Healthcare Triage: Hospital Competition Can Impact Your Health
It turns out, hospital and health system consolidations can result in worse outcomes for patients. These mergers reduce competition, and it turns out that hospitals compete more often on quality than they do on prices. The result is that quality suffers in markets with less competition.
https://stateofreform.com/news/federal/2019/02/breaking-down-health-cares-cost-dilemma-part-ii/
This article is Part II of a two-part series on the cost of health care and its component parts. Part I explores the recent growth of health care costs in the United States as well as the utilization inputs in the cost equation. Part II breaks down the pricing component of cost, determined by market leverage and the cost of delivering services.
The Titanic
This brings us to the second category of costs: the Titanic. Or, to use our equation here of THC = U x P, the Titanic I’m talking about is the pricing component of cost.
In other words, health care leaders should do everything they can to make sure that utilization is the right care at the right time in the right setting. This makes a meaningful difference in the quality of our health care system.
But, if we focus on health care utilization alone, the health care system is still going to sink under the weight of costs. Our efforts will still be deck chairs on the Titanic.
To keep our ship afloat, we have to address the pricing input of our cost equation.
Like our cost equation above, pricing also has a simple equation of two inputs that determine price. According to a seminal study out of Massachusetts, which has been reaffirmed in additional studies (and by the experience of many network relations vice presidents across America’s health plans), this equation is straightforward.
Pricing is determined by a combination of market leverage (ML) and service delivery costs (SDC), where market leverage is 75 percent of the pricing structure and the cost of delivering the service is 25 percent.
This is true for either the plan or the provider, depending on where market leverage exists. This equation looks like this: P = ML(.75) + SDC(.25).
If we put this together, the math equation would look like this: THC = U x (ML(.75) + SDC(.25)).
Here’s how the study put it:
Price variations are correlated to market leverage as measured by the relative market position of the hospital or provider group compared with other hospitals or provider groups within a geographic region or within a group of academic medical centers.
While addressing the utilization component of the cost-growth problem is essential, any successful reform initiative must take into account the significant role of unit price in driving costs. Bending the cost curve will require tackling the growth in price and the market dynamics that perpetuate price inflation and lead to irrational price disparities.
But here is what the numbers say: between 2004 and 2017, adjusting for age and sex factors, 68 percent of the growth in overall national health care expenditures came from increases in medical prices. Only 32 percent of growth came from utilization of services.
In other words, pricing is more than twice as important as utilization in the growth of health care costs – costs that are increasing more rapidly than ever.
Put graphically, while we have two inputs into total health care costs or expenditures, it’s incorrect to think of them as weighted equally, as demonstrated in image 1 above. It’s more accurate to think of these two pieces weighted as shown in image 2. And, if we are honest about the role of market leverage in health care pricing, market leverage alone is more than half of the overall problem in health care costs – more than all of the service delivery costs and utilization combined.
Keeping the Titanic afloat
Let’s restate the challenge we face here in our trans-Atlantic metaphor. Cost is the biggest problem in health care today. Those costs are made up by pricing and utilization, where pricing is more than twice as impactful in cost growth as utilization, and where market leverage is three times more impactful to pricing than are service delivery costs.
In order to keep our health care system afloat, we must address costs. And to address costs, we must address pricing. And to address pricing, we must address market leverage.
If we move every deck chair around, but fail to address the cost consequences of market leverage, our ship will sink.
In our capitalist economy, we view consolidated market leverage as a market failure. It’s why we have antitrust statutes and an active regulatory regime to manage and push back against consolidation. Where the market failure is in the area of a public good, the American political system has often regulated those consolidated markets like public utilities or quasi-public entities.
Think of energy and Enron, of railroads and BNSF, of telephones and Ma Bell.
As health care nears 20 percent of the US economy, and where even urban states like California suffer from a “staggering” concentration of market leverage among health care providers, the lesson for health care policymakers and senior health care executives is this: If you want to get your hands around cost, you’re going to have to address market leverage to do that. Everything else is just deck chairs.
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center filed a counter lawsuit on Thursday against the Pennsylvania attorney general, who is seeking to force the healthcare giant into contracting with rival Highmark. The system is also seeking to insert itself in a broader lawsuit over the ways Blues operate.
The flurry of filings taps into big questions over payer competition and underscores tensions seen throughout the country between insurance companies and providers as they negotiate contracts, particularly in highly concentrated markets. States have stepped up their enforcement of consumer protections against rising healthcare costs — but UPMC is saying its regulators have greatly overstepped their bounds.
Earlier this month, Shapiro alleged Pittsburgh’s dominant medical provider wasn’t living up to its charitable mission as a nonprofit, accusing the health system of “forsaking its charitable obligations” in exchange for “corporate greed.”
The legal duel stems from a contract dispute between UPMC and its rival Highmark. Until June 30, the two have a legal agreement protecting consumer access to the other’s network through a consent decree. UPMC refuses to modify the decree and contract with Highmark, which risks in-network access to UPMC hospitals for Highmark members.
