Tag Archives: Medicare

Squeeze On Affordable Health Insurance For 50- To 64-Year-Olds

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/howardgleckman/2018/06/21/the-trump-administrations-squeeze-on-affordable-health-insurance-for-50-64-year-olds/#4ea0538b1d94

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In a series of recent decisions, the Trump Administration is taking steps that will sharply raise insurance premiums for people aged 50 to 64, just before they become eligible for Medicare. While these steps are likely to make coverage less expensive for young, healthy consumers, they will inevitably raise costs for middle-aged people with chronic conditions. For many, insurance will become unaffordable. And that lack of coverage will eventually result in higher costs for Medicare.

Trump is taking three major steps that will affect the availability of Affordable Care Act health insurance for middle-aged consumers.  

Repealing but not replacing

First, at the urging of the Trump Administration, Congress last year repealed the tax penalty that has to be paid by those without health insurance, effective for tax year 2019. The penalty is the ACA’s mechanism to push people to buy insurance. The logic: By broadening the pool of those with ACA insurance to include those less likely to incur significant medical costs, the individual mandate would keep premiums relatively low for everyone.

Then, early this month, the Trump Administration refused to defend the remaining provisions of the ACA in federal court. In the case Texas v. the federal Department of Health and Human Services, 20 red states argued that, absent the now-repealed individual mandate, the rest of the ACA will be unconstitutional. Thus, all its other provisions, including several important to those older consumers, also would be thrown out. They include premium limits for those 50-64, minimum benefit requirements,  and the ban on insurance companies rejecting potential purchasers due to pre-existing conditions.

Pre-existing conditions

Prior to the ACA, in a practice known as age-rating, 60-year-olds could pay premiums that were 11 times higher than younger buyers. The ACA capped that ratio at 3:1. AARP estimates that bumping it up to 5:1 would raise annual premiums for a 60-year-old by more than $3,000, or 22%.

Similarly, allowing carriers to underwrite for pre-existing conditions would make insurance widely unavailable for people aged 50 to 64. AARP estimates that 25 million people, or 40% of those 50 to 64, have a condition that could disqualify them from non-group insurance.

The Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center estimates that tossing out the remaining provisions of the ACA would result in 17 million people losing commercial insurance and another 15 million losing Medicaid and children’s health care under the CHIP program.

By Urban colleagues project that even those remaining  in the private individual insurance market “would likely have policies that cover fewer benefits and require more out-of-pocket spending for services.”

Rare agreement

The Texas lawsuit, and the Administration’s refusal to defend the law in court, has generated an outpouring of opposition. It created a rare moment when consumer groups, hospitals, and doctors agreed on a health policy issue.

But the story doesn’t end there. This week, the Trump Administration took one more step towards dismantling the ACA in a way that will likely harm pre-Medicare consumers: The Department of Labor adopted new rules opening the door to low cost, low-benefit health plans.  These will now be widely available to small businesses and, importantly, self-employed individuals.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 4 million people will buy these policies, sold by association health plans (AHPs). The consulting firm Avalere Health estimates that individual AHP premiums will be an average of $9,700 cheaper than ACA coverage, and that 1 million people will shift from marketplace plans to AHP policies. But it predicts premiums will rise by 3.5 percent for more comprehensive ACA insurance, largely because the remaining consumers will be older and sicker than AHP buyers.

President Trump promotes these plans as a less costly alternative to ACA coverage. This week he told the National Federation of Independent Business, “You’re going to save massive amounts of money and have much better health care. You’re going to save a fortune and you’re going to be able to give yourselves and your employees tremendous health care.”

Low cost, few benefits

But the plans do not include any minimum benefit requirements. Thus, they can exclude coverage for pregnancies, mental health issues, or drugs or hospital care. Carriers won’t be able to exclude buyers on the basis of pre-existing conditions but can adjust premiums based on age or sex. And, because they often exclude benefits important to those with chronic conditions, such as medications, they don’t need to underwrite: Those consumers simply won’t buy these policies.

Priced out of ACA coverage and uninterested in limited insurance that won’t cover their needs, it is easy to imagine many of those in their early 60s simply going without coverage (and care) until they become eligible for Medicare at age 65. That will not only put their health at risk, it will raise Medicare costs. Medicare spends about one-third more on medical care for those who join the program without having had insurance in the year before enrolling.

