Many Americans breathed a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court left the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in place following its third major legal challenge in June 2021. This decision left widely supported policies in place, like ensuring coverage regardless of preexisting conditions, coverage for dependents up to age 26 on their parents’ plan and removal of annual and lifetime benefit limits.
But the hits keep coming. One of the most popular benefits offered by the ACA, free preventive care through many employer-based and marketplace insurance plans, is under attack by another legal domino, Kelley v. Becerra. As University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley sees it, “[t]his time, the law’s opponents stand a good chance of succeeding.”
We are public health and economics researchers at Boston University who have been studying how preventive care is covered by the ACA and what this means for patients. With this policy now in jeopardy, health care in the U.S. stands to take a big step backward.
What did the ACA do for preventive health?
The Affordable Care Act tried to achieve the twin ideals of making health care more accessible while reducing health care spending. It created marketplaces for individuals to purchase health insurance and expanded Medicaid to increase coverage for more low-income people.
One way it has tried to reach both goals is to prioritize preventive services that maximize patient health and minimize cost, like cancer screenings, vaccinations and access to contraception. Eliminating financial barriers to health screenings increases the likelihood that common but costly chronic conditions, such as heart disease, will be diagnosed early on.
Section 2713 of the ACA requires insurers to offer full coverage of preventive services that are endorsed by three federal groups: the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and the Health Resources and Services Administration. This means that eligible preventive services ordered by your doctor won’t cost you anything out of pocket. For example, the CARES Act used this provision to ensure COVID-19 vaccines would be free for many Americans.
Removing the financial barrier has drastically reduced the average cost of a range of preventive services. Our study found that the costs of well-child visits and mammograms were reduced by 56% and 74%, respectively, from 2006 to 2018. We also found that the ACA reduced the share of children’s preventive checkups that included out-of-pocket costs from over 50% in 2010 to under 15% in 2018.
Residual costs for preventive services remain
Despite these reductions in costs, there are limitations to this benefit. For example, it doesn’t cover follow-up tests or treatments. This means that if a routine mammogram or colonoscopy reveals something that requires further care, patients may have to pay for the initial screening test, too. And some patients still receive unexpected bills for preventive care that should have been covered. This can happen, for example, when providers submit incorrect billing codes to insurers, which have specific and often idiosyncratic preventive care guidelines.
We also studied the residual out-of-pocket costs that privately insured Americans had after using eligible preventive services in 2018. We found that these patients paid between $75 million to $219 million per year combined for services that should have been free for them. Unexpected preventive care bills were most likely to hit patients living in rural areas or the South, as well as those seeking women’s services such as contraception and other reproductive health care. Among patients attempting to get a free wellness visit from their doctor, nearly 1 in 5 were later asked to pay for it.
Nevertheless, the preventive health provision of the ACA has resulted in significant reductions in patient costs for many essential and popular services. And removing financial barriers is a key way to encourage patients to use preventive services intended to protect their health.
The threat of Kelley v. Becerra
The plaintiffs who brought the latest legal challenge to the ACA, Kelley v. Becerra, object to covering contraception and preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV on religious and moral grounds. The case is currently awaiting decision in a district court in Texas, but seems to be headed to the Supreme Court.
The case rests on two legal issues: 1) violation of the nondelegation doctrine, and 2) the appointments clause of the Constitution. The nondelegation doctrine is a rarely used legal argument that requires Congress to specify how their powers should be used. It essentially argues that Congress was too vague by not specifying which preventive services would be included in Section 2713 up front. The appointments clause specifies that the people using government powers must be “officers of the United States.” In this case, it is unclear whether those in the federal groups that determine eligible preventive care services qualify.
Texas District Judge Reed O’Connor has indicated so far that he takes a kind view toward the plaintiff’s case. He could rule that this provision of the ACA is unconstitutional and put the case on a path to the Supreme Court.
