Tag Archives: Medicaid

Beyond Showmanship And Spite: Toward A Health Care “Grand Bargain”

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https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20171116.24714/full/

Is a deal on health care possible? Conventional wisdom says no. “Repeal and Replace” is dead, and Republicans have moved on. So have many Democrats, toward pursuit of a single-payer plan that’s going nowhere on Capitol Hill but energizes the party’s core. Last month, President Donald Trump said he’ll “dismantle” the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on his own—and backed this up with executive orders that risk the stability of the insurance exchanges.

Democrats are angry that Trump and congressional Republicans want to repeal the ACA and roll back its expansion of health insurance coverage. Republicans are angry that Democrats pushed “Obamacare” through Congress on a party-line basis, and they see the ACA as big government running amok. Both parties are positioning themselves for primaries, and neither shows much interest in the risky work of compromise.

We’re alarmed. One of us is a Cato Institute-friendly “free-market”eer who wrote a book arguing (tongue in cheek) that Medicare is the work of the Devil. The other helped to develop President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign health plan and believes that failure to ensure everyone’s access to health care is an assault on human decency. But we’ve come together because we believe that failure to resolve the present impasse will have hugely destructive consequences for millions of Americans’ access to health care—and for our national confidence in our political system’s capacity to function.

Designing A Deal

President Trump has cut off cost-sharing reduction subsidies to insurers and issued a directive to allow coverage options less comprehensive than the ACA requires—measures that threaten to unravel the individual and small-group markets by incentivizing younger and healthier people to exit. Meanwhile, the uncertainty that besets federal funding under the ACA for Medicaid expansion poses huge fiscal risks for states, as does Congress’s failure, so far, to renew funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). And over the longer term, soaring private and public spending on medical services that deliver doubtful value erodes US productivity and well-being.

We think a bipartisan “grand bargain” to stabilize the US health care system is feasible—if key decision makers can move beyond showmanship and spite. To this end, we outline a deal that: honors but balances the competing values at stake, steadies both market and public mechanisms of medical care financing, and puts the nation on a path toward sustainability in health spending.

Our grand bargain builds on federalism. Vastly different values, priorities, and interests stand in the way of nationwide health policy uniformity. Allowing states to sort out controversial matters within broader limits than the ACA now imposes would permit creative policy alternatives to unfold and encourage local buy-in. We needn’t and shouldn’t mandate definitive answers to bitterly contested questions that can be reasonably negotiated at the state or local level. Instead, we should open political and market pathways for the emergence of answers to these questions over time.

Moving to this long game will require all sides to pass on their pursuit of a quick political win. Doing so is the key to moving from cycles of backlash and volatility to a system that builds confidence and delivers high-quality, compassionate health care to all.

The Long Game: Seven Steps Toward a Compromise that Can Work And Endure

With these basic principles in mind, we propose the following seven steps:

Moving Beyond Maximalism—Medicaid Rollback And “Medicare for All”

Republicans should end their campaign to roll back the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, and Democrats should stand down on their quest for single payer. Both pursuits inspire true believers but will go nowhere on Capitol Hill for the imaginable future.

State Flexibility

Give states more flexibility to design their Medicaid programs and to govern their insurance exchanges. One approach would be to simply allow states complete flexibility to design their own coverage rules. Alternatively, we could give states more flexibility but ensure, via federal law, that Medicaid and plans sold on the exchanges provide affordable access to effective preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic services. States could also be allowed but not required to offer a public option through their exchanges. Instead of an all-or-none answer to the public plan question, the nation would have a framework for market-driven, state-by-state resolution. Similarly, states should be allowed to decide whether to prohibit, permit, or require enrollment of Medicaid beneficiaries in private plans. Finally, when it comes to care that serves culturally contested purposes—including, but not limited to, gender reassignment or confirmation and late termination of pregnancies for nontherapeutic reasons—states should be given autonomy to go their own ways. More federalism will achieve greater stability than would temporary nationwide imposition of one or another approach by whichever party happens to hold the electoral upper hand.

Health Savings Accounts That Appeal To Everyone

An expanded role for tax-protected health savings should have bipartisan appeal. We propose that every lawful US resident be auto-enrolled in a health savings account (HSA), funded through a refundable tax credit, scaled to income and family size. People could opt out but would lose this credit if they did. Few would do so, enabling HSAs to become a means for pursuing both market discipline and social equity.

Repeal The Individual Mandate

Sacrilege, you’re surely thinking, if you’re a Democrat who’s spent seven-plus years defending the mandate, the ACA’s most disliked element. But the mandate isn’t needed to keep healthy people in community-rated risk pools—it’s the intensity of the incentives, whether framed as penalties or subsidies, that matters. Even the mandate’s most outspoken economist-defender, Jonathan Gruber, concedes that high-enough subsidies for the purchase of insurance can substitute for it.

Such subsidies could be supplied in conservative-friendly fashion by allowing all who buy coverage on the exchanges to put HSA funds (including the tax credit we urge) toward their premiums. Sign-up for coverage could also be made more user-friendly through auto-enrollment, subject to opt-out, in “silver” plans (for tax filers who aren’t otherwise covered and aren’t Medicaid eligible). A more robust approach might condition the refundable HSA tax credit on tax filers’ purchasing insurance (or not opting out of auto-enrollment).

Congressional Authorization Of Funding For Both The ACA’s Cost-Sharing Reductions And CHIP

There is bipartisan support for restoring the ACA’s cost-sharing reduction subsidies and extending CHIP. Although annual appropriations are the norm, Congress should guarantee funding for the cost-sharing reductions for a two-year period, with automatic renewal for an additional two years if per capita subsidies rise by no more than the Consumer Price Index (CPI) during the prior two years. By so doing, Congress can reaffirm its authority over appropriations while helping to stabilize markets for individual coverage. Likewise, Congress should renew CHIP’s funding for several years—we urge three as a compromise—to both stabilize state budgets and secure health care for the millions of children who depend on this program.