The result of all this: Trump is creating two separate individual health insurance markets, one for young and healthy people, and one for older and sick people.  Some young people may buy low-cost policies that will serve them well—until they get sick. Many older people won’t buy insurance at all, risking their health and, very likely, raising costs to government.

 

Medicare Takes Aim At Boomerang Hospitalizations Of Nursing Home Patients

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https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/06/13/619259541/medicare-takes-aim-at-boomerang-hospitalizations-of-nursing-home-patients

“Oh my God, we dropped her!” Sandra Snipes said she heard the nursing home aides yell as she fell to the floor.

She landed on her right side where her hip had recently been replaced. She cried out in pain.

A hospital clinician later discovered her hip was dislocated.

That was not the only injury Snipes, then 61, said she suffered in 2011 at Richmond Pines Healthcare & Rehabilitation Center in Hamlet, N.C. Nurses allegedly had been injecting her twice a day with a potent blood thinner despite written instructions to stop.

“She said, ‘I just feel so tired,’ ” her daughter, Laura Clark, said in an interview. “The nurses were saying she’s depressed and wasn’t doing her exercises. I said no, something is wrong.”

Her children also discovered Snipes’ surgical wound had become infected and infested with insects. Just 11 days after she arrived at the nursing home to heal from her hip surgery, she was back in the hospital.

The fall and these other alleged lapses in care led Clark and the family to file a lawsuit against the nursing home. Richmond Pines declined to discuss the case beyond saying it disputed the allegations at the time. The home agreed in 2017 to pay Snipes’ family $1.4 million to settle their lawsuit.

While the confluence of complications in Snipes’ case was extreme, return trips from nursing homes to hospitals are far from unusual.

With hospitals pushing patients out the door earlier, nursing homes are deluged with increasingly frail patients. But many homes, with their sometimes-skeletal medical staffing, often fail to handle post-hospital complications — or create new problems by not heeding or receiving accurate hospital and physician instructions.

Patients, caught in the middle, may suffer. One in 5 Medicare patients sent from the hospital to a nursing home boomerangs back within 30 days, often for potentially preventable conditions such as dehydration, infections and medication errors, federal records show. Such rehospitalizations occur 27 percent more frequently than for the Medicare population at large.

Nursing homes have been unintentionally rewarded by decades of colliding government payment policies, which gave both hospitals and nursing homes financial incentives for the transfers. That has left the most vulnerable patients often ping-ponging between institutions, wreaking havoc with patients’ care.

“There’s this saying in nursing homes, and it’s really unfortunate: ‘When in doubt, ship them out,’ ” said David Grabowski, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. “It’s a short-run, cost-minimizing strategy, but it ends up costing the system and the individual a lot more.”

In recent years, the government has begun to tackle the problem. In 2013, Medicare began fining hospitals for high readmission rates in an attempt to curtail premature discharges and to encourage hospitals to refer patients to nursing homes with good track records.

Starting this October, the government will address the other side of the equation, giving nursing homes bonuses or assessing penalties based on their Medicare rehospitalization rates. The goal is to accelerate early signs of progress: The rate of potentially avoidable readmissions dropped to 10.8 percent in 2016 from 12.4 percent in 2011, according to Congress’ Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.

“We’re better, but not well,” Grabowski said. “There’s still a high rate of inappropriate readmissions.”

The revolving door is an unintended byproduct of long-standing payment policies. Medicare pays hospitals a set rate to care for a patient depending on the average time it takes to treat a typical patient with a given diagnosis. That means that hospitals effectively profit by earlier discharge and lose money by keeping patients longer, even though an elderly patient may require a few extra days.

But nursing homes have their own incentives to hospitalize patients. For one thing, keeping patients out of hospitals requires frequent examinations and speedy laboratory tests — all of which add costs to nursing homes.

Plus, most nursing home residents are covered by Medicaid, the state-federal program for the poor that is usually the lowest-paying form of insurance. If a nursing home sends a Medicaid resident to the hospital, she usually returns with up to 100 days covered by Medicare, which pays more. On top of all that, in some states, Medicaid pays a “bed-hold” fee when a patient is hospitalized.

None of this is good for the patients. Nursing home residents often return from the hospital more confused or with a new infection, said Dr. David Gifford, a senior vice president of quality and regulatory affairs at the American Health Care Association, a nursing home trade group.

