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6-hospital Verity Health files for bankruptcy
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/6-hospital-verity-health-files-for-bankruptcy.html
El Segundo, Calif.-based Verity Health, which operates six hospitals in Northern and Southern California and maintains ties to billionaire former surgeon Patrick Soon-Shiong, MD, filed for bankruptcy Aug. 31, Reuters reports.
Verity Health CEO Richard Adcock told Reuters he expects the system to remain in bankruptcy protection for at least a few years as it restructures and continues working with potential buyers.
The bankruptcy announcement comes on the heels of several deals that left the system with more than $1 billion in pension liabilities and bond debt. Verity Health reportedly secured a $185 million loan to remain operational.
Mr. Adcock added the system has been losing nearly $175 million per year on a cash flow basis.
In July, Verity Health revealed it is examining all strategic options, including a sale, of some or all of its hospitals. Mr. Adcock told Reuters the system has received a number of offers, including from several large national hospital operators.
Dr. Soon-Shiong, who has founded and sold several biotech companies and recently purchased the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers for $500 million, acquired Verity Health’s management company in 2017. At the time, he said his goal was to revitalize the health system, which has come to employ 6,000-plus people as of 2017.
Mr. Adcock said the health system is re-examining all of its contracts, including the management deal with Dr. Soon-Shiong, Reuters reports.
How to Tame Health Care Spending? Look for One-Percent Solutions
The health care system in the United States costs nearly double that of its peer countries, without much better outcomes. Many scholars and policymakers have looked at this state of affairs and dreamed big. Maybe there’s some broad fix — high deductibles, improvements in end-of-life care, a single-payer system — that can make United States health care less expensive.
But what if the most workable answer isn’t something big, but hosts of small tweaks? A group of about a dozen health economists has begun trying to identify policy adjustments, sometimes in tiny slices of the health care system, that could produce savings worth around 1 percent of the country’s $3.3 trillion annual health spending. If you put together enough such fixes, the group points out, they could add up to something more substantial.
This is a shift from the kind of research that is typically rewarded by big journal editors and tenure committees, but it could turn out to have a crucial role in understanding why our health care system is so expensive, and so unusual.
“I think focusing on the forest misses the fact that there are trees encroaching out of the forest,” said Fiona Scott Morton, a health economist at the Yale School of Management. “And we need to start cutting them down.”
A working paper published Monday proposes one possible fix. In the 1980s, Congress carved out a small group of hospitals from its normal rules for payment. These “long-term care hospitals,” which treated patients with tuberculosis and chronic diseases, could earn far more money than traditional hospitals and nursing homes if they cared for patients who stayed with them for an average of 25 days. Since then, the number of these hospitals has mushroomed, from a few dozen to more than 400, most run by two for-profit chains.
For years, analysts and policymakers have wondered about the value of these hospitals, which tend to treat very sick patients who need a lot of care, such as mechanical ventilation or dialysis. Several analyses have suggested that Medicare may be overpaying for their services. And Congress has made some small changes to limit the number of patients who are eligible for such care.
The new paper, from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago, took a close look at what happened to patients as new long-term care hospitals opened around the country in places that had none.
The study, covering 1990 to 2014, found that when such a hospital opened, the odds increased that very sick patients leaving a normal hospital would end up going next to a long-term care hospital, generating a growing bill for both Medicare and the patients themselves. But the researchers found no benefit when it came to patients’ chances of dying or going home within 90 days.
The researchers concluded that the health care system could probably save a lot of money — around $5 billion a year — by paying the long-term care hospitals the same prices that are paid to skilled nursing facilities, the places that most long-term patients end up in when there is no long-term care hospital nearby.
The hospital industry disagrees with the paper’s conclusion and disputes the notion that the extra money they get is wasteful. The American Hospital Association noted that since the study ended, Congress has changed the rules for long-term care hospitals so that fewer of their patients qualify for the highest payment rates. That means that the study results might be different if they looked at long-term hospital care in more recent years.
Select Medical, one of the large chains of long-term care hospitals, said in a statement that measuring only whether the long-term care patients died or went home did not capture other, more subtle health benefits that the hospitals provided compared with other options. But the industry does not collect such measures of quality in a standardized way, making that theory hard to test.
