Tag Archives: Healthcare Access

CMS finalizes 340B drug program cut

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https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/cms-finalizes-340b-drug-program-cut/509892/

Dive Brief:

  • The CMS on Wednesday released a final rule that will significantly cut drug payments to hospitals that use the 340B Drug Pricing Program. The changes to the Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment and Ambulatory Surgical Center Payment Systems and Quality Reporting Program take effect Jan. 1, 2018.
  • The rule also puts a moratorium on enforcement of the direct supervision policy in certain cases, increases outpatient payments by 1.35%, removes six measures from the Outcome Reporting Program and removes total knee arthroplasty from the inpatient only list.
  • The American Hospital Association released a statement blasting the 340B cut, saying it “will dramatically threaten access to healthcare for many patients, including uninsured and other vulnerable populations.” AHA, America’s Essential Hospitals and the Association of American Medical Colleges plan to sue the administration over the change.

Dive Insight:

The cut to drug payments in the 340B program, which is mostly used by safety net hospitals, is dramatic. Instead of being paid the average sales price plus 6%, they will now be paid 22.5% less than the average price. Children’s hospitals and community hospitals in rural areas are exempt from the reduction.

Hospitals that use the program say it is necessary to helping them care for vulnerable populations, and have cautioned the cut will jeopardize that. There is little oversight, however, over how hospitals track and use the savings generating through 340B. Some lawmakers have said hospitals should be required to make this information readily available.

A controversial study released last month showed hospitals participating in 340B had more of a decline in charity care than other hospitals. AHA said the report is misleading and doesn’t take into account other community benefits hospitals provide.

Hospitals will also be angered by the CMS decision to allow total knee replacement surgeries to take place in outpatient settings. The agency is following the lead of commercial payers, who are pushing for care to move away from more expensive inpatient settings. CMS has said the change will let Medicare beneficiaries get a knee replacement at lower cost, but hospitals say the quality of care for those procedures could decrease.

 

Healthcare Triage: Is Medicaid Coverage Better or Worse than Private Insurance?

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Healthcare Triage: Is Medicaid Coverage Better or Worse than Private Insurance?

As we have discussed repeatedly here on HCT, it’s better for patients to have Medicaid than to be uninsured, contrary to critics of the program. But is having Medicaid, as those critics also say, much worse than having private insurance?

This episode was adapted from a column  Austin and I wrote for the Upshot. Links to further reading and sources can be found there.

Trump rolls back Obamacare birth control mandate

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http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/06/trump-rolls-back-obamacares-contraception-rule-243537

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The new policy reignites the battle over one of the health care law’s most controversial provisions.

The Trump administration will allow virtually any employer to claim a religious or moral objection to Obamacare’s birth control coverage mandate under a sweeping rollback announced Friday.

The new policies, which take effect immediately, reignite a fierce battle over one of the health care law’s most controversial provisions and quickly drew legal challenges. The requirement to provide FDA-approved contraception at no cost was long opposed by religious groups that heavily favored Trump, and has been wrapped up in litigation for more than five years.

“The United States has a long history of providing conscience protections in the regulation of health care for entities and individuals with objections based on religious beliefs or moral convictions,” the administration wrote in new rules.

The American Civil Liberties Union said it will file a lawsuit on Friday to block the long-anticipated rules from the Trump administration, and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra also announced plans to sue. Women’s health groups for months have been preparing lawsuits against the new policies, which they say will enable employers to deny their workers access to needed care.

The Trump administration said it was acting to protect individuals and groups from being forced to violate their religious beliefs as it downplayed concerns that more women would struggle to afford birth control.

“The attempts by the previous administration to provide some protections were inadequate,” said a senior HHS official of the Obama administration’s efforts to provide workarounds for religious groups. “They are being rebuffed here.”

The administration issued two rules — one outlining how an employer could claim an exemption for religious beliefs, the other outlining an exemption for sincerely held moral convictions — on the same day Attorney General Jeff Sessions called for sweeping protections for religious freedom in a government-wide memo that could have far-reaching implications.