In response to the attorney general’s initial complaint, UPMC alleges that Shapiro’s attempt to renew and modify an expiring agreement between the Pittsburgh health system and Highmark is “unprecedented and unwarranted.” The modification would, among other things, remove the majority of UPMC’s board of directors and force the integrated system to contract with any payer.
The state AG responded on Friday, accusing UPMC of ignoring its mission and noting it would not be intimated by the healthcare behemoth.
“With their filings today, UPMC has shown they intend to spend countless hours and untold resources on a legal battle instead of focusing on their stated mission as a non-profit charity — promoting the public interest and providing patient access to affordable health care,” said Attorney General’s Office spokesman Joe Grace.
In its notice to the AG, UPMC lays out five examples it calls frivolous enough to get Shapiro’s motion dismissed — including previous testimony delivered by Deputy Attorney General Jim Donahue in 2014, when he told state representatives there is “no statutory basis” to make the two companies contract with each other without setting a dangerous economic precedent.
“If we force the resolution in this case, we really could not avoid trying to force a similar resolution in all those other situations, and that is simply and unworkable method of dealing with these problems,” Donahue said at the time. “We’d be putting our finger on the scale, so to speak … and we’re not sure what those effects would be.”
One effect is a class action lawsuit, which UPMC filed separately Thursday. It alleges Shapiro has violated at least four federal laws: Medicare Advantage statutes protecting competition, the Affordable Care Act’s nonprofit payer regulations and the Sherman Act and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974.
“Purporting to act in his official capacity, General Shapiro has illegally taken over nonprofit healthcare in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” UPMC’s class action states. “Without rulemaking, legislation or public comment, General Shapiro has announced new ‘principles’ that radically (and often in direct contravention of existing federal and state law) change how nonprofit health insurers and providers operate, now rendering the Attorney General the arbiter of how nonprofit health organizations should envision and achieve their mission.”
Separate from its battle with the state attorney general, UPMC is attempting to jump in the middle of a legal antitrust battle over how Blue Cross Blue Shield plans operate. UPMC is seeking both a preliminary injunction and a motion to intervene in the years-long federal case in Alabama.
UPMC is asking the Alabama court to stop the Blues plans from enforcing their own market allocation agreements that prevent UPMC from contracting with other Blues plans, according to the filing. UPMC says a significant chunk of its patients have a Blue Cross Blue Shield plan from a different provider other than Highmark.
Joe Whatley, co-lead counsel for provider plaintiffs in the Alabama case, told Healthcare Dive UPMC “presents a good example of how the Blues are abusing their illegal agreement for their benefit and to harm healthcare providers throughout the country.”
UPMC argues that it would contract with other Blue Cross Blue Shield plans, separate from Highmark, but cannot due to the way Blues operate — or limit how they compete with one another. BCBS plans tend to stake out their own geographic areas and avoid competition with one another, a practice the Alabama court has already found is in violation of antitrust laws. A BCBS appeal to the Alabama judge’s opinion was already struck down by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals late last year.
UPMC is asking the Alabama court for an injunction, or to step in and stop the Blues plans from enforcing or complying with their own market allocation agreements that are preventing UPMC from contracting with other Blues plans, according to the filing. And because the hometown plan, Highmark, does not have a contract with UPMC after June 30, it means that other Blues plan members that have enjoyed in-network access to UPMC will soon lose access after the consent decree expires.
About 24% of UPMC’s hospital patients have a Blue Cross Blue Shield plan other than Highmark.
UPMC contends that it has tried to contract with other Blues but was turned down. “The average non-Highmark Blues patient does not know that UPMC has offered contracts to each of these plans and been turned down because the Blues’ illegal market allocation prevents them entering into such an agreement with UPMC,” according to the filing.
Without an injunction, UPMC alleges it will suffer irreparable harm to its reputation and will lose a significant number of patients who have a non-Highmark Blues plans.
The Pennsylvania attorney general’s office has not responded to Healthcare Dive’s request for comment and UPMC declined to discuss the case further.
https://www.managedhealthcareexecutive.com/health-management/4-biggest-new-areas-focus-2019
If you ignore the Sword of Damocles hanging over the industry in the form of a Texas federal judge’s ruling the entire ACA unconstitutional, 2019 could shape up as a relatively chaos-free year with little chance of legislative or regulatory upheaval. Despite the fact that the number one issue on voters’ minds during the 2018 election was healthcare, it’s unlikely that the extremely divided Congress will be able to address it in any meaningful way. Cue the 2020 election.
The biggest issues healthcare industry leaders foresee include:
1. Addressing social drivers of health
Although it’s become clear that a person’s zip code has more impact on their health than their DNA, dealing with the social determinants (or social drivers) of health that relate to where a person lives are often far outside of the scope of most health plans’ operations. That’s rapidly changing. Whether it’s food or housing insecurity, economic stability, social or environmental safety or literacy, the impacts these social drivers have on health outcomes and costs are significant. Spurred by state Medicaid agencies and CMS, finding and deploying tools to measure and address the underlying issues that drive much of the cost and utilization in healthcare will be a focus during the year.