“And they never quite get back to normal,” he said.

‘She Looked Like A Wet Washcloth’

Communication lapses between physicians and nursing homes is one recurring cause of rehospitalizations. Elaine Essa had been taking thyroid medication ever since that gland was removed when she was a teenager. Essa, 82, was living at a nursing home in Lancaster, Calif., in 2013 when a bout of pneumonia sent her to the hospital.

When she returned to the nursing home — now named Wellsprings Post-Acute Care Center — her doctor omitted a crucial instruction from her admission order: to resume the thyroid medication, according to a lawsuit filed by her family. The nursing home telephoned Essa’s doctor to order the medication, but he never called them back, the suit said.

Without the medication, Essa’s appetite diminished, her weight increased and her energy vanished — all indications of a thyroid imbalance, said the family’s attorney, Ben Yeroushalmi, discussing the lawsuit. Her doctors from Garrison Family Medical Group never visited her, sending instead their nurse practitioner. He, like the nursing home employees, did not grasp the cause of her decline, although her thyroid condition was prominently noted in her medical records, the lawsuit said.

Three months after her return from the hospital, “she looked like a wet washcloth. She had no color in her face,” said Donna Jo Duncan, a daughter, in a deposition. Duncan said she demanded the home’s nurses check her mother’s blood pressure. When they did, a supervisor ran over and said, “Call an ambulance right away,” Duncan said in the deposition.

At the hospital, a physician said tests showed “zero” thyroid hormone levels, Deborah Ann Favorite, a daughter, recalled in an interview. She testified in her deposition that the doctor told her, “I can’t believe that this woman is still alive.”

Essa died the next month. The nursing home and the medical practice settled the case for confidential amounts. Cynthia Schein, an attorney for the home, declined to discuss the case beyond saying it was “settled to everyone’s satisfaction.” The suit is still ongoing against one other doctor, who did not respond to requests for comment.

Dangers In Discouraging Hospitalization

Out of the nation’s 15,630 nursing homes, one-fifth send 25 percent or more of their patients back to the hospital, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis of data on Medicare’s Nursing Home Compare website. On the other end of the spectrum, the fifth of homes with the lowest readmission rates return fewer than 17 percent of residents to the hospital.

Many health policy experts say that spread shows how much improvement is possible. But patient advocates fear the campaign against hospitalizing nursing home patients may backfire, especially when Medicare begins linking readmission rates to its payments.

“We’re always worried the bad nursing homes are going to get the message ‘Don’t send anyone to the hospital,’ ” said Tony Chicotel, a staff attorney at California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, a nonprofit based in San Francisco.

Richmond Pines, where Sandra Snipes stayed, has a higher than average rehospitalization rate of 25 percent, according to federal records. But the family’s lawyer, Kyle Nutt, said the lawsuit claimed the nurses initially resisted sending Snipes back, insisting she was “just drowsy.”

After Snipes was rehospitalized, her blood thinner was discontinued, her hip was reset, and she was discharged to a different nursing home, according to the family’s lawsuit. But her hospital trips were not over: When she showed signs of recurrent infection, the second home sent her to yet another hospital, the lawsuit alleged.

Ultimately, the lawsuit claimed that doctors removed her prosthetic hip and more than a liter of infected blood clots and tissues. Nutt said if Richmond Pines’ nurses had “caught the over-administration of the blood thinner right off the bat, we don’t think any of this would have happened.”

Snipes returned home but was never able to walk again, according to the lawsuit. Her husband, William, cared for her until she died in 2015, her daughter, Clark, said.

“She didn’t want to go back into the nursing home,” Clark said. “She was terrified.”

 

 

 

More than a quarter of major health systems plan Medicare Advantage launch, though many lack confidence

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http://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/more-quarter-major-health-systems-plan-medicare-advantage-launch-though-many-lack-confidence?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWkdSaE9UZzRPV0poTW1FeCIsInQiOiJTK1lnZEdEakdOVlZNYWRBSzF5M3o1d3BRWmpQXC8ydVBYN2lFY01mUEQwbnhTVjBIU2NScmdIMWtXcjN3NGpXb1NoSG53clwvXC90TzJ1QWFPRWpoeGFtXC9jSHl4TFwvbDgwMEZYaU1kVmxRa1NCNHloRk9lK0VUZFBkVEVuV1hHTytIIn0%3D

 

Executives say the top reason for launching a Medicare Advantage plan is the opportunity to capture more value.