The “Long Game”—Reining In Medical Spending

A long-term effort to contain spending growth is essential for US fiscal stability and consumer well-being. The ACA created a framework for doing this. The Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) can limit Medicare spending, subject to congressional veto, if growth exceeds target rates. And the 40 percent “Cadillac tax” on high-cost private health plans will cover a rising share of the private market as medical costs increase. Together, these policies have the potential to contain clinical spending by capping demand. But there’s bipartisan opposition to both. The IPAB, which hasn’t yet been established, and the Cadillac tax, now delayed until 2020, are fiercely opposed by stakeholders with lots to lose, and they’re at high risk of repeal.

A grand bargain should follow through on both of these strategies, plus add similar restraints on Medicaid spending and on the amounts spent to subsidize coverage through the exchanges. Most other nations employ global budgeting to control health spending. For reasons of federalism, public philosophy, and market structure, global budgeting isn’t an option for the US. But a coordinated scheme of restraint, based on the best available behavioral and economic modeling, could apply similar braking power to our entire health economy. There’s plenty of room for argument about design details (that is, should per capita growth targets be based on the CPI? The CPI plus 1 percent?) and methods of restraint (that is, the IPAB approach? Spending caps for public programs? The Cadillac tax versus caps on tax deductibility of insurance premiums?). Continued bipartisan evasion will only make the problem worse.

Pursuing Therapeutic Value

Much more must be done to use health care resources wisely as constraints tighten. Tying financial rewards closely to clinical value via paymentpractices, market exclusivity policies, and other incentives will be critical—and will require the clearing of legal and regulatory obstacles. Voluntary action must also play a role: The grand bargain we’ve sketched here creates myriad opportunities for providers, patients, and insurers to gain by insisting on value from a sector of the economy that too often fails to deliver it.

To be sure, politics could foil all efforts to forge compromise. But there is a way forward. Our proposals achieve much that is important to both the ACA’s fiercest critics and staunchest defenders. They work in concert to address the political and market crises that immediately threaten our health care system, while laying the foundation for a long-term approach to control medical spending’s unsustainable growth.

Medicaid Expansion Has Improved the Financial Outlook for Safety-Net Hospitals

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http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2017/nov/financial-impact-state-medicaid-expansion-safety-net-hospitals

Abstract

  • Issue: Safety-net hospitals play a vital role in delivering health care to Medicaid enrollees, the uninsured, and other vulnerable patients. By reducing the number of uninsured Americans, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was also expected to lower these hospitals’ significant uncompensated care costs and shore up their financial stability.
  • Goal: To examine how the ACA’s Medicaid expansion affected the financial status of safety-net hospitals in states that expanded Medicaid and in states that did not.
  • Methods: Using Medicare hospital cost reports for federal fiscal years 2012 and 2015, the authors compared changes in Medicaid inpatient days as a percentage of total inpatient days, Medicaid revenues as a percentage of total net patient revenues, uncompensated care costs as a percentage of total operating costs, and hospital operating margins.
  • Findings and Conclusions: Medicaid expansion had a significant, favorable financial impact on safety-net hospitals. From 2012 to 2015, safety-net hospitals in expansion states, compared to those in nonexpansion states, experienced larger increases in Medicaid inpatient days and Medicaid revenues as well as reduced uncompensated care costs. These changes improved operating margins for safety-net hospitals in expansion states. Margins for safety-net hospitals in nonexpansion states, meanwhile, declined.

Background

Through their missions or legal mandate, safety-net hospitals provide care to all patients, regardless of their ability to pay.1 They include public hospitals, which are often providers of last resort in their communities; academic medical centers, which combine their teaching function with a mission to serve vulnerable populations; and certain private hospitals.

Safety-net hospitals deliver a significant level of care to low-income patients, including Medicaid enrollees and the uninsured, typically providing services that other hospitals in the community do not offer — trauma, burn care, neonatal intensive care, and inpatient behavioral health, as well as education for future physicians and other health care professionals. They are also an important source of care to uninsured individuals who are ineligible for Medicaid or subsidized marketplace coverage because of their citizenship status.2

Several studies have suggested major reductions in uncompensated care and improved financial status at safety-net institutions in states that expanded Medicaid compared to those in states that did not expand.3,4 However, these results were based on interviews with a limited number of safety-net health system executives and staff. Our analysis expands on this research by examining changes in key financial metrics — that is, uncompensated care, Medicaid costs and revenues, and total hospital margins–across safety-net hospitals nationally using standardized data.

When compared to other short-term acute care hospitals, hospitals that met our safety-net hospital criteria had substantially higher Medicaid revenue and uncompensated care levels than non-safety-net hospitals. Safety-net hospitals, however, had lower operating margins (Exhibit 1).

Below we discuss findings on the impact of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) Medicaid expansion on safety-net hospitals’ financial status. The ACA allowed states to expand Medicaid eligibility to nonelderly adults with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. The reduction in the number of uninsured under the ACA coverage expansions was expected to reduce the uncompensated care that hospitals provide, thus improving their financial status. As of 2015, 31 states and the District of Columbia had expanded Medicaid, while 19 states had not.5

We measure changes in the financial status of safety-net hospitals in states that expanded Medicaid prior to 2015 (326 hospitals) versus safety-net hospitals in states that did not expand or expanded in 2015 or after (268 hospitals). (See “How We Conducted This Study” for complete methods.)