The new birth control rules hew closely to a draft that leaked in May and drew swift condemnation from Democrats, public health groups and women’s health care advocates.

“Today’s outrageous rules by the Trump Administration show callous disregard for women’s rights, health, and autonomy, said Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center. “By taking away women’s access to no-cost birth control coverage, the rules give employers a license to discriminate against women. We will take immediate legal steps to block these unfair and discriminatory rules.”

It’s unclear how many organizations will now look to drop birth control coverage from their insurance plans. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2014 Hobby Lobby ruling that closely held private companies could seek an exemption on religious grounds, only a few dozen employers requested one from the Obama administration, POLITICO found last year.

The birth control coverage mandate is broadly supported by the general public, polling has found over the years. And it appears to have reduced women’s spending on contraception. One study estimated that women saved $1.4 billion on birth control pills in 2013 as a result of the coverage requirement. About 55 million women have directly benefited from no-cost birth control, according to an Obama administration report released last year.

“Any move to decrease access to these vital services would have damaging effects on public health and women’s health,” said Haywood Brown, director of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Trump hinted at his plan to roll back the birth control mandate this spring as he signed an executive order on religious freedom, but the regulation had been tied up at his budget office for more than four months. By weakening the mandate, Trump is unilaterally paring back a small piece of Obamacare detested by his conservative base, which has grown increasingly frustrated with the GOP’s inability to fulfill its longstanding promise to repeal the health care law.

The Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate took effect in 2012 after the Obama administration accepted a recommendation from an independent panel to require plans to cover it at no cost to women. The administration exempted houses of worship and unsuccessfully tried to make accommodations for religiously affiliated groups to allow their employees to still receive the coverage from a third party. But those groups rejected the accommodations and filed dozens of lawsuits, leading to two separate Supreme Court challenges, including the Hobby Lobbydecision.

The Supreme Court last year ordered the Obama administration and religiously affiliated organizations, such as universities and charities, to reach agreement on an accommodation that would let employees of such groups have access to no-cost contraception. They never resolved the issue.

Advocates for religious groups called the rule a major step forward after years of fighting the mandate.

“Today President Trump delivered a huge victory for conscience rights and religious liberty in America,” said Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser in a statement. “No longer will Catholic nuns who care for the elderly poor be forced by the government to provide abortion-inducing drugs in their health care plans.”

The Trump administration argues that women have affordable contraceptive options should employers drop coverage, and that several government programs provide free or subsidized contraception for low-income women, including Title X family planning grants.

But women’s health advocates say that program is already underfunded, and other Trump administration priorities — including stalled plans to repeal Obamacare and defund Planned Parenthood — would further erode access to affordable birth control.

“President Trump’s shameful war on women rages on,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) in a statement. “By ending the birth control mandate, the President and his Administration are allowing employers to stand in the way of women accessing the healthcare that they and their doctors have deemed necessary.”

Congress misses deadline to reauthorize CHIP

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http://www.healthcaredive.com/news/congress-misses-deadline-to-reauthorize-chip/506252/

Dive Brief:

  • The Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which provides coverage to 9 million children, expired this weekend after Congress failed to reauthorize the program before the Sept. 30 deadline.
  • There is still hope that Congress will approve a reauthorization quickly, but state leaders are concerned if Congress doesn’t act soon they will run out of money for the program, which is mostly paid for with federal funds. House and Senate lawmakers have said they will pursue CHIP legislation this week.
  • The Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC) estimated that if CHIP isn’t reauthorized three states and the District of Columbia will run out of program funding by the end of the year and another 27 states will run dry in the first quarter of 2018.

Dive Insight:

MACPAC warned that stopping CHIP funding will impact state budgets and force states to decide whether to continue coverage on their own dime. If states limit or stop CHIP coverage, hospitals and providers could feel the brunt of fewer insured children and more bad debt. This is especially true for children’s hospitals.