2. Provider consolidation
As hospital systems extend their reach with acquisitions, mergers and alliances (for example the $28 billion Catholic Health Initiatives and Dignity Health merger), health plans will be faced with much less leverage in rate negotiation and greater challenges in establishing competitive product differentiation as providers will have more power to dictate terms for products and rates. On the other hand, plans aligned with providers will face a more favorable environment and may see significant growth over their unaligned competition.
3. Medicaid work requirements
Adding work requirements for “able-bodied adults” to Medicaid expansion waivers has allowed Republican states that opted out of this ACA option (and the significant federal dollars that go with it) to find a way to participate that aligns with their stated conservative values.
Unfortunately, work requirements are much easier to put in place than to administer as some of the early-implementing states like Arkansas are finding out. Expect more non-expansion states to use this mechanism to expand their Medicaid coverage and for the health plans involved to be inundated with a whole new set of administrative requirements and challenging enrollment issues.
4. Personal healthcare technologies
The Dick Tracy watches are here and are way more than cool communication devices. Measuring pulse and blood sugar, breathing rate, simple ECGs, and providing emergency alerts for falls are only the beginning of what appears to be a host of clinical monitoring and alerts coming from these personal technologies. Whether and how health plans address and incorporate the application of these new capabilities to their membership will make a significant difference in the MCO’s market presence and competitive stance.
While these were a some of the more frequently mentioned challenges, obviously other issues resonated a higher level for some execs based on their geography and product lines. Here’s hoping that 2019 sees the industry better serve the diverse healthcare needs of the country by meeting consumers’ demands for quality, affordability, and access.
A paper out this week from Rice University healthcare economist Vivian Ho is the latest analysis to posit that vertical integration of doctors and hospitals does little to improve care quality. Researchers evaluated 29 primarily hospital-focused quality and patient satisfaction measures and found that higher levels of vertical integration were associated with improved performance on just a small number of metrics—and increased market concentration was associated with lower scores on all patient satisfaction measures.
Before concluding that vertical integration generates little improvement in quality, it’s worth looking a little deeper at the methodology of this study, as well as the larger drivers of hospital-physician integration. Researchers used a blunt measure of vertical integration, combining health systems’ self-reported physician alignment model with a standard index of hospital market concentration (on the theory that lower hospital-to-hospital competition indicates greater vertical integration). The performance measures examined are hospital-focused, ignoring outpatient care quality, as well as the nuance of whether the “integrated” physicians in any market are responsible for the outcomes measured (employing primary care doctors and orthopedic surgeons would have little impact on measures of hospital treatment of heart attacks).
In a press release, the author notes: “If patient welfare doesn’t improve after integration, there may be other reasons why physicians and hospitals are forming closer relationships—perhaps to raise profits.” That’s right: there are many motives for vertical integration. Surely profitability has been a driver, as well as the rising complexity and deteriorating economics of running an independent practice. In the real world, physician alignment strategies are rarely driven by the primary goal of improved quality. However, many health systems have begun to recognize that closer financial alignment is a necessary (but far from sufficient) requirement to enable real progress on quality improvement. Regardless of alignment approach, though, quality improvement results from the hard work of care process redesign and cultural change, not as the inevitable result of vertical integration. Success stories are still too few and far between, but we believe there is value in leveraging vertical integration to make this work easier. Condemning vertical integration seems a harsh verdict; a more appropriate criticism would be that much of the heavy lifting of care redesign is yet to begin.
What does health insurance coverage look like for Americans today, more than eight years after the Affordable Care Act’s passage? In this brief, we present findings from the Commonwealth Fund’s latest Biennial Health Insurance Survey to assess the extent and quality of coverage for U.S. working-age adults. Conducted since 2001, the survey uses three measures to gauge the adequacy of people’s coverage:
As the findings highlighted below show, the greatest deterioration in the quality and comprehensiveness of coverage has occurred among people in employer plans. More than half of Americans under age 65 — about 158 million people — get their health insurance through an employer, while about one-quarter either have a plan purchased through the individual insurance market or are enrolled in Medicaid.1Although the ACA has expanded and improved coverage options for people without access to a job-based health plan, the law largely left the employer market alone.2
The 2018 Commonwealth Fund Biennial Heath Insurance Survey included a nationally representative sample of 4,225 adults ages 19 to 64. SSRS conducted the telephone survey between June 27 and November 11, 2018.3 (See “How We Conducted This Study” for more detail.)
In this analysis, we use a measure of underinsurance that accounts for an insured adult’s reported out-of-pocket costs over the course of a year, not including insurance premiums, as well as his or her plan deductible. (The measure was first used in the Commonwealth Fund’s 2003 Biennial Health Insurance Survey.*) These actual expenditures and the potential risk of expenditures, as represented by the deductible, are then compared with household income. Specifically, we consider people who are insured all year to be underinsured if:
The out-of-pocket cost component of the measure is only triggered if a person uses his or her plan to obtain health care. The deductible component provides an indicator of the financial protection the plan offers and the risk of incurring costs before someone gets health care. The definition does not include other dimensions of someone’s health plan that might leave them potentially exposed to costs, such as copayments or uncovered services. It therefore provides a conservative measure of underinsurance in the United States.