Patients stand to lose more than just money
If Section 2713 were repealed, insurers would have the freedom to reimpose patient cost-sharing for preventive care. In the short run, this could increase the financial strain that patients face when seeking preventive care and discourage them from doing so. In the long run, this could result in increased rates of preventable and expensive-to-treat chronic conditions. And because Section 2713 is what allows free COVID-19 vaccines for those with private health insurance, some patients may have to pay for their vaccines and future boosters if the provision is axed.
The ACA has been instrumental in expanding access to preventive care for millions of Americans. While the ACA’s preventive health coverage provision isn’t perfect, a lot of progress that has been made toward lower-cost, higher-value care may be erased if Section 2713 is repealed.
Lower-income patients will stand to lose the most. And it could make ending the COVID-19 pandemic that much harder.
Interest in the antiparasitic drug Ivermectin has increased drastically as of late thanks to the belief that it can help to prevent and/or treat Covid-19. In today’s episode we examine recent data on the efficacy of Ivermectin as an antiviral and discuss the history behind how it gained this reputation.
https://mailchi.mp/60a059924012/the-weekly-gist-september-10-2021?e=d1e747d2d8
Declaring that “our patience is wearing thin” with Americans who refuse to be vaccinated against COVID-19, President Biden announced sweeping new plans to implement vaccine mandates on Thursday.
Businesses that employ more than 100 people must require their employees to get vaccinated or face weekly COVID testing, federal workers and contractors must be vaccinated or face disciplinary measures, and all healthcare organizations that receive Medicare or Medicaid funds must ensure 100 percent employee vaccination as a condition of continued participation in those federal payment programs. The healthcare component of the mandate will impact about 17 million workers, including those at hospitals, surgery centers, dialysis facilities, and home health agencies. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) already requires nursing home workers to be vaccinated, and yesterday announced plans to release a new regulation by October 1st, implementing the expanded mandate. According to Fierce Healthcare, at least 172 hospital systems have already announced some form of vaccine mandate, but others have expressed concerns that forcing workers to get vaccinated might exacerbate labor shortages and result in employees seeking work elsewhere.
Responding to President Biden’s announcement, the American Hospital Association (AHA) echoed those concerns, citing “the critical challenges that we are facing in maintaining the resiliency of our workforce.” In our view, that concern pales in comparison to the imperative to protect patients by reducing the potential for exposure by unvaccinated caregivers. If anything, the national healthcare mandate should provide cover for those hospitals and care providers that have shied away from mandates, letting other organizations take the lead. Once universal healthcare mandates are implemented, vaccine resistant workers will find few employment alternatives left, significantly dampening the risk of widespread resignations. If you don’t want to take the necessary precautions to keep patients safe, you shouldn’t be working in healthcare in the first place. Yesterday’s mandate announcement, while aggressive, is overdue.
Health spending in the United States is highest in the world, driven in part by administrative complexity. To date, studies examining the administrative costs of American health care have primarily focused on clinicians and organizations—rarely on patients.
A new study in Health Services Research finds administrative complexity in the U.S. health care system has consequences for access to care that are on par with those of financial barriers like copays and deductibles. In other words, we pay for health care in two ways: in money and in the hassle of dealing with a complex, confusing, and error-riddled system. Both are barriers to access. The study was led by Michael Anne Kyle, and coauthor, Austin Frakt.
Main Findings
Methods
To measure the size and consequences of patients’ administrative roles, we used data from the nationally representative March 2019 Health Reform Monitoring Survey of insured, nonelderly adults (18-64) to assess the annual prevalence of five common types of administrative tasks patients perform: (1) appointment scheduling; (2) obtaining information from an insurer or provider; (3) obtaining prior authorizations; (4) resolving insurance or provider billing issues; (5) and resolving insurance premium problems. The study examined the association of these tasks with two important measures of their burden: delayed and forgone care.
