation, Value Proposition, Value-Based Healthcare, Virtual Healthcare, Virtual Reality, Virtual Visit, Workplace Safety • Leave a comment

https://www.lrvhealth.com/podcast/?single_podcast=2203

Covid-19, Regulatory Changes and Election Implications: An Inside ...Chas Roades (@ChasRoades) | Twitter

Healthcare is Hard: A Podcast for Insiders; June 11, 2020

Over the course of nearly 20 years as Chief Research Officer at The Advisory Board Company, Chas Roades became a trusted advisor for CEOs, leadership teams and boards of directors at health systems across the country. When The Advisory Board was acquired by Optum in 2017, Chas left the company with Chief Medical Officer, Lisa Bielamowicz. Together they founded Gist Healthcare, where they play a similar role, but take an even deeper and more focused look at the issues health systems are facing.

As Chas explains, Gist Healthcare has members from Allentown, Pennsylvania to Beverly Hills, California and everywhere in between. Most of the organizations Gist works with are regional health systems in the $2 to $5 billion range, where Chas and his colleagues become adjunct members of the executive team and board. In this role, Chas is typically hopscotching the country for in-person meetings and strategy sessions, but Covid-19 has brought many changes.

“Almost overnight, Chas went from in-depth sessions about long-term five-year strategy, to discussions about how health systems will make it through the next six weeks and after that, adapt to the new normal. He spoke to Keith Figlioli about many of the issues impacting these discussions including:

  • Corporate Governance. The decisions health systems will be forced to make over the next two to five years are staggeringly big, according to Chas. As a result, Gist is spending a lot of time thinking about governance right now and how to help health systems supercharge governance processes to lay a foundation for the making these difficult choices.
  • Health Systems Acting Like Systems. As health systems struggle to maintain revenue and margins, they’ll be forced to streamline operations in a way that finally takes advantage of system value. As providers consolidated in recent years, they successfully met the goal of gaining size and negotiating leverage, but paid much less attention to the harder part – controlling cost and creating value. That’s about to change. It will be a lasting impact of Covid-19, and an opportunity for innovators.
  • The Telehealth Land Grab. Providers have quickly ramped-up telehealth services as a necessity to survive during lockdowns. But as telehealth plays a larger role in the new standard of care, payers will not sit idly by and are preparing to double-down on their own virtual care capabilities. They’re looking to take over the virtual space and own the digital front door in an effort to gain coveted customer loyalty. Chas talks about how it would be foolish for providers to expect that payers will continue reimburse at high rates or at parity for physical visits.
  • The Battleground Over Physicians. This is the other area to watch as payers and providers clash over the hearts and minds of consumers. The years-long trend of physician practices being acquired and rolled-up into larger organizations will significantly accelerate due to Covid-19. The financial pain the pandemic has caused will force some practices out of business and many others looking for an exit. And as health systems deal with their own financial hardships, payers with deep pockets are the more likely suitor.”

 

 

 

 

Myth Diagnosis: Do hospitals charge more to make up for low government pay?

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Capitation, Global Payment, Health Policy, Health System, High Premiums, High Prices, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Managed Care, Market Consolidation, Market Power, Value-Based Healthcare • Leave a comment

https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/myth-diagnosis-do-hospitals-charge-more-to-make-up-for-low-government-pay/560021/

Image result for hospital prices

It’s a mantra from providers to justify the disparate prices charged patients depending on their level of insurance coverage: It’s all in the name of cost shifting to make up for stingy government reimbursement.

The idea is that hospitals bill commercial payers more to make up for low rates from government payers and the costs from treating the uninsured. Providers and payers both insist the practice occurs, but academics are skeptical — and the notion is notoriously difficult to measure.

No one is doubting that the prices are different depending on who is footing the bill. The issue is whether they are dependent on each other.

“What is crystal clear is that there’s a huge unit cost payment differential between government and commercial payers,” John Pickering of Milliman told Healthcare Dive. “What isn’t clear is whether there’s a causal effect between those two.”

Heath economists, doctors and industry executives have been arguing about whether hospitals perform cost shifting for at least 40 years.

Government efforts to tamp down on runaway payments to providers may have sparked the debate. These include Medicare’s shift from strictly fee-for-service reimbursement to the prospective payment system in the 1980s.

Also, the Affordable Care Act attempted to codify efforts to pay providers based on performance with initiatives like the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program and alternative payment models.