Jim Kaufman, vice president of public policy at Children’s Hospital Association (CHA), recently told Healthcare Dive that CHIP is important for children’s hospitals. “CHIP is good for kids, and that makes it good for children’s hospitals and children’s providers,” Kaufman said.

Not reauthorizing CHIP quickly could especially be an issue for the three states (Arizona, Minnesota and North Carolina) and the District of Columbia, which are expected to run out of CHIP money by the end of the year.

There was hope last month that Congress might be able to reauthorize the program in time. A bipartisan group of senator agreed on a reauthorization bill in September that would have extended CHIP for another five years. However, momentum for that bill stalled when Capitol Hill turned its attention to the Graham-Cassidy ACA repeal legislation. Graham-Cassidy died without a floor vote, and Congress didn’t take up CHIP reauthorization before the deadline.

CHIP, which costs about $14 billion annually, was created in 1997 as a way to provide more health insurance coverage to children of families with low and moderate incomes. The federal government sends CHIP money to states annually, based on previous spending of the funds and populations factors. The states must spend the federal money within two years. Money that isn’t used goes back to the federal government to reallocate to states with CHIP funding shortfalls.

Congress has reauthorized the program periodically since its creation. CHIP has wide support and studies have shown the program helps reduce hospitalizations and child mortality and increase quality of care. When the program was created, 15% of children were uninsured. That number is now about 5% because of CHIP, the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansion.

Incentives Are All Wrong for Single-Payer Health Care

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https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-12/incentives-are-all-wrong-for-single-payer-health-care

Americans won’t give up their private insurance unless the government option is better. And that won’t be cheap.

The conventional wisdom these days is that the major Democratic presidential candidates for 2020 will end up endorsing some version of single-payer health care. Senator Bernie Sanders is expected to introduce his Medicare for All bill this week, with a considerable number of co-sponsors. This political posturing, however, is far from a practical proposal.

There’s an obvious problem with moving Americans to a single-payer system: Most people with private health insurance are pretty happy with their current arrangements. They are not looking to trade in that coverage for a new government program of uncertain quality, along with unknown higher taxes. When President Barack Obama was selling the Affordable Care Act, he promised Americans that they could keep their health insurance if they wanted to. When this didn’t turn out to be true for everyone, there was a significant backlash.

Progressive analysts thus have turned to how a single-payer system might come about more gradually. But longer transition times don’t solve the core problem.

Let’s say the federal government sets up a “public option,” as it sometimes is called. Individuals would have the opportunity to buy into government insurance at some price. The new government program would be competing with private insurance, but just how good will the new benefits be? If you’re healthy and have other coverage, you probably won’t switch — if you did, that would be a sign that the new government program was of very high quality and probably too expensive for the nation as a whole. Boosting the health care of the best-covered Americans isn’t the policy priority right now.

Instead, the public option might be set up to attract those who don’t already have good coverage. But those are the same people who don’t have the money to pay a fair market price for health insurance now. In essence, the program would come to resemble a Medicaid expansion, whether or not it would fall under the formal rubric of Medicaid.

That’s a plausible option for a marginal change; many states, of course, have already done a Medicaid expansion. The question remains whether such a program can evolve into single-payer health insurance. The answer is probably not. To become a single-payer system, as coverage climbs up the income ladder, the new reform would have to lure Americans out of private health insurance. It either has to make the private alternative worse, say by penalties like a stiff “Cadillac tax” on policies that exceed a certain level, or it has to make the public alternative especially appealing. We are then back to the change either being unpopular or spending too much money on people who already have decent coverage.

You can make a good case for continuing the forthcoming Cadillac tax on private insurance, as is embedded in Obamacare. But the point of that change was to get people to move to less health insurance coverage and to use less health-care resources, not to bounce them into a system with yet lower marginal cost for a doctor’s visit or extra medical procedures.