Conclusions
High administrative complexity is a central feature of the U.S. health care system. Largely overlooked, patients frequently do administrative work that can create burdens resulting in delayed or foregone care. The prevalence of delayed or foregone care due to administrative tasks is comparable to similar estimates of cost-related barriers to care. Administrative complexity is endemic to all post-industrial health systems, but there may be opportunity to design administrative tools with greater care to avoid exacerbating or reinforcing inequities.
Not a typo: Unvaccinated people are 11 times more likely to die of COVID than those who’ve gotten the shot, the CDC found.
By the numbers: Of 37,948 hospitalizations in 13 jurisdictions studied between April and July, 2,976 patients— or about 8% — were vaccinated, Axios’ Noah Garfinkel reports.
The three vaccines “showed continued robust protection for all adults — greater than 82 percent — for hospitalization, emergency room and urgent care trips,” The Washington Post reports.
Earlier this week, David States and Bill Gardner argued that the U.S. should lead the developed nations in a program to immunize the entire human population. The Washington Post reported that President Biden is expected to call for a global vaccine summit conference.
David and Bill wrote that we should do this because it would save many lives. Perhaps this is all that needs to be said. We also argued that the U.S. stood to benefit if we could substantially reduce the number of global covid cases. This would reduce U.S. coronavirus exposure and slow the rate of evolution of new coronavirus variants. The economic cost to the U.S. of a more severe pandemic could easily be greater than the cost of making and distributing the vaccine. If so, the global vaccination effort would pay for itself.
There is, however, another moral argument for global vaccination, this one tied to 9/11 and the ensuing global war on terror. Since 9/11, the U.S. has engaged in 20 years of warfare in countries across the world.
The consequences of that war have been catastrophic. According to the Watson Institute at Brown University,
At least 801,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan… The U.S. post-9/11 wars have forcibly displaced at least 38 million people in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria. This number exceeds the total displaced by every war since 1900, except World War II.
Of course, much of that violence was committed by al-Qaeda, ISIS, or the Syrian government. Some of the civil wars that have followed 9/11 might have happened anyway. Nevertheless, Americans failed to limit their 9/11 response to the specific individuals who carried out the attacks. This was a principal cause of the ensuing death and displacements.
So now, the U.S. is known not only for baseball and democracy but also for drone strikes and torture. If we led an effort to vaccinate the world, it would be one of the largest humanitarian actions in history. We should do this to set an example and balance the effects of the global war on terror.
https://mailchi.mp/60a059924012/the-weekly-gist-september-10-2021?e=d1e747d2d8
The typical media coverage of the healthcare workforce crisis often focuses on the acute shortage of hospital-based nurses. For instance, the hospital forced to close a unit as nurses, burned out after 18 months of extra shifts taking care of COVID patients, leave for lower-stress, more predictable jobs in outpatient facilities or doctors’ offices.
But we’re hearing about a reverse trend in recent conversations with health system leaders. Instead of outpatient settings benefiting from an influx of nursing talent, ambulatory leaders report that nurses are now leaving for hospital or travel nursing positions that offer higher salaries and large sign-on bonuses. That’s forcing non-hospital settings to reduce operating room and endoscopy capacity.
Nor are shortages just in the nursing workforce. One system executive lamented that they had to cancel several non-emergent cardiac surgeries, not due to nurse staffing challenges; rather, they were short on surgical technicians. “Surgical techs aren’t leaving because of COVID,” the executive shared, “they’re leaving because the labor market is so strong, and they can make the same money doing something entirely different.”
For lower-wage workers in particular, the old value proposition of working for a health system, centered around good benefits, continuing education, and a long-term career path, isn’t providing the boost it used to. Workers are willing to trade those for improved work-life balance, predictability, and the perception of a “safer” workplace.
Stabilizing the healthcare workforce will ultimately require providers to rethink job design, the allocation of talent across settings of care, and the integration of technology in workflow. And it will require re-anchoring the work in the mission of serving the community.
But in the short term, many health systems will find themselves having to pay more to retain key workers, including but not limited to hospital nurses, to maintain patient access to care.
HENRY KOTULA 