Part of the difficulty is untangling factors like differences in geography, quality and market share, said Michael Darden, an associate professor at Carey Business School.

The body of research on healthcare cost shifting is mixed. There is evidence that some hospitals perform cost shifting, but not strong and clear results showing hospitals make such adjustments consistently or what exactly is causing them.

The debate has received some renewed attention as more states approve Medicaid expansion under the ACA and as employers consider offering high-deductible health plans that patients on the hook for more costs, Rick Gundling, senior vice president for healthcare financial practices with the Healthcare Financial Management Association, told Healthcare Dive.

“As folks get more price-sensitive through higher cost-sharing with patients and employers and these types of things — it’s certainly talked about. As it should be,” he said.

Policy implications

The topic may get even more attention as healthcare has come to dominate the early days of the 2020 presidential election, at least among the 20-plus contenders running in the primary.

While still a long way off, a “Medicare for All”-type system seems closer than any time in recent history.

While not all of the proposals explicitly or fully eliminate the private insurance industry, some (including those put forward by Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.,) do, and others would at least severely curtail it. One key question for those plans is whether government rates would have to increase in order to keep hospitals and providers above water, and if so, by how much.

To counter, President Donald Trump and his administration have stepped up their scrutiny of industry billing practices. These efforts include pushing Congress to ban surprise billing and executive orders to revamp kidney care in the country and advance price transparency.

For their part,  providers say they’ll be forced to raise other rates if government programs pay less. Insurers will say the phenomenon means they must raise premiums to keep up.

In a statement to Healthcare Dive, America’s Health Insurance Plans pointed the finger at rising hospital prices, spurred in part from provider consolidation. The payer lobby argued health plans do their best to keep out-of-pocket costs affordable for customers through payment negotiations and by offering a number of coverage options.

“However, insurance premiums track directly with the underlying cost of medical care. The rising cost of doctor’s visits, hospital stays, and prescription medications all put upward pressure on premiums,” the group said.

Employers care about this issue as well, especially those that self-insure, said Steve Wojcik, vice president of public policy for the National Business Group on Health. Coverage can get expensive for businesses because they don’t get as good of a deal as government payers, he told Healthcare Dive.

Wojcik suggested more radical change away from fee-for-service payment arranges would be a better way of dealing with the issue. It’s an argument for many who push the healthcare sector’s slow march toward paying for quality and not quantity of treatment.

“I think, ultimately, it’s about driving transformation in healthcare delivery so that there’s more of a global payment for managing someone’s health or the health of a population rather than paying piecemeal for different services, which I think is inflationary,” he said.

Regardless, whether hospitals cost shift isn’t as important as whether they go out of business. “We may be missing the point if we focus on cost shifting,” Christopher Ody, a health economist at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, told Healthcare Dive.

Charging as much as they can?

A paper Darden helped author in the National Bureau of Economic Research found some hospitals that faced payment reductions from value-based Medicare programs did negotiate slightly higher average payments from private payers.

Health economist Austin Frakt noted the ability to negotiate better pricing could be related to quality improvement these hospitals likely undertook, knowing their quality measures would directly affect future payments.

It comes back to determining causality, Frakt, who holds positions with the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, Boston University and Harvard, told Healthcare Dive.

“It’s an important distinction, because the simplest economic model which is consistent with the evidence is that hospitals charge as much as they can to each type of payer,” he said. “So, they can’t really change what they receive from Medicare — those prices are fixed. But they charge private payers whatever the revenue- or profit-maximizing price is.”

Hospitals assert there is causality, but haven’t pointed to evidence that convinced Frakt of their argument. Frakt, for the record, understand why hospitals make the argument to policymakers, however.

“I’m not implying that this, throughout, is just to make a profit,” he said. “I think it’s possible to also have the best interests of patients in mind and to have this argument.”

Grundling said there has to be a breaking point somewhere so long as government rates fail to keep up with medical inflation. Also, hospitals have a federal legal responsibility to stabilize any patient regardless of ability to pay and have other philanthropic investments.

“It just puts a greater pressure on other payers in the system,” he said.

Frakt said the argument providers give for cost shifting doesn’t necessarily make sense for the average consumer. “It’s very strange that people find it intuitive that hospitals can readily cost shift because we don’t talk about any other industry like that,” he said. “Nobody says, well, my theater tickets was so much higher because you paid less.”

The idea that healthcare is vastly different from other industries is enduring, however, he said. “People don’t even want to think of healthcare as having prices,” he said. “How do you put a price on that?”