The National Association of Long Term Hospitals, a trade group, also noted that the paper’s policy proposals were more extreme than those from other critics, who had suggested more minor changes to how the hospitals should be paid.
Neale Mahoney, a health economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, who was one of the working paper’s co-authors, said the history of long-term care hospitals fit together with the economic analysis to suggest that the special hospital payment probably wasn’t appropriate.
“What’s convinced me that these institutions are a source of waste is a constellation of evidence rather than one piece of evidence,” he said.
Dr. Jeremy Kahn, a critical care physician and professor of health policy at the University of Pittsburgh, who has studied long-term care hospitals extensively, said there are some patients with particular ailments who benefit from the setting, but agreed with the economists that the hospitals are a historical accident, defined more by payment rules than patient needs.
“Long-term care hospitals aren’t to blame here,” he said. “If you see a dollar on the ground, you will pick it up, and that’s what’s going on here.”
Mr. Mahoney said the economics profession is fond of broad conclusions. The typical paper takes a narrow case and tries to draw a broader conclusion about how the world works. But he increasingly thinks that there may be value in thinking small, doing more of what he calls “forensic economics.”
One of his co-authors, Amy Finkelstein, says she has been inspired by a colleague who works in development economics, Esther Duflo, who recently delivered a speech titled “The Economist as Plumber,” arguing that her colleagues should not look down on tinkering as unworthy of the profession.
“We may need to do more health care plumbing rather than health care big theories,” said Ms. Finkelstein, a health economist at M.I.T. “The history of long-term care hospitals suggests the industry will always innovate ahead of you, and you may actually have to roll up your sleeves and find these pockets of waste.”
The researchers have begun to chat during coffee breaks at conferences and in long phone conversations. Small possible sources of inefficiency, like drug co-payment coupons for generic drugs or high out-of-network payments for emergency room care, could start to add up.
The scholars involved in the project know that they are not the first group to think small. The sort of deep and narrow investigations they are undertaking have long been the focus of groups like the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, a group that recommends changes to Congress and that had even flagged long-term care hospitals for overhaul years ago. Washington policymakers and think tanks have long assembled briefing books of options to help them nip and tuck dollars out of government health programs.
But the new effort by academics may expand the impact of such suggestions. New data about not just government spending but also private insurance has enabled researchers to examine spending and inefficiency in the health care system more broadly than ever before. After all, the health care system is much bigger than just Medicare.
“I think people say that’s too small — it’s not going to change the trajectory — therefore we shouldn’t spend time on it,” said Ms. Morton, the Yale economist. “And they are forgetting how many dollars there are.”
Nonprofit hospitals ‘on an unsustainable path,’ Moody’s says
https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/nonprofit-hospitals-on-an-unsustainable-path-moodys-says/531245/
Dive Brief:
- Not-for-profit and public hospitals spent more than they gained in revenues for the second consecutive year in fiscal 2017, according to Moody’s Investors Service.
- Moody’s said the widening gap leaves facilities “on an unsustainable path” and will remain the largest strain on nonprofits through next year.
- Median annual expense growth decreased to 5.7% in 2017 from 7.1%. That’s compared to annual revenue growth, which declined to 4.6% from 6.1%, according to Moody’s analyst Rita Sverdlik.
Dive Insight:
Hospitals, especially nonprofit facilities, are facing difficult times. Morgan Stanley recently reported that about 18% of more than 6,000 hospitals studied were at a risk of closure or are performing weakly. About 8% of studied hospitals were at risk of closing and 10% were called “weak,” according to that report.
For perspective, just 2.5% of hospitals closed over the past five years.
What’s in store for hospitals in the near term depends on the specific outlook. Moody’s this year revised its outlook for the sector from stable to negative. That move followed nonprofit hospitals seeing more credit downgrades in 2017.
On the other hand, Fitch Ratings recently called off its “Rating Watch” for U.S. nonprofit hospitals and health systems after the organizations showed improved or stable results this year.
So, there are signs of improvement in the sector, but challenges with revenues, sagging reimbursements and lower admissions will continue to plague hospitals.
The reasons Moody’s gave for lower revenue growth came from lower reimbursements, the shift to outpatient care, increased M&A activity and additional ambulatory competition. It said the move away from inpatient to outpatient moved into its fifth year.