It’s worth thinking through why some single-payer systems, such as those on the European continent or in Hong Kong and Taiwan, seem to work. Typically those systems were instituted while health-care costs were still fairly low, and then kept down by government fiat. The U.S. is not in that position, and it’s hard to see doctors and hospitals — powerful lobbies — going along with significant cuts to their payments.

Single-payer systems can work for yet another reason: If a citizenry consumes much less health care, and it doesn’t damage patient outcomes so much. Patient queuing isn’t a disaster if people who really need treatment get priority, as is the case in the better-run single-payer systems. In other words, single payer has to be sold as a way of getting us all to cut back on the consumption of medical resources. Unfortunately, the Medicare for All movement is more about easing everyone’s access and boosting the usage of health-care resources, a typically American approach.

When it comes to access, the major problem in the U.S. is distributional: Some of the poor have insufficient access, and arguably some of the well-off receive health care at too low a user price. Given Americans’ love for consumption, it’s probably too late to fix the latter problem. We can, to some extent, improve lower-income access by Medicaid expansions.

The political war along the way to a full single-payer system is unlikely to be rewarding. According to one poll, single payer is supported by only 43 percent of Americans, hardly enough to overcome political gridlock.

Progress will come in bits and pieces. The notion of a universal cure-all is a myth, whether it comes to improving your health or improving America’s health-care system.

 

When athletes share their battles with mental illness

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2017/08/30/michael-phelps-brandon-marshall-mental-health-battles-royce-white-jerry-west/596857001/

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Public Health Care Programs: Lower Cost but Not Lower Quality

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Public Health Care Programs: Lower Cost but Not Lower Quality

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In recent days, Democrats have stepped into the health policy vacuum created by the Republicans’ failure to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Proposals making the rounds include allowing Americans to buy into Medicare at age 55 or to buy into Medicaid.

Both Medicare and Medicaid pay lower prices to health care providers compared with private market plans offered by employers and in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces. On that basis, you might think these public programs are more cost-efficient. Are they?

Imagine that I take my car to the cheapest mechanic in town, while you take yours to the most expensive. My repairs, though costing less, don’t always fix the problem or last as long. You get what you pay for.

Let’s take a look at whether something similar is happening with public health programs. One study examined claims data for 26 low-value services and found that as much as 2.7 percent of Medicare’s spending is on these services alone, which include ineffective cancer screening, diagnostic testing, imaging and surgery. That sounds pretty bad.

But a paper that appeared in Health Services Research this year suggests that private plans do not perform better. Looking at the years 2009 to 2011, the authors compared the rates at which Medicare and private health plans provided seven low-value services. The services compared were among those identified as unnecessary by national organizations of medical specialists as part of the Choosing Wisely campaign.

The researchers found that four of the seven services they examined were provided at similar rates by Medicare and commercial market plans: cervical cancer screening over age 65; prescription opioid use for migraines; cardiac testing in asymptomatic patients; and frequent bone density scans. Medicare was less likely to pay for unnecessary imaging for back pain, but more likely to pay for vitamin D screening.

This finding might seem counterintuitive. Commercial market plans pay higher rates and confer higher profit margins, meaning there is more financial incentive for physicians to provide privately insured patients more of all types of care, whether low or high value.

But other results from the study suggest a more likely explanation: Doctors tend to treat all their patients similarly, regardless of who is paying the bill.

“What kind of insurance you have does affect your access to health care,” said Carrie Colla, associate professor of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice and the lead author of the study. “But once you’re in front of the doctor, by and large you’re treated the same way as any other patient.”

One apparent exception found in the study involved the seventh service it examined: cardiac testing before low-risk, noncardiac surgery. This service was provided to 46 percent of Medicare beneficiaries and 26 percent of privately insured patients. The large difference could reflect the fact that cardiac problems are more prevalent among older people. So a doctor with equal concern for all her patients might test Medicare patients at a higher rate for that reason. Nonetheless, such testing is considered low value even for the Medicare population.