Key Findings

Our analysis of Medicare cost report data for federal fiscal years 2012 and 2015 shows a sizable contrast in financial performance between safety-net hospitals in states that expanded Medicaid under the ACA and those in states that did not. Performance metrics included the following:

    • Hospital operating margins.6 Operating margins improved for safety-net hospitals located in Medicaid expansion states compared with declines for those in states that did not expand. From 2012 to 2015, operating margins for safety-net hospitals in Medicaid expansion states increased from –3.2 percent to –2.1 percent in 2015 (Exhibit 2, Appendix A). In contrast during the same period, operating margins for safety-net hospitals in nonexpansion states declined from 2.3 percent to 2.0 percent. Largely accounting for this difference were increased Medicaid revenues and reduced uncompensated care costs. Even after expansion, safety-net hospitals’ operating margins in Medicaid expansion states were lower than those in nonexpansion states.
    • Medicaid inpatient days. From 2012 to 2015, safety-net hospitals in Medicaid expansion states experienced larger growth in Medicaid utilization than those in nonexpansion states (Exhibit 3). During the study period, Medicaid inpatient days in expansion states rose 13.5 percent. In comparison, Medicaid inpatient days in nonexpansion states fell slightly, by 0.9 percent.
    • Medicaid revenues and costs.7 The rise in use of safety-net hospitals in Medicaid expansion states resulted in these hospitals’ increased Medicaid revenue and costs compared to a slight decline in nonexpansion states (Exhibit 4). From 2012 to 2015, safety-net hospitals’ Medicaid revenues as a share of net patient revenues rose 12.7 percent in Medicaid expansion states. In contrast, during the same period, safety-net hospitals’ Medicaid revenues as a share of net patient revenues declined 1.8 percent in nonexpansion states. However, safety-net hospitals’ profit margins on Medicaid patients fell from 6.8 percent to 0.7 percent in expansion states, suggesting that the revenues received for newly eligible patients did not keep pace with the higher cost of treating these patients.
    • Uncompensated care costs.8 In 2012, safety-net hospitals’ uncompensated care costs as a percent of total hospital operating costs equaled 6.7 percent in expansion states compared to 5.7 percent in nonexpansion states (Exhibit 5). By 2015, however, the safety-net hospitals’ share of uncompensated care declined to 3.5 percent in expansion states, or a reduction of 47.4 percent. By comparison, in nonexpansion states that year, uncompensated care costs as a share of total hospital operating costs fell to 5.3 percent, a 7.8 percent reduction.

Discussion

These data suggest that the Medicaid expansion created by the ACA had a significant positive financial impact on safety-net hospitals in states that expanded Medicaid eligibility relative to those in states that did not expand. Safety-net hospitals in expansion states saw larger increases in Medicaid patient volume and revenue, reduced uncompensated care, and improved financial margins compared to safety-net hospitals in nonexpansion states. Although our study’s results are specific to safety-net hospitals, other studies have found similar trends across all hospitals in expansion and nonexpansion states.9

The improved financial stability of safety-net hospitals could allow these hospitals to continue expanding outpatient capacity, invest in strategies to improve care coordination, hire new staff, and develop better infrastructure to monitor costs.10 Such investments can also help prepare hospitals for new payment arrangements that may require them to assume more financial risk for patient care and outcomes. Improvements not only benefit the institutions and Medicaid patients but the communities these hospitals serve.

Current attempts to repeal the ACA aim to eliminate the Medicaid expansions over time and curtail Medicaid spending by more than $800 billion over 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that about 14 million people could lose their Medicaid coverage by 2026, which would have an adverse effect on safety-net hospitals in those states. Specifically, safety-net hospitals’ gains in reduced uncompensated care and improved overall financial margins could be lost in the future.

 

Ambulance trips can leave you with surprising — and very expensive — bills

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/ambulance-trips-can-leave-you-with-surprising–and-very-expensive–bills/2017/11/17/6be9280e-c313-11e7-84bc-5e285c7f4512_story.html?tid=ss_tw-bottom&utm_term=.78d3dfa36d97

Image result for high ambulance bill trends

 

One patient got a $3,660 bill for a four-mile ride. Another was charged $8,460 for a trip from a hospital that could not handle his case to another that could. Still another found herself marooned at an out-of-network hospital, where she’d been taken by ambulance without her consent.

These patients all took ambulances in emergencies and got slammed with unexpected bills. Public outrage has erupted over surprise medical bills — generally out-of-network charges that a patient did not expect or could not control — prompting 21 states to pass laws over the years protecting consumers in some situations. But these laws largely ignore ground ambulance rides, which can leave patients stuck with hundreds or even thousands of dollars in bills and with few options for recourse, finds a Kaiser Health News review of 350 consumer complaints in 32 states.

Patients usually choose to go to the doctor, but they are vulnerable when they call 911 or get into an ambulance. The dispatcher picks the ambulance crew, which may be the local fire department or a private company hired by the municipality. The crew, in turn, often picks the hospital. Moreover, many ambulances are not summoned by patients, but by police or a bystander.

Betsy Imholz, special projects director at the Consumers Union, which has collected more than 700 patient stories about surprise medical bills, said at least a quarter concern ambulances.

“It’s a huge problem,” she said.

Forty years ago, most ambulances were free for patients, provided by volunteers or town fire departments using taxpayer money, said Jay Fitch, president of Fitch & Associates, an emergency services consulting firm. Today, ambulances are increasingly run by private companies and venture capital firms. Ambulance operators now often charge by the mile and sometimes for each “service,” such as providing oxygen. If the ambulance is staffed by paramedics rather than emergency medical technicians, that will result in a higher charge — even if the patient didn’t need paramedic-level services. Charges range from zero to thousands of dollars.

The core of the problem is that ambulance companies and private insurers often can’t agree on a fair price, so the ambulance service doesn’t join the insurer’s network. That leaves patients stuck with out-of-network charges that are not negotiated, Imholz said.

This happens to patients frequently, according to a recent study of more than half a million ambulance trips taken by patients with private insurance in 2014. The study, by two staffers at the Federal Trade Commission, found that 26 percent of these trips were billed on an out-of-network basis.

That figure is “quite jarring,” said Loren Adler, co-author of a recent report on surprise billing.

The KHN review of complaints revealed two common scenarios leaving patients in debt: First, patients get into an ambulance after a 911 call. Second, an ambulance transfers them between hospitals. In both scenarios, patients later learn the fee is much higher because the ambulance was out-of-network, and after the insurer pays what it deems fair, they get a surprise bill for the balance, also known as a “balance bill.”