“Reversing sluggish volume trends and growing profitable service lines will be critical to improving the sector’s financial trajectory over the near-term as most hospitals continue to operate in a fee-for-service environment,” Sverdlik said.
Moody’s added that more hospitals reported operating deficits in 2017. That coincided with lower absolute operating cash flow. It said 28.4% of nonprofit hospital experienced operating losses, an increase from 16.5% in 2016. Also, 59% of providers reported lower absolute operating cash flow, which was more than double the 24% noted in 2015. The 2017 figure was the highest percentage in five years.
Don’t expect times to get better any time soon. Moody’s said nonprofit hospital margins will continue to remain thin through this year. Margins have fallen to an all-time low of 1.6% operating and 8.1% of operating cash flow.
“Margin pressures led to softened debt coverage ratios, though the median growth rate of total debt has been negative over the last five years,” Sverdlik said. “Ongoing operating pressures will constrain the ability to reverse these trends, especially if providers turn to debt to fund capital needs.”
However, it’s not all bad news. Moody’s said the medians have shown positive signs. For instance, median unrestricted cash and investments growth rate improved to 8.9% thanks to strong market returns and steady capital spending. Also, absolute cash growth exceeded expenses growth, which caused improved median cash on hand. That trend isn’t expected to continue if hospitals spend more cash flow on capital or if equity markets fall.
New Accumulator Adjustment Programs Threaten Chronically Ill Patients
For too many Americans with chronic illnesses, such as HIV, arthritis, and hemophilia, insurance companies and their pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) are erecting access barriers to innovative and life-saving prescription medicines. A new and growing trend—called accumulator adjustment programs—threatens to exacerbate the problem by significantly increasing out-of-pocket spending for patients. On top of it, patients are not even aware of this sudden and very costly change.
Patients with chronic illnesses already jump through hoops to receive their drugs. First, they have to ensure that their medicines are covered by their plan. Then they often have to work through a series of utilization management steps, such as prior authorization and step-therapy.
On top of those hurdles, more and more patients are facing high deductibles for prescription drugs or are being asked to pay a percentage of the cost of a drug, which is called coinsurance, instead of a nominal copayment. Coinsurance and deductibles often require patients to pay cost sharing based on the list price, which does not reflect the rebates that the PBMs receive from the drug companies.
When patients are still satisfying their deductible or are paying high coinsurance, they can face out-of-pocket spending of thousands of dollars to fill one prescription. If they cannot afford these costs, they will leave the pharmacy counter empty-handed and risk becoming sick or getting sicker. Drug manufacturers offer coupons to prevent this and make cost sharing for these drugs affordable. Historically, commercial insurance plans have applied the value of these coupons to a patient’s annual deductible and out-of-pocket maximum; reaching these limits translates into lower out-of-pocket spending for the rest of the year.
Now, however, accumulator adjustment programs are currently being pushed by PBMs, such as Express Scripts and CVS Caremark, to insurers including United Healthcare, Molina, and BlueCross BlueShield of Texas and Illinois, and to large employers such as Walmart, Home Depot, and Allstate. These programs change the calculus for patients by no longer applying the copay coupons to patient deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums. Patients must spend more out of pocket to reach their deductible; sometimes thousands of dollars more. For too many patients, this makes the drugs they depend on unaffordable.
While there has been an ongoing debate between the insurance industry and the drug companies regarding who is responsible for the high cost of some medications, this new practice has nothing to do with the actual cost of the drug. The only thing that has changed is how much the insurance company, employer, or PBM is requiring patients to pay for their drug. And these entities are beginning to implement accumulator adjustment programs without adequately informing beneficiaries, who will be shocked to learn that the cost-sharing assistance they have been relying on no longer applies toward their deductible or out-of-pocket costs.
People living with HIV and hepatitis have long relied on these copay coupons to afford the cost of their medications. The impact on a countless number of peoples’ lives has been profound. But this new practice will increase patient out-of-pocket spending, leaving patients at risk of hitting a “cost cliff” mid-year. This cliff could cause disruptions to patients’ care as medication becomes prohibitively expensive. For people living with HIV, hepatitis, and so many other health conditions, the resulting decision can literally mean life or death.