Another recent study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, also found little relationship between insurance status and low-value care. The study found no difference in the rates at which seven of nine low-value services were provided to patients on Medicaid versus those with private coverage. Six were also provided at the same rates for uninsured and privately insured patients.

Moreover, the study found that physicians who see a higher proportion of patients on Medicaid provide the same rate of low- and high-value services for all their patients as other physicians do. This is an important finding because Medicaid pays doctors less than private plans do, raising concerns that higher-quality doctors would tend not to participate in the program.

“Despite concerns to the contrary, Medicaid patients don’t appear to be seeing lower-quality doctors,” said Dr. Michael Barnett, lead author of the study, a physician with the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an assistant professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Though raising the prices Medicaid pays doctors may increase physician participation, enhancing enrollees’ access to care, it isn’t likely to change the quality of care patients receive once they are in the doctor’s office.”

If insurance status doesn’t influence how much low-value care patients are being offered, what does? In part, it seems related to the history and organization of local health care markets. A big culprit, according to Ms. Colla’s study, is a market’s ratio of specialists, like cardiologists and orthopedists, to primary care physicians. In areas where there are relatively more specialists, there is also more low-value care. That’s not to say that specialists don’t provide valuable services — but it suggests that they tend to provide more low-value care as well.

In a way, this is good news — the medical system doesn’t seem to discriminate by insurance status. It also means that public programs appear to be relatively cost-efficient, spending less than private payers for care of similar quality. That bodes well for Democrats’ proposals to expand Medicare or Medicaid.

But the bad news is that the study results imply that the value of care is hard to influence by adjusting prices. In a normal market, paying less for something would send a message of its low value, prompting people to provide less of it. The fact that price apparently does not influence doctors’ decisions is just another way in which health care does not seem to function like other markets.

No, Medicaid isn’t broken

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https://www.axios.com/no-medicaid-isnt-broken-2404950733.html

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One reason the architects of the American Health Care Act want to cut Medicaid spending and give more responsibility to the states is that they believe that the current program is “broken,” with inadequate access to physicians and out-of-control costs. This is one of those canards that is repeated so often that many people just accept it as true. Mostly, it is not true.

Like any big messy public program, Medicaid is very far from perfect, as I learned when I oversaw a Medicaid program for a Republican governor in New Jersey. But on basic measures of access and satisfaction with care, Medicaid beneficiaries look very much like people with private employer coverage despite the fact that they are sicker and poorer. And they’re doing better than the uninsured.

The bottom line: Medicaid isn’t broken — at least, not any more than private insurance is.

Finding doctors: The biggest problem that’s usually cited with Medicaid is that people have trouble finding doctors who will take them. And there are troubles with low Medicaid provider reimbursement rates and physician access, but they vary around the country. It’s not hard to find a state, or more typically a region within a state, where physician access is a real problem.

But overall:

  • 74% of Medicaid beneficiaries see a doctor each year
  • 69% for people with employer based private coverage see a doctor each year.
  • People on Medicaid are also nearly just as satisfied with their health care as people with employer coverage.

Costs aren’t out of control: Medicaid spending did jump to 10.5% in 2015 with the Affordable Care Act coverage expansion, but it dropped to 5.9% in 2016 and is projected to grow by 4.5% this year.

And per capita Medicaid costs are not rising faster than costs for private insurance. In fact, they’re projected to grow more slowly.

Some would say that’s because Medicaid underpays providers, and it does pay substantially less than Medicare in many states. Others would say, good for Medicaid; it drives a tougher bargain with providers while getting results comparable to other payers.

The AHCA would take more than 800 billion dollars out of Medicaid over the next decade by reducing funding for the Medicaid expansion and capping federal Medicaid spending. The architects of the AHCA may believe Medicaid dollars are better spent elsewhere or not spent at all, or that somehow states can make Medicaid work better with far less money.