The Better Business Bureau has received nearly 1,200 consumer complaints about ambulances in the past three years; half were related to billing, and 46 mentioned out-of-network charges, spokeswoman Katherine Hutt said.

While the federal government sets reimbursement rates for patients on Medicare, it does not regulate ambulance fees for patients with private insurance. Those patients are left with a highly fragmented system in which the cost of a similar ambulance trip can vary widely from town to town. There are about 14,000 ambulance services across the country, run by governments, volunteers, hospitals and private companies, according to the American Ambulance Association. (The Washington area reflects that mix.)

For a glimpse into the unpredictable system, consider the case of Roman Barshay. The 46-year-old software engineer, who lives in Brooklyn, was visiting friends in the Boston suburb of Chestnut Hill last November when he took a nasty fall.

Barshay felt a sharp pain in his chest and back, and he had trouble walking. An ambulance crew responded to a 911 call at his friends’ house and drove him four miles to Brigham and Women’s Hospital, taking his blood pressure as he lay down in the back. Doctors there determined he had sprained tendons and ligaments and a bruised foot, and released him after about four hours, he said.

After Barshay returned to Brooklyn, he got a bill for $3,660, or $915 for each mile of the ambulance ride. His insurance had covered nearly half, leaving him to pay the remaining $1,890.50.

“I thought it was a mistake,” Barshay said.

But Fallon Ambulance Service, the private company that brought him to the hospital, was out-of-network for his UnitedHealthcare insurance plan.

“The cost is outrageous,” said Barshay, who reluctantly paid the bill after Fallon sent it to a collection agency. If he had known what the ride would cost, he said, he would at least have been able to refuse the ride and “crawl to the hospital myself.”

In a statement, UnitedHealthcare said: “Out-of-network ambulance companies should not be using emergencies as an opportunity to bill patients excessive amounts when they are at their most vulnerable.”

“You feel horribly to send a patient a bill like that,” said Peter Racicot, senior vice president of Fallon, a family-owned company based outside Boston.

But ambulance firms are “severely underfunded” by Medicare and Medicaid, Racicot said, so Fallon must balance the books by charging higher rates for patients with private insurance.

Racicot said his company has not contracted with Barshay’s insurer because they couldn’t agree on a fair rate. When insurers and ambulance companies can’t agree, he said, “unfortunately, the subscribers wind up in the middle.”

It’s also unrealistic to expect EMTs and paramedics at the scene of an emergency to determine whether their company takes a patient’s insurance, Racicot added.

Ambulance services must charge enough to subsidize the cost of keeping their crews ready around the clock, said Fitch, the ambulance consultant. In a third of the cases where an ambulance crew answers a call, he added, they end up not transporting anyone and the company typically isn’t reimbursed for the trip.

In part, Barshay had bad luck. If his injury had happened just a mile away — inside Boston’s city limits — he could have ridden a city ambulance, which would have charged $1,490, according to Boston EMS, a sum that his insurer probably would have covered in full.

Very few states have laws limiting ambulance charges, and most state laws that protect patients from surprise billing do not apply to ground ambulance rides, according to Brian Werfel, a consultant to the American Ambulance Association. And none of the surprise-billing protections apply to people with self-funded employer-sponsored health insurance plans, which are regulated only by federal law. That’s a huge exception: 61 percent of privately insured employees are covered by self-funded employer-sponsored plans.

Some towns that hire private companies to respond to 911 calls may regulate fees or prohibit balance billing, Werfel said, but each locality is different.

Insurers try to protect patients from balance billing by negotiating rates with ambulance companies, said Cathryn Donaldson, a spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans. But “some ambulance companies have been resistant to join plan networks” that offer Medicare-based rates, she said.

Medicare rates vary widely by geographic area. On average, ambulance services make a small profit on Medicare payments, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office. If a patient uses a basic life support ambulance in an emergency in an urban area, for instance, Medicare payments range from $324 to $453, plus $7.29 per mile. Medicaid rates tend to be significantly lower.

There’s evidence of waste and fraud in the ambulance industry, Donaldson added, citing a study from the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services. The report concluded that in 2012 Medicare paid more than $50 million in improper ambulance bills, including for supposedly emergency-level transport that ended at a nursing home, not a hospital. One in 5 ambulance services had “questionable billing” practices, said the report, which noted that Medicare spent $5.8 billion on ambulance transport that year.

Most complaints reviewed by Kaiser Health News did not appear to involve fraudulent charges. Instead, patients got caught in a system in which ambulance services can legally charge thousands of dollars for a single trip — even when the trip starts at an in-network hospital.

That’s what happened to Devin Hall, a 67-year-old retired postal inspector in Northern California. While he faces Stage 3 prostate cancer, Hall is also fighting a $7,109.70 bill from American Medical Response, the nation’s largest ambulance provider.

On Dec. 27, 2016, Hall went to a local hospital with rectal bleeding. Because the hospital didn’t have the right specialist to treat his symptoms, it arranged for an ambulance ride to another hospital about 20 miles away. Even though the hospital was in his network, the ambulance was not.

Hall was stunned to see that AMR billed $8,460 for the trip. His federal health plan, the Special Agents Mutual Benefit Association, paid $1,350.30 and held Hall responsible for $727.08, records show. (According to his plan’s explanation of benefits, it paid that amount because AMR’s charges exceeded the plan’s Medicare-based fee schedule, which is based on Medicare rates.) But AMR turned his case over to a debt collector, Credence Resource Management, which sent an Aug. 25 notice seeking the full balance of $7,109.70.

“These charges are exorbitant — I just don’t think what AMR is doing is right,” said Hall, noting that he had intentionally sought treatment at an in-network hospital.

He has spent months on the phone calling the hospital, his insurer and AMR trying to resolve the matter. Given his prognosis, he worries about leaving his wife with a legal fight and a lien on their Brentwood, Calif., house for a debt they shouldn’t owe.