While some may claim that coupons are being used to incentivize brand-name drugs over generics, the fact is 87 percent of the coupons are for drugs that have no generic equivalent. The 13 percent of branded drugs programs in which generic equivalent products are available accounted for only 0.05 percent of all prescriptions filled.
There is a relatively new drug regimen, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PrEP), that when taken regularly, prevents HIV. Because there is no generic alternative, most patients can’t afford the high coinsurance and rely on manufacturer copay assistance to reach their deductible and lighten the burden. This new practice of no longer applying the copay coupons to patient deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums by the insurance companies and PBMs are making access to this remarkable treatment more difficult and will have a significant impact on our efforts to prevent HIV in the United States.
But it does not have to be like this. The growing practice of not counting copay coupons toward a beneficiary’s deductible most likely stems from PBMs, insurers, and human resources professionals, who sign off on these plans, failing to fully comprehend the impact these programs will have on vulnerable patient populations and the overall health care system.
Patient groups and employees across the country should reach out to their health insurance providers and workplace plan managers to check whether their plan is implementing this new troubling practice. And if they are, people need to speak up and push back. These new insurance practices are not acceptable and bad for the health of our country.
What Have We Learned About Bundling Medical Conditions?
As an alternative payment model, bundled payments hold the potential to improve the value of care by holding clinicians and organizations accountable for episode-specific quality and costs. Medicare has scaled bundled payments nationwide via several programs that define episodes based on hospitalization and up to 90 days of post-acute care.
However, the impact of bundled payments appears to differ between surgical and medical episodes. On one hand, Medicare has achieved promising results from bundling surgical care for lower extremity joint replacement. Medicare’s evaluation of its largest national bundled payment program, the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement (BPCI) initiative, has demonstrated that participation in joint replacement bundles is associated with a 3.8 percent decrease in per-episode spending with stable-to-improved quality. Other work evaluating the experience of high performers in BPCI demonstrates that bundled payments may reduce the costs of joint replacement episodes by up to 20 percent, with sizeable bonuses to physicians and hospitals and small improvements in quality – outcomes that, if scalable, would represent a win for patients, clinicians, organizations, and Medicare alike. On the other hand, recent evidence corroborates analyses conducted by Medicare and its contractor, suggesting that as designed, bundles for medical conditions such as congestive heart failure (CHF) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are not associated with significant changes in quality or Medicare spending.
Therefore, one critical aspect of understanding the impact of bundled payments is evaluating how and why it differs for surgical versus medical care. This insight is particularly important given that surgical and medical episodes will be further expanded at a national scale in the forthcoming Bundled Payments for Care Improvement Advanced (BPCI-Advanced) program. In this post, we describe why the lack of episode savings in Medicare’s medical bundles may not be unexpected, why policymakers should not abandon medical bundles, and why existing evidence poses three important policy implications for the future of medical bundles.
Why Results May Differ For Surgical Versus Medical Bundles
By designing bundles that span hospitalization and post-acute care, Medicare has emphasized reductions in post-acute utilization and spending as major financial savings opportunities. While this approach suits surgical care in which a procedure triggers a cascade of acute and post-acute care, it may pose several challenges for episodes related to medical conditions. First, spending patterns for surgical versus medical care differ, more predictably spiking after surgical procedures but adopting a more cyclical pattern for chronic medical conditions. Accordingly, hospitalization may be more appropriate as an episode trigger for surgical episodes than for medical ones.
In surgical care such as joint replacement, hospitalization is a clear, distinct trigger before which there would be no expected episode-related utilization (e.g., little to no joint replacement-associated services prior to the surgery) and after which there is a distinct cascade of related utilization (e.g., physical rehabilitation, wound care, and post-surgical follow-up). In contrast, hospitalization only represents one aspect and phase of management for medical conditions such as CHF and COPD, which span outpatient, inpatient, emergency department, and post-acute settings over longer periods.
Second, physicians’ and hospitals’ ability to impact post-acute care utilization and spending may differ between surgical and medical episodes. This difference is not simply a reflection of the proportion of total episode spending paid to institutional post-acute care providers. For example, spending on skilled nursing facilities and inpatient rehabilitation facilities was only marginally higher for joint replacement compared with five medical conditions (26 versus 24 percent, respectively).