Compared to 2010, when the ACA became law, fewer people today are uninsured, but more people are underinsured. Of the 194 million U.S. adults ages 19 to 64 in 2018, an estimated 87 million, or 45 percent, were inadequately insured (see Tables 1 and 2).
Despite actions by the Trump administration and Congress to weaken the ACA, our survey found no statistically significant change in the adult uninsured rate by late 2018 compared to 2016 (Table 3). This finding is consistent with recent federal surveys, but other private surveys (including other Commonwealth Fund surveys) have found small increases in uninsured rates since 2016 (see “Changes in U.S. Uninsured Rates Since 2013”).
While there has been no change since 2010, statistically speaking, in the proportion of people who are insured now but have experienced a recent time without coverage, these reported gaps are of much shorter duration on average than they were before the ACA. In 2018, 61 percent of people who reported a coverage gap said it has lasted for six months or less, compared to 31 percent who said they had been uninsured for a year or longer. This is nearly a reverse of what it was like in 2012, two years before the ACA’s major coverage expansions. In that year, 57 percent of adults with a coverage gap reported it was for a year or longer, while one-third said it was a shorter gap.
There also has been some improvement in long-term uninsured rates. Among adults who were uninsured at the time of the survey, 54 percent reported they had been without coverage for more than two years, down from 72 percent before the ACA coverage expansions went into effect. The share of those who had been uninsured for six months or less climbed to 20 percent, nearly double the rate prior to the coverage expansions.
Of people who were insured continuously throughout 2018, an estimated 44 million were underinsured because of high out-of-pocket costs and deductibles (Table 1). This is up from an estimated 29 million in 2010 (data not shown). The most likely to be underinsured are people who buy plans on their own through the individual market including the marketplaces. However, the greatest growth in the number of underinsured adults is occurring among those in employer health plans.
Several factors may be contributing to high underinsured rates among adults in individual market plans and rising rates in employer plans:
It is well documented that people who gained coverage under the ACA’s expansions have better access to health care as a result.6 This has led to overall improvement in health care access, as indicated by multiple surveys.7 In 2014, the year the ACA’s major coverage expansions went into effect, the share of adults in our survey who said that cost prevented them from getting health care that they needed, such as prescription medication, dropped significantly (Table 4). But there has been no significant improvement since then.
The lack of continued improvement in overall access to care nationally reflects the fact that coverage gains have plateaued, and underinsured rates have climbed. People who experience any time uninsured are more likely than any other group to delay getting care because of cost (Table 5). And among people with coverage all year, those who were underinsured reported cost-related delays in getting care at nearly double the rate of those who were not underinsured.
There was modest but significant improvement following the ACA’s coverage expansions in the proportion of all U.S. adults who reported having difficulty paying their medical bills or said they were paying off medical debt over time (Table 4). Federal surveys have found similar improvements.8 However, those gains have stalled.
Inadequate insurance coverage leaves people exposed to high health care costs, and these expenses can quickly turn into medical debt. More than half of uninsured adults and insured adults who have had a coverage gap reported that they had had problems paying medical bills or were paying off medical debt over time (Table 6). Among people who had continuous insurance coverage, the rate of medical bill and debt problems is nearly twice as high for the underinsured as it is for people who are not underinsured.
Having continuous coverage makes a significant difference in whether people have a regular source of care, get timely preventive care, or receive recommended cancer screenings. Adults with coverage gaps or those who were uninsured when they responded to the survey were the least likely to have gotten preventive care and cancer screenings in the recommended time frame.
Being underinsured, however, does not seem to reduce the likelihood of having a usual source of care or receiving timely preventive care or cancer screens — provided a person has continuous coverage. This is likely because the ACA requires insurers and employers to cover recommended preventive care and cancer screens without cost-sharing. Even prior to the ACA, a majority of employer plans provided predeductible coverage of preventive services.9
U.S. working-age adults are significantly more likely to have health insurance since the ACA became law in 2010. But the improvement in uninsured rates has stalled. In addition, more people have health plans that fail to adequately protect them from health care costs, with the fastest deterioration in cost protection occurring in the employer market. The ACA made only minor changes to employer plans, and the erosion in cost protection has taken a bite out of the progress made in Americans’ health coverage since the law’s enactment.
Both the federal government and the states, however, have the ability to extend the law’s coverage gains and improve the cost protection of both individual-market and employer plans. Here is a short list of policy options:
Health care costs are primarily what’s driving growth in premiums across all health insurance markets. Employers and insurers have kept premiums down by increasing consumers’ deductibles and other cost-sharing, which in turn is making more people underinsured. This means that policy options like the ones we’ve highlighted above will need to be paired with efforts to slow medical spending. These could include changing how health care is organized and providers are paid to achieve greater value for health care dollars and better health outcomes.28 The government also could tackle rising prescription drug costs29 and use antitrust laws to combat the growing concentration of insurer and provider markets.30
Hospital Mergers Improve Health? Evidence Shows the Opposite
Many things affect your health. Genetics. Lifestyle. Modern medicine. The environment in which you live and work.