A new survey from Lumeris found that 27 percent of major U.S. health system executives intend to launch a Medicare Advantage plan in the next four years. Despite that, confidence among these same execs is lacking, with only 29 percent reporting they felt confident in their organization’s ability to make the launch successfully.

“These survey findings are consistent with our conversations with healthcare executives across the country who are feeling a sense of urgency around Medicare Advantage strategies, but also realize that this type of work is vastly different than traditional health system operations,” said Jeff Carroll, executive director of health plans at Lumeris, by statement.

In April, The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced it was releasing Medicare Advantage encounter data for the first time by request from the CMS Research Data Assistance Center. The MA encounter data, starting from 2015, provides detailed information about services to beneficiaries enrolled in a Medicare Advantage managed plan. It will give researchers insight into the care delivered under MA plans and will help them improve the Medicare program, CMS said. Annual updates are planned.

According to the 90 executives Lumeris surveyed from major health systems, the top reason for launching a Medicare Advantage plan is the opportunity to capture more value by controlling a greater portion of the premium dollar as compared to fee-for-service Medicare.

Other key drivers cited include market and regulatory trends supporting Medicare Advantage. In particular, shrinking Medicare margins could threaten the viability of hospitals and health systems as the senior population continues to grow and becomes a larger proportion of providers’ patient panels.

The respondents also recognized that launching a Medicare Advantage plan will be challenging due to the complexities of operating an insurance plan, which are far different than the capabilities required to successfully operate a health system.

They also shared concerns about the significant financial investment required and an overall lack of expertise in the health plan space. The majority of respondents, 59 percent, indicated they were likely to use outside resources to launch their plans — and that those resources are very likely to include a vendor partner that can mitigate operational risk.

“Launching and managing a Medicare Advantage plan requires skills beyond the core competencies of most health systems, which is one reason many provider-sponsored plans fail in the first few years,” Carroll said. “Through those failures, it has become clear that providers who select the right partners increase the likelihood for greater success in a shorter period of time.”

 

KHN’s ‘What The Health?’ Health Care Politics, Midterm Edition

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https://khn.org/news/podcast-khns-what-the-health-health-care-politics-midterm-edition/

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The 2018 midterm elections were supposed to be a referendum on President Donald Trump, not about issues such as health care. Still, voters, Democrats and, to a lesser extent, Republicans seem to be keeping health care on the front burner.

The news from Medicare’s trustees that its hospital trust fund is on shakier financial footing than it was last year, hefty premium increases being proposed in several states and activity on Medicaid expansion all take on a political tinge as the critical elections draw closer.

Also this week, an interview with Matt Eyles, president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the health insurance industry trade group.

This week’s panelists for KHN’s “What the Health?” are Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News, Stephanie Armour of The Wall Street Journal, Alice Ollstein of Talking Points Memo and Rebecca Adams of CQ Roll Call.

Among the takeaways from this week’s podcast:

  • Outside Washington, concerns about health care accessibility and prices remain a big issue.
  • Democrats, looking toward the midterm elections in the fall, think that health care can be a potent issue for them. But many also believe that they can’t just run on complaints that the Republicans are sabotaging the Affordable Care Act. They are seeking to find a message that looks to the future.
  • Republicans see the plans by the White House to implement new regulations that allow expansion of association health plans and short-term health plans as a strong action that will thwart complaints that they haven’t fixed the ACA.
  • The states are beginning to release the initial requests from health insurers for premium increases. They vary substantially, but many appear to be partly attributed to the decision last year by Congress to repeal the penalty for people who don’t get insurance.
  • The report this week by the Medicare trustees that the hospital trust fund is closer to insolvency has ignited Democratic criticism of changes in health care law that were part of the GOP tax cut last year.
  • Arkansas has begun implementing its work requirements for healthy adults covered by the Medicaid expansion. It’s the first state to do that. But critics point out that those adults will have to register their work hours online only — and many do not have access to computers.