Rather, differences in the ability to impact post-acute care utilization may relate to the types of services provided in institutional post-acute settings for surgical versus medical patients. For surgical episodes, care at skilled nursing facilities often involves discrete, time-limited activities such as physical rehabilitation to achieve post-surgical recovery (e.g., strengthening, functional improvement). In contrast, given the natural history of diseases such as CHF and COPD, institutional post-acute care services for medical patients generally involve complex tasks such as medication management(e.g., diuretics) and multifaceted occupational therapy to promote self-care and activities of daily living. Consequently, hospitals in surgical bundles have achieved savings without compromising quality by shifting discharges from skilled nursing facilities and inpatient rehabilitation facilities towards home, with either home health or self-care. However, it remains unclear if similar efforts are possible or appropriate for the types of post-acute care that are often required as part of medical bundles. In turn, discharge patterns in medical bundles may reflect the less predictably defined roles of institutional post-acute care providers.
Another reason that shifting discharges away from institutional post-acute care providers may prove challenging under medical bundles is that they involve different types of patients than those often involved in surgical bundles. As noted recently, patients in medical bundles tend to be older and at higher risk for poverty and disability than patients in joint replacement bundles. In turn, patients receiving care for medical conditions may have greater clinical needs during and after hospitalization than patients undergoing surgical procedures.
Implications For The Design Of Medical Bundles
Collectively, these dynamics offer insight into why clinicians bundling care for medical conditions have not achieved savings in BPCI. They also have implications for the design of medical bundles going forward.
First, Medicare could consider modifying when and how medical episodes begin. Rather than being a necessary pre-condition for an episode, hospitalization itself may be a modifiable element of variation in medical conditions. Consequently, unlike in surgical procedures, using hospitalization as a medical episode trigger may miss the opportunity to include cost and utilization variation across the care continuum. As an alternative, if medical episodes were triggered in the outpatient setting – for example, after two specialty office visits within one month — provides might be better able to coordinate medical bundles with other efforts to improve value (e.g., payment models such as accountable care organizations and policies such as the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program).
Second, Medicare could design medical bundles so that the emphasis on improvement is not restricted to care delivered in the post-discharge period. While variation reduction is not an absolute requisite for performance in bundled payments, care standardization remains an important organizational strategy for improving episode-based care. Creating incentives to focus on outpatient and pre-discharge elements may be particularly fruitful for medical bundles given the complexities of ongoing (in the ambulatory setting) and acute (in the hospital setting) management, and the possibility that practice redesign may require more time and greater effort than in surgical episodes.
Third, more data are needed to understand the impact of medical bundles and how best to design them in the future. To date, we have only early evidence about the impact of medical bundles in BPCI (the mean number of months of BPCI participation was 7 months for these hospitals). Given that other alternative payment models such as accountable care organizations have required three or more years before participants achieved savings, medical bundled payment policy should be guided by longer-term evaluations. Such evaluations should also closely monitor the programs for unintended effects: while it may be reassuring that medical bundles have not appeared to inadvertently lead to more readmissions or emergency department visits, vigilance is nonetheless required given the history of racial disparities in access that stem from quality- and value-based policies. Finally, future work can speed progress towards improvement by providing more detailed descriptions of the utilization and spending patterns of patients involved in medical bundles, as well as highlighting the experiences of high-performing providers.
Looking Ahead
While existing evidence suggests that medical bundles may not improve the value of care, these findings are not necessarily unexpected, and policymakers should not abandon the effort to bundle the care of medical conditions. Instead, in addition to more long-term evaluations, the design of medical bundles may be improved in the future by modifying how they are triggered and which phases of care they capture.
Senators Consider Dueling Bills Over Texas Individual Mandate Litigation
Litigation in Texas over the constitutionality of the individual mandate and, with it, the entire Affordable Care Act (ACA) is receiving more and more attention in Congress. On August 23, 2018, Republican Senators released new legislation that they believe would help blunt the impact of a ruling for the plaintiffs in Texas v. United States. The stated aim of the bill is to “guarantee” equal access to health care coverage regardless of health status or preexisting conditions. However, in the event that the court agrees with the plaintiffs—or even just the Trump administration—the legislation leaves significant gaps.