But although we rarely consider it, the degree of competition among health care organizations does so as well.
Markets for both hospitals and physicians have become more concentrated in recent years. Although higher prices are the consequences most often discussed, such consolidation can also result in worse health care. Studies show that rates of mortality and of major health setbacks grow when competition falls.
This runs counter to claims some in the health care industry have made in favor of mergers. By harnessing economies of scale and scope, they’ve argued, larger organizations can offer better care at lower costs.
In one recent example, two Texas health systems — Baylor Scott & White, and Memorial Hermann Health System — sought to merge, forming a 68-hospital system. The systems have since abandoned the plan, but not before Jim Hinton, Baylor Scott & White’s chief executive, told The Wall Street Journal that “the end, the more important end, is to improve care.”
Yet Martin Gaynor, a Carnegie Mellon University economist who been an author of several reviews exploring the consequences of hospital consolidation, said that “evidence from three decades of hospital mergers does not support the claim that consolidation improves quality.” This is especially true when government constrains prices, as is the case for Medicare in the United States and Britain’s National Health Service.
“When prices are set by the government, hospitals don’t compete on price; they compete on quality,” Mr. Gaynor said. But this doesn’t happen in markets that are highly consolidated.
In 2006, the National Health Service introduced a policy that increased competition among hospitals. When recommending hospital care, it required general practitioners to provide patients with five options, as well as quality data for each. Because hospital payments are fixed by the government — whichever hospital a patient chooses gets the payment for care provided to that patient — hospitals ended up competing on quality.
Mr. Gaynor was an author of a study showing that consequences of this policy included shorter hospital stays and lower mortality. According to the study, for every decrease of 10 percentage points in hospital market concentration, 30-day mortality for heart attacks fell nearly 3 percent.
Another study found that hospital competition in the N.H.S. decreased heart attack mortality, and several studies of Medicare also found that hospital competition results in lower rates of mortality from heart attacks and pneumonia.
Another piece of evidence in the competition-quality connection comes from other types of health care providers, including doctors. Recently, investigators from the Federal Trade Commission examined what happens when cardiologists team up into larger groups. The study, published in Health Services Research, focused on the health care outcomes of about two million Medicare beneficiaries who had been treated for hypertension, for a cardiac ailment or for a heart attack from 2005 to 2012.
The study found that when cardiology markets are more concentrated, these kinds of patients are more likely to have heart attacks, visit the emergency department, be readmitted to the hospital or die. These effects of market concentration are large.
To illustrate, consider a cardiology market with five practices in which one becomes more dominant — going from just below a 40 percent market share to a 60 percent market share (with the rest of the market split equally across the other four practices). The study found that the chance of having a heart attack would go up 5 to 7 percent as the largest cardiology practice became more dominant. The chance of visiting the emergency department, being readmitted to the hospital or dying would go up similarly.
The study also found that greater market concentration led to higher spending. And a different study of family doctors in England found that quality and patient satisfaction increased with competition.
For many goods and services, Americans are comfortable with the idea that competition leads to lower prices and better quality. But we often think of health care as different — that it somehow shouldn’t be “market based.”
What the research shows, though, is that there are lots of ways markets can function, with more or less government involvement. Even when the government is highly involved, as is the case with the British National Health Service or American Medicare, competition is a valuable tool that can drive health care toward greater value.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/18/walmart-cvs-health-hammer-out-new-pbm-pharmacy-network-deal–.html
Verticals gonna vertical
As we wrote last week, the recent dust-up between CVS’s pharmacy benefit management (PBM) subsidiary Caremark and Walmart, during which the retail giant threatened to sever its relationship with CVS over a dispute regarding reimbursement levels before finally coming to a settlement, is a harbinger of things to come as the healthcare landscape becomes dominated by massive, vertically-integrated competitors.
A new investigative piece from The Columbus Dispatch this week seems to confirm this view. Examining previously-undisclosed data about CVS’s drug plan pricing practices as part of Ohio’s Medicaid program, the article reveals that CVS paid its own retail pharmacies much higher reimbursement rates than it offered to key competitors Walmart and Kroger to provide generic drugs to Medicaid beneficiaries. According to the article, CVS would have had to pay Walmart pharmacies 46 percent more, and Kroger pharmacies 25 percent more, to match the levels of reimbursement it paid its own retail pharmacies, data that are cited in a state report on the Medicaid pharmacy program that CVS is engaged in a court battle to keep secret. The reimbursement differential is “startling information”, according to a former Justice Department antitrust official quoted in the article. A spokesman for CVS maintained that the PBM’s payment rates are “competitive” and influenced by a complex range of factors. Underscoring the opaque and complicated methodology drug plans use to determine payments to retail pharmacies, independent pharmacy operators were paid more than CVS stores, as were Walgreens stores. A separate analysis of PBM pricing behavior in New York uncovered similar evidence, according to Bloomberg.