 

It Costs $685 Billion a Year to Subsidize U.S. Health Insurance

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-23/it-costs-685-billion-a-year-to-subsidize-u-s-health-insurance

 

It will cost the U.S. government almost $700 billion in subsidies this year help provide Americans under age 65 with health insurance through their jobs or in government-sponsored health programs, according to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The subsidies come from four main categories. About $296 billion is federal spending on programs like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which help insure low-income people. Almost as big are the tax write-offs that employers take for providing coverage to their workers. Medicare-eligible people, such as the disabled, account for $82 billion. Subsidies for Obamacare and for other individual coverage are the smallest segment, at $55 billion.

In total, the subsidies are equivalent to about 3.4 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product.

Financing Americans’ Insurance

In 2018, subsidizing health coverage will cost taxpayers almost $700 billion.

Also known as the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare reduced the number of uninsured, but 29 million people will likely go without health coverage in an average month this year, the CBO said. Thirty-five million Americans could lack coverage by 2028 as rising premiums and the elimination of the individual mandate drive more people to drop coverage.

The subsidies in the Affordable Care Act are designed to insulate people in the program from premium increases. The CBO projected that monthly premiums for a mid-range plan in the program will increase by 15 percent by 2019, and by about 7 percent annually through 2028.

One reason for the rising premiums is the actions of President Donald Trump. Last year, Trump topped funding for the cost-sharing reduction payments made to insurers under Obamacare to help Americans afford health costs.

The non-payment of those subsidies, less enforcement of a rule requiring people to have insurance and limited competition caused insurers to raise their premiums by about 34 percent in 2018, compared to 2017. That increased the cost of the subsidies to the federal government, according to the CBO.

Aetna whistle-blower put on leave after accusing CVS Caremark of $1B billing scheme

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https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/legal-regulatory-issues/aetna-whistle-blower-put-on-leave-after-accusing-cvs-caremark-of-1b-billing-scheme.html

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Aenta’s former chief Medicare actuary was placed on administrative leave after filing a whistle-blower lawsuit alleging pharmacy benefits manager CVS Caremark overbilled Medicaid and Medicare for prescription drugs, according to The Columbus Dispatch.

Here are four things to know about the lawsuit.

1. Sarah Behnke, Aetna’s former chief Medicare actuary, filed the pending whistle-blower suit after her internal investigation found CVS Caremark has been allegedly overbilling the federal government for prescriptions since 2007, according to the lawsuit. Ms. Behnke accused CVS Caremark of inappropriately billing the government $1 billion-plus in fraudulent charges.

2. Aetna placed Ms. Behnke on administrative leave after the whistle-blower suit was unsealed in federal court in early April. The unsealing comes as CVS Health, the parent company of CVS Caremark, is attempting to buy Aetna for $69 billion.

3. Ms. Behnke’s lawyer told The Columbus Dispatch Aetna’s decision to place its then-Medicare actuary on administrative leave was “retaliatory and inappropriate.”

4. CVS Caremark rejected the allegations and said it will hand documents over to the court by June 1. The company said it was unaware who filed the lawsuit until after its parent put out an offer to Aetna. CVS Health spokesperson Michael DeAngelis told the publication, “We believe this complaint is without merit, and we intend to vigorously defend ourselves against these allegations.” Aetna officials declined The Columbus Dispatch‘s request for comment.

 

Americans’ Confidence in Their Ability to Pay for Health Care Is Falling

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http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/blog/2018/may/americans-confidence-paying-health-care-falling?omnicid=CFC1404232&mid=henrykotula@yahoo.com

President Trump is expected to soon address the nation about the rising cost of prescription drugs. But Americans are worried about more than drug prices. New findings from the Commonwealth Fund Affordable Care Act Tracking Survey show that consumers’ confidence in their ability to afford all their needed health care continues to decline.

Last week, we reported that the survey indicated a small but significant increase in the uninsured rate among working-age adults since 2016. In this post, we look at people’s views of the affordability of their health care. The Affordable Care Act Tracking Survey is a nationally representative telephone survey conducted by SSRS that tracks coverage rates among 19-to-64-year-olds, and has focused in particular on the experiences of adults who have gained coverage through the marketplaces and Medicaid. The latest wave of the survey was conducted between February and March 2018.1

Findings

Confidence in Ability to Afford Health Care Continues to Decline

In each wave of the survey, we’ve asked respondents whether they have confidence in their ability to afford health care if they were to become seriously ill. In 2018, 62.4 percent of adults said they were very or somewhat confident they could afford their health care, down from a high of nearly 70 percent in 2015 (Table 1). Only about half of people with incomes less than 250 percent of poverty ($30,150 for an individual) were confident they could afford care if they were to become very sick, down from 60 percent in 2015 and about 20 percentage points lower than the rate for adults with higher incomes. There were also significant declines in confidence among young adults, those ages 50 to 64, women, and people with health problems. Declines were significant among both Democrats and Republicans.