After being contacted by Kaiser Health News, AMR said it pulled Hall’s case from collections while it reviews the billing. After further review, company spokesman Jason Sorrick said the charges were warranted because it was a “critical care transport, which requires a specialized nurse and equipment on board.”

Sorrick faulted Hall’s health plan for underpaying, and said Hall could receive a discount if he qualifies for AMR’s “compassionate care program” based on his financial and medical situation.

“In this case, it appears the patient’s insurance company simply made up a price they wanted to pay,” Sorrick said.

In July, a California law went into effect that protects consumers from surprise medical bills from out-of-network providers, including some ambulance transport between hospitals. But Hall’s case occurred before that, and the state law doesn’t apply to him because of his federal insurance plan.

The consumer complaints reviewed by Kaiser Health News reveal a wide variety of ways that patients are left fighting big bills:

• An older patient in California said debt collectors called incessantly, including on Sunday mornings and at night, demanding an extra $500 on top of the $1,000 that his insurance had paid for an ambulance trip.

• Two ambulance services responded to a New Jersey man’s 911 call when he felt burning in his chest. One of them charged him $2,100 for treating him on the scene for less than 30 minutes — even though he never rode in that company’s ambulance.

• A woman who rolled over in her Jeep in Texas was charged a $26,400 “trauma activation fee” — a fee triggered when the ambulance service called ahead to the emergency department to assemble a trauma team. The woman, who did not require trauma care, fought the hospital to get the fee waived.

In other cases, patients face financial hardship when ambulances take them to out-of-network hospitals. Patients don’t always have a choice in where to seek care; that’s up to the ambulance crew and depends on the protocols written by the medical director of each ambulance service, said Werfel, the ambulance association consultant.

Sarah Wilson, a 36-year-old microbiologist, had a seizure at her grandmother’s house in rural Ohio on March 18, 2016, the day after having hip surgery at Akron City Hospital. When her husband called 911, the private ambulance crew that responded refused to take her back to Akron City Hospital, instead driving her to an out-of-network hospital that was 22 miles closer. Wilson refused care because the hospital was out-of-network, she said.

Wilson wanted to leave. But “I was literally trapped in my stretcher,” without the crutches she needed to walk, she said. Her husband, who had followed by car, wasn’t allowed to see her right away. She ended up leaving against medical advice at 4 a.m. She landed in collections for a $202 hospital bill for a medical examination, a debt that damaged her credit score, she said.

Ken Joseph, chief paramedic of Emergency Medical Transport, the private ambulance company that transported Wilson, said company protocol is to take patients to the “closest appropriate facility.” Serving a large area with just two ambulances, the company has to get each ambulance back to its station quickly so it can be ready for the next call, he said.

Patients such as Wilson are often left to battle these bills alone, because there are no federal protections for patients with private insurance.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), who has been pushing for federal legislation protecting patients from surprise hospital bills, said in a statement that he supports doing the same for ambulance bills.

Meanwhile, patients do have the right to refuse an ambulance ride, as long as they are older than 18 and mentally capable.

“You could just take an Uber,” said Adler, co-author of the surprise-billing report. But if you need an ambulance, there’s little recourse to avoid unexpected bills, he said, “other than yelling at the insurance company after the fact, or yelling at the ambulance company.”

Puerto Rico’s Dire Health-Care Crisis

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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/puerto-ricos-health-care-crisis-is-just-beginning/544210/

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It’s been two months since Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, but nearly 10 percent of the island’s 3.4 million residents still don’t have access to clean, safe water. Half of the electric grid is still out of service, which has made it difficult to safely store food or medicines that need to be refrigerated. The outages have also left many residents vulnerable to heat exposure; temperatures remain in the high 80s on the island.

There’s also growing concern that Puerto Rico’s Medicaid program — which covers nearly half of Puerto Ricans — will soon run out of money to pay doctors and hospitals. The territory’s governor has asked the Trump administration to waive Puerto Rico’s share of Medicaid costs, and some Democratic senators have made similar appeals.

 

 

How the elections could put the brakes on anti-ACA plans

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https://www.axios.com/how-the-elections-could-put-the-brakes-on-anti-aca-plans-2508099820.html

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The most important issue in an election is sometimes, but seldom, the factor that actually determines the outcome of the election. That’s what we saw happen in Virginia this week. Health was the top issue in the Virginia race, according to exit polls, but it was only one of many factors that drove the election.

The bottom line: The election may have been more of a referendum on President Trump than health care — but the results in Virginia and in the Maine referendum on Medicaid expansion will still have a practical impact on what happens next, including the appetite for Affordable Care Act repeal and for cutting Medicaid to pay for tax cuts.

The details: Voters in Virginia named health care as far and away their top issue in the election in the network exit poll. It’s not surprising that the issue was at the top of their minds; they have been hearing all about the ACA in the news for months and about Medicaid expansion in their state.

Yes, but: Notably, the exit poll did not include the economy on the list of issues voters could choose. Fox News did ask about the economy and, as the chart shows, it and health were statistically tied in their poll.

Between the lines: When voters rank health care as a top issue in an election, it does not necessarily mean health care drove their vote. Voters’ views of the candidates themselves are generally a bigger factor. The candidates were also proxies for voters’ feelings about President Trump, and many more voters in Virginia said they were voting to express opposition to Trump than their support for him (34% vs. 17%).

Most voters who chose health care as their top issue in Virginia voted for Northam, possibly signaling that Democrats may be able to campaign on health care and the ACA in upcoming elections.

What to watch: The Maine vote on Medicaid expansion was a different story. Maine voters cast their ballots on a specific referendum to expand the Medicaid program, and it won resoundingly. The result speaks to a lesson learned in the repeal and replace debate: Medicaid and Medicaid expansion are far more popular than Republicans seem to think they are, largely because Medicaid now covers 74 million Americans and matters to a broad cross section of the American people.