At the same time, Democratic Senators had their efforts to potentially intervene in the litigation rebuffed during the debate over a recent appropriations bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS), Education, and Defense. With a hearing on Texas scheduled for September 5, 2018—the same time as hearings are set to begin in Congress over the confirmation of D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court—attention on the case is only likely to increase.
Brief Background On Texas
In Texas, 20 Republican state attorneys general and two individual plaintiffs challenge the constitutionality of the individual mandate, which was zeroed out by Congress beginning in 2019. Without the penalty, the plaintiffs argue that the mandate is unconstitutional. Because the mandate cannot be severed from the rest of the law, they believe the entire ACA should also be struck down.
In June, the Department of Justice (DOJ) declined to defend the constitutionality of the individual mandate alongside the ACA’s provisions on guaranteed issue (42 U.S.C. §§ 300gg-1, 300gg-4(a)), community rating (42 U.S.C. §§ 300gg(a)(1), 300gg-4(b)), and the ban on preexisting condition exclusions and discrimination based on health status (42 U.S.C. § 300gg-3). These provisions collectively ensure that individuals with preexisting conditions cannot be charged more for their coverage or denied coverage or benefits based on health status or other factors.
The plaintiffs have asked Judge Reed O’Connor of the federal district court in the Northern District of Texas to enjoin HHS and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from enforcing the ACA and its implementing regulations—or, at a minimum, to strike down the law’s guaranteed issue and community rating provisions alongside the mandate. Judge O’Connor is considering ruling on the merits of the case (instead of issuing a preliminary injunction) and has scheduled a hearing on the motion for a preliminary injunction for September 5.
As noted above, the hearing will coincide with confirmation hearings for Judge Kavanaugh. Texas will likely be a focal point in the Kavanaugh proceedings because of the possibility that the case will reach the Supreme Court and because previous decisions suggest that Judge Kavanaugh believes that a President can decline to enforce laws that he or she believes to be unconstitutional.
The New Republican Legislation
Recognizing the potential impact of the Texas lawsuit, 10 Republican Senators released new legislation on August 23. The bill is sponsored by Senators Thom Tillis (NC), Lamar Alexander (TN), Chuck Grassley (IA), Dean Heller (NV), Bill Cassidy (LA), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Joni Ernst (IA), Lindsey Graham (SC), John Barrasso (WY), and Roger Wicker (MS). It is tied directly to the Texas litigation: Press releases acknowledge the September 5 hearing and state that “protections for patients with pre-existing conditions could be eliminated” if Judge O’Connor rules in favor of the plaintiffs.
The legislation would amend the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). Although HIPAA offered significant new protections at the time it was passed, these protections were limited in terms of ensuring that people with preexisting conditions could access affordable, comprehensive coverage, particularly in the individual market. HIPAA established a minimum set of federal protections for certain consumers—for example, those who lost their group coverage—facing certain situations, such as job lock because of a new preexisting condition exclusion period. HIPAA also required guaranteed issue in the small group market and guaranteed renewability in the individual and group markets.
As mentioned, the DOJ has declined to defend the ACA’s provisions on guaranteed issue (42 U.S.C. §§ 300gg-1, 300gg-4(a)) and community rating (42 U.S.C. §§ 300gg(a)(1), 300gg-4(b)), and the ban on preexisting condition exclusions and discrimination based on health status (42 U.S.C. § 300gg-3). Thus, their position in the lawsuit implicates parts of four provisions of federal law: 42 U.S.C. §§ 300gg, 300gg-1, 300gg-3, and 300gg-4.
The legislation introduced by Republican Senators would restore only two of the four provisions that stand to be invalidated in Texas: 42 U.S.C. § 300gg-1 (guaranteed issue) and most of § 300gg-4 (guaranteed issue and rating based on health status). So the bill would prohibit the denial of coverage and rating based on health status, but it would not prohibit preexisting condition exclusions or rating based on other factors, such as age, gender, tobacco use, or occupation. This means that many individuals, including those with preexisting conditions, could still face higher premiums, higher out-of-pocket costs, and the denial of benefits because of a preexisting condition even after paying premiums for many months.