The Ohio and New York pharmacy stories are yet more evidence that, as healthcare companies continue to expand their control over greater segments of the “value chain”—combining, for example, insurance, distribution, and care delivery—they are able to flex their market power in ways that look increasingly anti-competitive. Hospitals that “own” their referral sources, insurers that “own” the delivery of care, and pharmacies that “own” drug benefit managers all edge closer to creating closed, proprietary platforms that can lock out competitors in any one segment.
That’s a feature, not a bug—indeed, much of the logic of population health is predicated on “network integrity”: keeping consumers inside a fully-controlled ecosystem of care to enable better coordination and reduce duplication and inefficiencies. Yet as giant healthcare corporations turn themselves into Amazon-style “everything stores”, we need to keep a watchful eye on competition.
Red flags to watch for: using the courts to maintain secret agreements or block the free flow of talent or information, “vertical tying” behavior that requires all-or-nothing contracting, and pricing strategies that leverage market power in one segment to raise prices in another.
The biggest flaw in using “market competition” to lower the cost of care: most companies hate actually competing in the marketplace—a problem made even more vexing by vertical integration.
https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/payer-provider-trends-to-watch-in-2019/545612/
Ripple effects from 2018 will continue well into the new year as players deal with some massive policy and business shifts.
The coming year for healthcare will see the industry reckon with some of the massive changes set in motion last year, such as megamergers like CVS-Aetna and Cigna-Express Scripts and a judge’s declaration that the Affordable Care Act is no longer constitutional.
On the policy front, newly-installed Democrats in Congress (and the party’s 2020 presidential candidates) will be pushing for more comprehensive health coverage plans while the GOP considers tougher Medicaid restrictions at the state, and potentially federal, level.
Meanwhile, some familiar storylines are likely to continue. Effusive digital health funding and increases in mobile and telehealth services show no signs of abating, and neither does general M&A activity.
Here’s a snapshot of a few big trends for the payer and provider crowds to watch for in 2019.
Historically, behavioral health services have been mostly disparate, but increased spending in digital health and a focus on lowering out-of-pocket costs will help spur greater connectivity, Sandra Kuhn, national lead for behavioral health consulting at Mercer, told Healthcare Dive. She predicted “more partnerships between traditional medical and behavioral health carriers on smaller, targeted point solutions” as the industry already began to see last year.
The trend more broadly fits into the push to recognize and act on social determinants of health.
One partnership is the Utah Alliance for the Determinants of Health, a coalition of providers, community organizations and government agencies banding together to reduce the impacts of SDOH. Their plan seeks to address socioeconomic stressors like housing instability, food insecurity and transportation — circumstances with a direct effect on mental and physical health — before patients show up in the ER lobby. Intermountain Healthcare, a primary stakeholder, invested $12 million in the initiative.
Early efforts include experimental EHR technologies, value-based payments for even more population health management programs and wraparound services. Health Affairs highlighted two separate initiatives, each making inroads on social determinants by carrying out existing population health programs in tandem with trusted community partners.
Overall, Kuhn said, more organizations will step up with tactical solutions to what has otherwise been an intractable problem. That includes payers like state Medicaid programs, many of which have begun value-based payments for behavioral health services.
Progress on behavioral and population health is happening in tandem with — or perhaps existing symbiotically alongside — the growth of telemedicine. At Riverside Health System, a rural health network in Newport News, Virginia, a long-term telebehavioral health initiative has improved coordinated care among psychiatrists and clinical social workers, as well as replaced a chunk of services offered at the system’s nursing homes.
Riverside isn’t the first to find success with telebehavioral health, but the system’s wider experimentation with programming, a happy accident triggered by a psychiatrist shortage, has certainly shown there’s a market for it — one that Quartet, Lyra and Teladoc have been quick to capitalize on. This year will see a swath of players from across the industry tackle behavioral health gaps by complementing primary care with telemedicine.
While larger health systems tend to have the means to be early adopters of new and robust healthcare technologies, physicians are beginning to integrate such services into their practices.
Use of telehealth among the commercially insured has been gradually rising since the mid-2000s, having grown 52% annually from 2005 to 2014 before spiking 261% between 2015 and 2017, according to JAMA.
Revenue cycle management firm SYNERGEN Health estimates digital health tech for remote use will grow by 30% this year, allowing patients to better manage their own healthcare, giving clinicians an opportunity to spend more time with more patients and, of course, generating new revenue streams.
As more payers hop aboard the telemedicine train and more services are covered, hospitals will continue see costs fall. A 2017 report from the Rural Broadband Association found that telehealth services were associated with an annual cost savings of $20,841 per U.S. hospital on average. The caveat here for hospitals is the very real possibility that large facilities will become increasingly more obsolete and overhead costs will become too costly as patients find yet another reason to stay away from their doors.