The impact: The immediate political implication is that it will be much tougher to cut Medicaid to help pay for tax cuts. Another lesson is that expanding Medicaid could be a winner in other states, especially with the federal government picking up 90 percent of the costs and the Trump administration ready to let red states put a conservative stamp on their programs. Medicaid is not Social Security or Medicare yet, but politically it is a lot closer than Republicans may realize.

A lot can and probably will happen between now and 2018. But for now, the prominence of health care in the Virginia election could throw a scare into moderate Republicans about continuing to pursue ACA repeal. And the Maine referendum on Medicaid expansion could make them more cautious about cutting Medicaid.

Virginia’s Electoral Changes Boost Medicaid Expansion Odds

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This week’s groundswell of political change in Virginia has improved the odds of Medicaid expansion becoming law there. The long-stalled liberal priority gained new life after Democrats nearly wiped out Republicans’ overwhelming majority in the House of Delegates.

For years Medicaid expansion, a key part of former President Barack Obama’s health care law, has been a non-starter in the Old Dominion. Republicans, who controlled two-thirds of Virginia’s House seats, have fiercely rejected expansion. Democrats have only made perfunctory pushes on the issue since 2014, when they lost a months-long showdown with the GOP.

That all changed Tuesday as Democrats won at least 15 House seats. Control of the chamber is still up in the air as a couple of close races have yet to be called — an outcome few but the most optimistic Democrats were expecting.

Democratic House Leader David Toscano said the election has “totally changed the dynamic” on Medicaid expansion, shifting it from a lost cause to something with serious momentum.

“It’s not dead on arrival anymore,” he said.

Toscano said expansion is by no means guaranteed but he believes Democrats could swing the needed handful of Republicans even if the GOP maintained slight control of the House.

Democratic Gov.-elect Ralph Northam, who made Medicaid expansion a part of his campaign platform, said Wednesday he’s eager to work with GOP lawmakers to get it approved. Republican state Sen. Emmett Hanger has previously expressed support for expansion. That theoretically provides enough votes to get it passed in the narrowly spilt state Senate.

But Republican leaders in both chambers said Thursday the election has not changed their opposition to the expansion. They say it would be fiscally irresponsible, even with the federal government promising to cover most of the new costs.

“Free and guaranteed money from Washington is neither free nor guaranteed,” said Parker Slaybaugh, a spokesman for Republican House Leader Kirk Cox.

Supporters of Medicaid expansion, including the state’s hospitals and much of the medical community, say it will boost the state’s economy in addition to helping poor people. Julian Walker, spokesman for the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association, said his group “stands ready to work” with lawmakers “to enhance coverage and alleviate the impact of uncompensated care of the state.”

The issue is gaining traction outside of Virginia.

In a public referendum Tuesday, Maine voters defied their state’s Republican governor and decided they wanted to expand Medicaid to some 70,000 citizens. Maine would join 31 other states in expanding the program. Similar referendum campaigns are planned in at least three other states.

At the federal level, Republicans have had little success trying to undo Medicaid expansion, despite President Donald Trump’s campaign promises to “repeal and replace” his predecessor’s law. GOP bills that would have repealed Medicaid expansion and limited future federal financing for the entire Medicaid program failed to pass Congress and drew opposition from some Republican governors.

Overall, about 11 million people in the country have gotten health coverage through the expansion of Medicaid.

Medicaid Is Great, but Rural Maine Needs Hospitals, Too

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This week Maine voted to become the 32nd state to expand Medicaid despite opposition by Gov. Paul LePage, who had vetoed five previous expansion bills passed by the state legislature and has now threatened to block the results of the ballot initiative. Unless Mr. LePage succeeds, about 80,000 more Mainers will be eligible for coverage, a victory in an unsettling year for health care in America.

With the Affordable Care Act under constant threat from the Trump administration and out-of-pocket costs rising faster than wages, health care topped the list of the most important issues facing Americans this year.

However, Maine and other rural states face a health care crisis that Medicaid expansion can’t fix on its own. It’s not about affordable coverage; it’s about access: For too many rural areas, doctors and hospitals are scarce.

In the postwar era, America made hospital construction and modernization a priority. On Aug. 13, 1946, Harry Truman signed the Hill-Burton Act,giving communities grants and loans for hospital construction. By 1975, almost one-third of American hospitals owed their creation to the law. Financing for Hill-Burton health care construction ended in 1997, but one rule from the original bill still applied: These hospitals had to give free or reduced care to people who couldn’t afford services. As rural areas aged and the population shrank because of manufacturing’s decline and the rise of a technology-driven economy centered on urban areas, hospitals struggled to stay in operation.

Under the Affordable Care Act, hospitals started shutting down at worrisome rates because of an increase in financial penalties for noncompliance with A.C.A. mandates, the cost of tighter reporting standards and smaller reimbursements for certain procedures. Since the A.C.A. became law in 2010, over 80 rural hospitals have closed nationwide. Maine alone has lost three hospitals in that time, about 10 percent of its rural total.

If closings continue at this rate, 25 percent of America’s rural hospitals will have disappeared in the decade after Obamacare’s passage. This does not take into account facility deterioration, doctor departures or department closures.

This is a big problem for Maine, which has the highest percentage of rural residents in the country, according to the most recent census data. Calais Regional Hospital in Down East Maine recently oversaw its last childbirth. The obstetrics department closed in late summer, forcing women in labor to drive 50 minutes to deliver their babies. Despite an opioid crisis that increases the chance of high-risk pregnancies, this same privately owned hospital shut down its pediatrics wing and intensive care unit in recent years, because of financial pressure from the management company halfway across the country in Tennessee.

This was hardly an isolated example in Maine. The town of Jackman closed its 24-hour emergency room in September, and Boothbay lost its only hospital in 2013. Rangeley, where my wife’s family lives, is an hour away from the nearest hospital and has no doctor in town.

Meanwhile, Maine Med in Portland, Maine’s largest city, is about to break ground for a $512 million addition just a few years after it finished a $40 million renovation. While rural Maine’s hospitals and departments are closing because of large losses, Maine Med had, for 2016, a $61 million surplus.