Implications
The protections offered by the restoration of the two provisions included in the Senate GOP bill, § 300gg-1 and most of § 300gg-4, are largely illusory without the other parts of the ACA—community rating and the ban on preexisting condition exclusions—that are at risk in the lawsuit. Assuming the at-risk provisions are struck down and the new legislation is adopted, consumers would still face significant gaps. For instance, a woman with a history of cancer could purchase a policy under the new bill, but she could be charged more based on her gender and age, potentially pricing her out of the market. In addition, her policy could have a preexisting condition exclusion, meaning that any recurrence of cancer—or any other health condition—might not be covered at all; this could lead to much higher out-of-pocket costs and far less financial protection.
If Congress were to enact this bill today, it would largely be duplicative of existing law (and would do nothing to disturb the ACA). If Congress were to enact this bill in response to the Texas litigation, its effect would depend on how (if at all) a court would invalidate the ACA provisions in Texas. Would a court strike the entire provisions, including what was adopted under HIPAA and other federal laws? Or would a court simply strike the amendments that were made by the ACA?
If the latter, the new legislation might do even less than its authors think, because much of the bill is, in fact, devoted to readopting existing federal law that may not be at issue in Texas. These provisions were adopted before the ACA and touch on, for instance, genetic information nondiscrimination and long-standing exceptions to guaranteed issue.
No Vote On Manchin Resolution To Potentially Intervene In Texas
In July, Democratic Senators led by Joe Manchin (WV) introduced a resolution with the goal of intervening in Texas to defend the ACA’s protections for people with preexisting conditions. The resolution would authorize the Senate Legal Counsel to move to intervene in the case on behalf of the Senate and defend the ACA. During last week’s debate over an HHS appropriations bill, Senate leadership blocked a vote on the amendment.
THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON IN YOUR ORGANIZATION
It’s natural to think of yourself as the most important person in the world. You think your own thoughts. You have your own perspective. You seek your own enjoyment. You dream your own dreams.
The pain of realizing the world doesn’t revolve around you blocks the light from shining through.
Who is the most important person in your organization? I don’t know. But I know it isn’t you.
Deception:
The belief that you are the center of the universe is a great deception that prevents you from reaching your potential as a leader.
It’s a small universe if you are its center.
Would you want to play in a symphony where the musicians ignored each other and followed their inner voice? What happens when symphonies ignore each other and turn a blind eye to the conductor?
Symphony becomes cacophony when each member does their own thing.
You become bigger when you give yourself to something bigger than yourself.
Others make you matter:
In its simplest form, a leader is a person with followers. In other words, leadership REQUIRES others.
Without others, you aren’t a leader.
How you view others determines the nature of your leadership.
Enough ego:
You need enough ego to want to make a difference, but not so much that life is all about you. David Letterman’s service to Habitat for Humanity illustrates the point.
“When you help others, you feel better about yourself. ” David Letterman
The search to feel better about himself led him to serve others. That’s healthy ego. Unhealthy ego serves only itself.
Another center:
Barack Obama spoke the following words at Senator John McCain’s memorial service.
“By his own account, John was a rebellious young man. In his case, that’s understandable, what faster way to distinguish yourself when you’re the son and grandson of admirals than to mutiny. Eventually, though, he concluded that the only way to really make his mark on the world is to commit to something bigger than yourself.” (September 1, 2018.)
What does it mean to live for something bigger than yourself? It means you are no longer the center.
Your most frightening and fulfilling power is placing something other than yourself at the center of your life.
Leaders who live for themselves live small disappointing lives.
7 ‘bigger than yourself’ practices:
- Visualize putting your team at the center of your focus for one day. Keep pushing yourself off center stage and shining the light on others.
- Get excited about things others are doing.
- Talk less about yourself and more about others.
- Ask people to share their perspective. “What do you think?”
- Notice your judgement of others. Are you typically negative? This suggests you think too highly of yourself.
- Stand up for your convictions with grace. Putting others at the center isn’t being a pushover.
- Determine if your actions matter. “Will this matter next week, next month, next year?”
When leaders lives for something bigger than themselves, what are they like?
HENRY KOTULA 