Many are hoping the days of the $629 hospital bill for a wet towel and a Band-Aid are coming to an end, but it’s not likely to happen in 2019.
Still, legislators and consumers alike are making price transparency an issue in hopes of curbing skyrocketing healthcare costs.
CMS took some action last year by finalizing a new rule mandating hospitals post chargemaster rates online in a machine-readable format. But the rule is effectively toothless. Hospitals were already required to make those prices available, and chargemaster rates only apply to the uninsured and balance billing. And despite the fact that the rule went into effect on the first day of the year, CMS admitted recently that it has no way of enforcing the mandate and would not comment on how many hospitals are currently in compliance with the rule.
“It is [our] expectation that all of them will comply,” CMS Administrator Seema Verma said on a call with reporters.
The rule doesn’t specify where hospitals need to post their charges. The only requirement is that they’re made available online, which has allowed health systems like mega-operator Ascension to bury their charges behind a tangled maze of clicks.
The company has previously defended itself in a statement to Healthcare Dive by arguing the costs can be confusing for patients, as they don’t take financial assistance and charity care into consideration. Chargemaster information, as some critics have pointed out, isn’t a very useful measure of pricing for consumers. It can actually be counterproductive.
Thomas Lee, chief medical officer at Press Ganey, speaking at the U.S. News Healthcare of Tomorrow conference, said economists don’t believe price transparency has a noteworthy impact on cost and efficiency.
“I’m predicting not much will happen and people won’t pay attention to it because the charges aren’t actually relevant to the vast majority of people,” Lee said. “If people are uninsured, I doubt they’re looking at these things either.”
If the ACA taught economists and legislators anything about American consumers, it’s that they want healthcare, but don’t want to take the time to shop around for it. In a recent Health Affairs survey, just 13% of respondents responsible for cost-sharing in their last healthcare encounter sought cost information before receiving care. Only 3% compared prices of different providers.
History seems to be repeating itself, as CMS hopes its “first step toward price transparency” will be picked up by market forces. By mandating the information be made available in a different file format, CMS believes it has “set the stage” for that data to be used by private third parties that can develop tools for consumers to use.
“There’s nothing in the rule that prevents hospitals from going further with this,” Verma said. “Hospitals can do that today.”
But they aren’t. In fact, the percentage of hospitals unable provide patients with price information jumped from 14% to 44% between 2012 and 2016, according to a JAMA study.
In short, the CMS rule is much more of a light nudge than a forceful shove into price transparency, and without regulation and the means of enforcing it, hospitals have little to no incentive to change. But expect the wheels of the price transparency conversation to continue turning in 2019, regardless.
As insurers have bulked up in scale after blockbuster mergers last year, Fitch Ratings expects relationships between providers and payers to be even more contentious during contract negotiations even in a value-based payment setting.
Some recent headline-grabbing squabbles include UnitedHealthcare’s contract impasse with Envision Healthcare, an ER staffing firm. Tenet and Cigna’s contract negotiations stalled and finally reached a multi-year deal this year.
Hospitals can also expect low rate increases from commercial insurers, according to Moody’s.
In markets where there is a dominant insurer and multiple hospitals, “Each hospital will need to demonstrate why it is indispensable to the insurer … and why it should be included in a network,” Moody’s reports.
However, there are potential glimmers of hope. As more states have expanded Medicaid, it puts pressure on other states to do so, which would provide a means of payment for hospitals that have gone without payment caring for the uninsured.
Payers and providers will continue to enter into value-based contracts in 2019 at varying degrees, according to Moody’s.
Many hospitals are engaging in contracts that offer incentives or alternative payment models for reaching certain quality measures, but very few are taking on full risk, or both the upside and downside risks within a contract, according to Moody’s.
That will continue into 2019: few are likely to take on downside risk, or the possibility of losing money, Moody’s reports.
However, while the popularity and use of these payment models continues, its cost-savings benefits have yet to be realized, according to a recent report.
Meanwhile, CMMI continues to test for ways to drive change in the healthcare by paying for quality as opposed to quantity. For instance, CMMI is testing whether it can reduce utilization and ultimately costs by addressing social-needs such as housing for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries. CMMI’s director Adam Boehler said he won’t force organizations to take on risk, but will help them take on a level of riskthey’re comfortable with.
But in an about-face, the Trump administration seems to be signaling that it may institute mandatory payment models that could put providers at risk of losing money.
Medicare Advantage will continue to be a profit center for insurers, which typically enjoy a 5% margin, according to 2016 data from the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.
As the population ages, it presents a growth opportunity for payers. Enrollment in MA plans grew by 8% from 2016 to 2017, according to a recent MedPAC report, as many more seniors are choosing to enroll in plans run by traditional insurers. About 34% of beneficiaries choose MA, a significant increase from a decade ago when just 10% enrolled in such plans.
Beginning this year, MA plans have greater flexibility to offer non-traditional benefits such as adult daycare, meals or in-home care to improve the overall health of patients, particularly those will high needs. CMS Administrator Seema Verma previously said 270 MA plans will offer these new benefits in 2019.