Medicaid expansion is a welcome source of new revenue to rural hospitals in Maine because more insured patients mean fewer uncompensated treatments. Still, it comes nowhere close to fixing the problem or, politically, putting any meaningful points on the Democratic scoreboard.

In 2016, Donald Trump won Maine’s rural congressional district by a 10-point margin and rural counties in America at large by a 26-point marginon a message of repealing and replacing Obamacare. As Maggie Elehwany of the National Rural Health Association said in an NPR interview this year, rural Americans voted for Mr. Trump in part because of health care. “They see their hospitals closing,” she noted. “And one hospital C.E.O. described it as a three-pronged stool. It’s the churches, the hospitals and the schools. If you lose one of those legs of that stool, the whole community collapses.”

Since President Trump hasn’t been able to deliver on any meaningful legislation to support rural voters, it is the Democrats’ time to deliver. One good step is a bill sponsored by the Democratic senators Tim Kaine of Virginia and Michael Bennet of Colorado called Medicare-X. It would give a public option to Americans in rural counties where limited competition has yielded higher-priced health insurance options.

It still doesn’t solve the heart of the rural problem. Democrats can’t just lower premiums and expand Medicaid. We must strengthen rural communities by making access to high-quality health care services a priority of any proposal. In any future legislation, we should demand grants for new hospitals, funds to modernize crumbling ones and financial incentives for top doctors to work in these areas. This will not only make rural communities healthier, but also more welcoming for growth and new business.

No person suffering from a heart attack should die because a hospital is too far. No pregnant mother should have to risk the health of her baby because she can’t make it to a delivery room in time. As Democrats, we believe that health care is a right. It would be a big mistake to expand health care insurance but offer no place to use it.

Lawsuit: Epic’s software double-bills Medicare, Medicaid for anesthesia services

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https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/lawsuit-epic-s-software-double-bills-medicare-medicaid-for-anesthesia.html

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Health IT giant Verona, Wis.-based Epic Systems has been hit with a False Claims Act lawsuit that alleges the company’s software double-bills Medicare and Medicaid for anesthesia services, resulting in the government being overbilled by hundreds of millions of dollars.

The lawsuit, which was filed under the qui tam provision of the False Claims Act in 2015 and made public Thursday, alleges Epic’s billing software’s default protocol is to charge for both the applicable base units for anesthesia provided on a procedure and the actual time taken for the procedure. This results in the provider being reimbursed twice for the base unit component, according to the lawsuit.

The whistle-blower who filed the lawsuit, Geraldine Petrowski, worked at Raleigh, N.C.-based WakeMed Health from September 2008 through June 2014. In her role as supervisor of physician’s coding, Ms. Petrowski served as the hospital liaison for Epic’s implementation of its software at WakeMed Health.

Ms. Petrowski claims she provided examples to Epic representatives illustrating the double-billing practice, and the company initially ignored her complaints. “It was only after relator, Petrowski, reiterated her direction to fix this software setting that [Epic] relented and fixed it only for the WakeMed Health facility,” according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit alleges the unlawful billing protocol has resulted “in the presentation of hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent bills for anesthesia services being submitted to Medicare and Medicaid as false claims.”

In a statement to Healthcare IT News, an Epic spokeswoman said, “The plaintiff’s assertions represent a fundamental misunderstanding of how claims software works.”

The Department of Justice declined to intervene in the case, and the whistle-blower will move forward in the case without the government.

Maine Medicaid expansion vote seen as ‘Obamacare’ referendum

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The roiling national debate over the government’s proper role in health care is coming to a head in a state more commonly known for moose, lobster and L.L. Bean.

On Nov. 7, voters in Maine will decide whether to join 31 other states and expand Medicaid under former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. It is the first time since the law took effect nearly four years ago that the expansion question has been put to voters.

The ballot measure comes after Maine’s Republican governor vetoed five attempts by the politically divided Legislature to expand the program and take advantage of the federal government picking up most of the cost.

It also acts as a bookend to a year in which President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans tried and failed repeatedly to repeal Obama’s law.

Activists on both sides of the issue are looking at the initiative, Maine Question 2, as a sort of national referendum on one of the key pillars of the law, commonly known as Obamacare. Roughly 11 million people nationwide have gained coverage through the expansion of Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for lower-income Americans.

Republican consultant Lance Dutson called Maine’s initiative a national bellwether in which the needs of the people could trump political ideology.

A pillar of former President Barack Obama’s health care law faces a test in Maine, where voters will decide whether to expand Medicaid. If voters pass the initiative, Maine would become the 32nd state to accept the expansion. (Oct. 31)

“People believe there are good parts to Obamacare and bad parts to Obamacare. And without taking Medicaid expansion, we are leaving one of the good parts on the table while still suffering from the bad parts of it,” said Dutson, who supports Question 2.

Maine may not be the last state to put the Medicaid question before voters. Expansion proponents in Idaho and Utah have launched similar efforts in those states aimed at the 2018 ballot.

If the initiative passes, an estimated 70,000 people in Maine would gain health coverage. The issue is personal to many in an aging, economically struggling state with a population that is smaller than the city of San Diego.

Nature painter Laura Tasheiko got dropped from Medicaid three years ago after successfully battling breast cancer. Since then, she has relied on the charitable services of a hospital near her home in Northport, a seaside village of less than 2,000 people about 100 miles northeast of Portland.

She worries about having another serious health problem before she is eligible for Medicare when she turns 65 next year.

“Some of the after-effects of the chemo can be severe, like heart failure,” she said. “Having no insurance is really scary.”

Maine’s hospitals support the Medicaid expansion and say charity care costs them over $100 million annually. The initiative’s supporters have reported spending about $2 million on their campaign, with hundreds of thousands of dollars coming from out-of-state groups. By comparison, the lead political action committee established to oppose the measure has spent a bit less than $300,000.

Among those who say Maine will benefit from the expansion is Bethany Miller. She said her adult son, Kyle, needed Medicaid because he couldn’t afford subsidized monthly insurance premiums even though he was working.