There are many principled conservative arguments for smaller government. But the argument that Medicaid is “broken” is not one of them; it is more urban legend than fact.

Healthcare Triage News: Narrow Insurance Networks Limit Access, Especially for Kids

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Healthcare Triage News: Narrow Insurance Networks Limit Access, Especially for Kids

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Narrow health insurance networks cover fewer doctors, and can be especially narrow when it comes to specialists. And, it turns out, this limited access to specialists disproportionately affects children. This is Healthcare Triage News:

 

Block grant funding of public health insurance: the Canadian example

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Block grant funding of public health insurance: the Canadian example

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Speaker Paul Ryan wants to reform Medicaid by “block granting” the program, that is,

by capping federal funding and turning control of the program over to states. The aim of such reforms is to reduce federal funding over the long term, while preserving a safety net for needy, low-income Americans. An additional valuable aim of this effort has been to advance federalism by reducing the federal government’s role and giving states and governors more freedom and flexibility in managing their Medicaid programs and helping people in their states.

What are the likely consequences of block granting? Benjamin Sommers and David Naylor write in JAMA about how Canada’s joint federal/provincial funding of health care provides lessons about the likely consequences of block granting.

Canada is a single payer health care system. However, there isn’t a Canadian single payer. Rather, there is a single payer for each province: I am covered by the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP). These plans are primarily funded by provincial taxes. However, provinces also receive a health transfer from the Canadian federal government, i. e., a block grant. The provincial health insurance plans are run by provincial health ministers, not the federal minister in Ottawa.

So, does provincial autonomy facilitate experimentation and tailoring by the provinces? Sommers and Naylor think not.

there is little evidence that the alleged advantages of block grants have materialized in Canada. Advocates argue that with greater flexibility and proper incentives, states can reduce costs by improving the efficiency of care. In Canada, however, the provinces’ primary means of coping with budget pressures under block grants has been to reduce funding to hospitals and bargain harder with provincial medical associations. Ironically, then, if this scenario plays out in the United States, it would exacerbate one of the chief Republican criticisms of Medicaid — that it pays clinicians such low rates that they have reduced incentives to care for low-income patients.

Indeed, physician refusal to take Medicaid patients is one of Speaker Ryan’s central criticisms of Medicaid.

What about the effects of a block grant system on federal funding of health care?

Once block funding was initiated in 1977, health care funding became a line item in the federal budget that could be arbitrarily cut or capped for fiscal or political reasons, as opposed to a level of spending pegged to the needs and health care use of the population. Importantly, these cuts occurred under both conservative and liberal federal governments.

When the Canadian health transfer began, the federal government paid 50% of provincial costs. However, the transfer has steadily declined, until it is now about 20%. Sommers and Naylor predict that US federal block grants would also decline, and this is clearly one of Speaker Ryan’s goals.

However, Canadian health care spending per capita has not declined.

As the cost of providing care has risen, but the federal health transfer has stayed fixed or declined, the provinces have taxed more and the federal government has taxed less. The provincial governments hate this, because they would rather have the federal government make the unpopular choice to raise taxes. But it’s not clear whether block granting has made a big difference in the health care received by Canadians.

American states could similarly increase taxes in response to a declining federal Medicaid block grant, but would they? The key difference between Canadian public health insurance and Medicaid is that the former is universal, while the latter is means-tested. Ontarians prefer lower taxes, but if Ontario decreases funding for OHIP, every Ontarian will experience longer waits for care. But American states can cut Medicaid — and reduce taxes — without affecting the health care of better off and able-bodied citizens.

The affluent and able-bodied are also the citizens most likely to vote. American states determine their own voting procedures. Block granting gives states an incentive to manage voting so as to reduce the participation of the marginalized communities who are most in need of public health insurance. Block granting is likely to undermine the health care for the poor and disabled, and it could reinforce the post-Shelby County v. Holder efforts to restrict voting.