These new benefits also pose an opportunity for nontraditional healthcare companies such as Lyft and Uber, which are looking for ways to shuttle seniors to appointments and pharmacies.
Payers including Cigna touted the future growth opportunity it sees for MA. “We are well positioned today and going forward for existing and new markets,” Cigna CEO David Cordani said of MA, according to Forbes.
As states weigh expanding Medicaid, it’s another potential opportunity for managed care plans to contract with states. As more states expand the program, it puts pressure on the remaining holdouts.
Last year, some red states took the issue to the ballot box and got approval for expansion, potentially providing a roadmap for stakeholders to replicate in other states where the legislatures balk at expansion. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is backing an idea that would expand Medicaid eligibility in his state to undocumented young adults, providing another opportunity for Medicaid managed care firms.
Likely potential winners are Centene and Molina. Centene is the nation’s largest Medicaid managed care firm with operations in 21 states covering more than 8 million people. Molina serves more than 3 million in 13 states and Puerto Rico.
Just recently, Molina CEO Joseph Zubretsky said even without expansion ushered in by the Affordable Care Act, $1 billion of new revenue opportunity exists in Molina’s existing footprint because of states like Illinois that are expanding Medicaid managed care statewide.
Two massive megamergers in CVS-Aetna and Cigna-Express Scripts dominated the conversation around mergers and acquisitions in healthcare.
Whether you think the mergers will help or hurt consumers, both deals have sparked a distinct shift across the industry as competitors search for ways to keep pace. It also frames 2019 as the year in which five big vertically integrated insurers in CVS, UnitedHealth, Cigna, Anthem and Humana begin to take shape.
Combined, the mergers totaled nearly $140 billion.
Both CVS and Cigna closed their transactions in the fourth quarter with promises that their new combined companies would “transform” the industry. Unquestionably, it’s already triggered some response from other players. Whether those companies can make good on their promises to improve care for consumers remains to be seen, and the payoff may not come for several years, as 2019 is likely to be a year of initial integration.
While CVS and Cigna hogged most of the spotlight, several other notable transactions across the payer sector could have smaller but similarly important consequences going forward.
In May, WellCare picked up Illinois-based Meridian Health Plans for $2.5 billion, acquiring a company with an established Medicaid footprint with 1.1 million members. The deal boosted WellCare’s membership by 26%.
But the transaction also thrust WellCare back onto the ACA exchanges. Meridian has 6,000 marketplace members in Michigan.
Importantly, the acquisition gave WellCare a new pharmacy benefit manager in Meridian Rx. CEO Kenneth Burdick said it would provide “additional insight into changing pharmacy costs and improving quality through the integration of pharmacy and medical care.”
WellCare was also a beneficiary of the CVS-Aetna deal after the Department of Justice required Aetna to sell off its Part D business in order to complete its merger.
The deal adds 2.2 million Part D members to WellCare, tripling its existing footprint of 1.1 million.
2018 was the year of post-acute care acquisitions for Humana. The insurer partnered with two private equity firms to buy Kindred Healthcare for $4.1 billion in a deal that was first announced last year. It used a similar purchase arrangement to invest in hospice provider Curo Health Service in a $1.4 billion deal.
Both acquisitions give Humana equity stake in the companies, with room to make further investments down the road. Kindred, in particular, is expected to further Humana’s focus on data analytics, digital tools and information sharing and improve the continuity of care for patients even after they leave the hospital.
Not to be outdone, rival Anthem also closed its purchase of Aspire Health, one of the country’s largest community-based palliative care providers.
With ample reserves, UnitedHealth is always in the mix when it comes to acquisitions. This year was no different. The insurance giant snapped up several provider organizations to add to its OptumHealth arm. In June, it was one of two buyers of hospital staffing company Sound Inpatient Physicians Holdings for $2.2 billion. It also bought out Seattle-based Polyclinic for an undisclosed sum. The physician practice has remained staunchly independent for more than a century.
Most notably, UnitedHealth is still in the process of closing its acquisition of DaVita Medical Group. DaVita recently dropped the price of that deal from $4.9 billion to $4.3 billion in an effort to speed up Federal Trade Commission approval.
The Minnesota-based insurer is also clearly interested in specialty pharmacies to supplement its PBM OptumRx. UnitedHealth bought Genoa Healthcare in September, adding 435 new pharmacies under its umbrella. Shortly after, it bought up Avella Specialty Pharmacy, a specialty pharmacy that also offers telepsychiatry services and medication management for behavioral health patients.
Perhaps in an effort to keep pace with Cigna and CVS, Centene has made smaller scale moves in the PBM space, investing in RxAdvance, a PBM launched by former Apple CEO John Sculley. Following an initial investment in March, Centene sunk another $50 million into the company in October and then announced plans to roll the solution out nationally. Notably, CEO Michael Neidorff has said he is pushing the PBM to move away from rebates and toward a model that relies on net pricing.
“You talk about ultimate transparency—that gets us there,” he said recently.
HENRY KOTULA 