She remembers watching as her son’s eyes went hollow and his body turned skeletal in the weeks before he died, at age 25, from a diabetic coma a year ago.

“He had a job, but he didn’t make enough money to pay for his basic needs and his insulin, and he couldn’t live without his insulin,” said Miller, who lives in Jay, a small paper mill town about 70 miles north of Portland.

LePage, a Trump supporter, is lobbying furiously against the initiative. He and other critics warn that the expansion will be too costly for Maine, even with the federal government picking up most of the tab. After 2020, the state’s share of paying for the expansion population would be 10 percent.

LePage warns that he would have to divert $54 million from other programs — for the elderly, disabled and children — to pay for Medicaid expansion.

“It’s going to kill this state,” he said.

LePage said he considers Medicaid another form of welfare and wants to require recipients to work and pay premiums.

Maine currently serves about 268,000 Medicaid recipients, down from 354,000 in 2011. LePage credits the drop to his administration’s tightened eligibility restrictions.

If Question 2 passes, the Medicaid expansion would cover adults under age 65 with incomes at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty level. That’s $16,643 for a single person or $22,412 for a family of two.

State Rep. Deborah Sanderson, a Republican, said Maine is already struggling to serve its rapidly aging population as nursing homes shutter and rural hospitals struggle.

“I get accused on occasion of trying to pit one population of folks against another,” she said. “It’s a case of only having a certain amount of resources to take care of a large number of needs.”

Finances are a concern in a state marked by factory closures and sluggish wage growth.

But with more people living on the margins, advocates of the expansion say that is all the more reason to extend the benefits of Medicaid. About 8 percent of Maine residents do not have insurance, a little less than the national percentage.

Democratic Sen. Geoffrey Gratwick, a retired rheumatologist, said he has seen many patients throughout his career who did not have health insurance and came to him with a disease already in its late stages. He voted for all five Medicaid expansion attempts.

“They are just as good people as you or I, but their lives will be shorter and they will be sicker,” he said. “Compassion, common sense and our economic interest demand that we get them the health care they need.”

Nathalie Arruda and her husband, Michael, are in that group that is sometimes without insurance. They live in the farming community of Orland, halfway between New Hampshire and the state’s eastern border with New Brunswick, Canada.

The couple run a computer business and rely on herbal teas and locally grown greens to stay healthy as they fall in and out of Medicaid eligibility. LePage restricted Medicaid eligibility for adults with dependents, like the Arrudas.

“There have absolutely been times when my husband or I have put off getting something looked at that we probably should have because we didn’t have coverage,” Arruda said.

In Miller’s view, her son would still be alive if LePage had signed one of the Medicaid expansion bills sent to him by the Legislature.

When Kyle turned 21, he was one of thousands who lost MaineCare coverage under the governor’s reforms. She said he juggled construction jobs but couldn’t afford his $80 subsidized monthly premium for private insurance.

He struggled to pay medical bills from emergency room visits, Miller said.

Before Kyle died last November, he had landed a steady job at a plastics factory that promised health insurance. He didn’t live long enough to get the coverage, falling into a diabetic coma.

“He started rationing his insulin so he could buy food,” his mother said. “And it cost him his life.”

Medicaid enrollment flat in 2017, but managed care keeps gaining steam

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For the first time in four years, overall enrollment in Medicaid did not grow significantly in 2017—though managed care continues to become more prevalent.

PwC’s annual report (PDF) on the state of the program—released this week to coincide with the Medicaid Health Plans of America conference—found that total enrollment in 2017 was 74.8 million. That’s just 98,000 above the enrollment total in 2016.

The reasons for that flattening growth include the fact that no new states expanded Medicaid this year, a strengthening economy, and some states’ moves to “aggressively redetermine eligibility status.”

By comparison, total enrollment was 72.9 million in 2015, 66.6 million in 2014 and 57.1 million in 2013. Thanks to that steady growth over the past five years, 23.2% of the U.S. population is now enrolled in Medicaid.

On the state level, enrollment changes in 2017 were more varied than in years past, the report notes. Twenty-two states reported declines, while 28 states and the District of Columbia saw increases—including a 23% rise in Alaska and a 20% rise in Montana tied to the states’ decision to expand Medicaid.

Looking at the last five years, divergent enrollment trends in Nevada and Maine offer a prime example of how powerful an effect state decision-making can have on Medicaid programs.

Nevada, whose leaders embraced the Affordable Care Act, has seen its program grow by 105% since 2013. But Maine has seen its Medicaid enrollment decline by 18% since 2013. The primary reason? Maine’s anti-ACA governor Paul LePage, who has vetoed the state legislature’s attempt to expand Medicaid five times.

Policy decisions at the national level can also have a big impact on Medicaid enrollment, the PwC report’s author, Ari Gottlieb, said during the MHPA conference. For example, the Trump administration’s ACA outreach cuts and conflicting information about whether the individual mandate will be enforced will affect more than just the individual insurance market.

Gottlieb predicted that total Medicaid enrollment might be lower next year because of those factors.

Meanwhile, the number of enrollees in private managed care plans continued its steady rise.

In 2017, 73% of Medicaid beneficiaries were in managed care plans, an increase of 1.9% year over year, or an additional 1 million Americans. In addition, 12 states now have at least 90% of their Medicaid populations covered by private plans, compared to just nine last year and four in 2013.

Over the past five years, an additional 20.9 million people were served by a managed care plan, while 3.1 million fewer were served by Medicaid fee-for-service.

But while the past year was mostly a stable one for Medicaid managed care, “the future is going to be more complicated,” Gottlieb said.

One reason is that all the talk about changing Medicaid, while not likely to result in major coverage reductions, will likely result in changes to how it’s paid for, which could prove challenging for health plans.

Further, the trend of consolidation in the managed care industry shows no signs of abating.

That means, according to Gottlieb, that “you’re going to need more scale to participate in the Medicaid of the future.”