People in Employer Plans Have the Greatest Confidence in Their Insurance

We asked people with health insurance how confident they were that their current insurance will help them afford the health care they need this year. Majorities of adults were somewhat or very confident in their coverage; those with employer coverage were the most confident. More than half (55%) of adults insured through an employer were very confident their coverage would help them afford their care compared to 31 percent of adults with individual market coverage and 41 percent of people with Medicaid (Table 2). The least confident were adults enrolled in Medicare. Working-age adults enrolled in Medicare were the sickest among insured adults and the second-poorest after those covered by Medicaid (data not shown).2

One-Quarter of Adults Said Health Care Became Harder to Afford

We asked people whether, over the past year, their health care, including prescription drugs, had become harder for them to afford, easier to afford, or if there had been no change. The majority (66%) said there had been no change, one-quarter (24%) said it had become harder to afford, and 8 percent said it had become easier (Table 3). People with individual market coverage were significantly more likely than those with employer coverage or Medicaid to say health care had become harder to afford. About one-third of adults with deductibles of $1,000 or more said health care had become harder to afford, twice the share of those who had no deductible. About one-third of those enrolled in Medicare and 41 percent who were uninsured also reported that their health care had become harder to afford.

Only About Half of Americans Would Have Money to Pay for an Unexpected Medical Bill

Accidents and other medical emergencies can leave both uninsured and insured people with unexpected medical bills, which usually require prompt payment. We asked people if they would have the money to pay a $1,000 medical bill within 30 days in the case of an unexpected medical event. Nearly half (46%) said they would not have the money to cover such a bill in that time frame (Table 4). Women, people of color, people who are uninsured, those covered by Medicaid or Medicare, and those with incomes under 250 percent of poverty were among the most likely to say they couldn’t pay the bill.

Health Care Is Among People’s Top Four Greatest Personal Financial Concerns

Fourteen percent of adults said that health care was their biggest personal financial concern, after mortgage or rent (23%), student loans (17%), and retirement (17%) (Table 5). Those most likely to cite health care as their greatest financial concern were people who could potentially face high out-of-pocket costs because they were uninsured or had high-deductible health plans.

Policy Implications

Uninsured adults are the least confident in their ability to pay medical bills. But the risk of high out-of-pocket health care costs doesn’t end when someone enrolls in a health plan. The proliferation and growth of high-deductible health plans in both the individual and employer insurance markets is leaving people with unaffordable health care costs. Many adults enrolled in Medicare for reasons of disability or serious illness also report unease about their health care costs. An estimated 41 million insured adults have such high out-of-pocket costs and deductibles relative to their incomes that they are effectively underinsured. As this survey indicates, the nation’s health care cost burden is felt disproportionately by people with low and moderate incomes, people of color, and women.

The ACA’s reforms to the individual insurance market have doubled the number of people who now get insurance on that market to an estimated 17 million, with approximately half receiving subsidies through the ACA marketplaces. The ACA also has made it possible for people who were regularly denied coverage by insurers — older Americans and those with health problems — to get insurance. They are now entitled by law to an offer should they want to buy a plan.

But as this survey suggests, the ACA’s reforms did not fully resolve the individual market’s relatively higher costs for all those enrolled, compared to employer coverage or Medicaid. Moreover, recent actions by Congress and the Trump administration, including the repeal of the individual mandate penalty and loosened restrictions on plans that don’t comply with the ACA, are expected to exacerbate those costs for many. In the survey, people with individual market coverage are more likely than those with employer coverage or Medicaid to say that their health care, including prescription drugs, has become harder to afford in the past year. They express less confidence than those with employer coverage that their insurance will help them afford their care this year. As explained in the first post, there are a number of policy options that Congress can pursue that would improve individual market insurance’s affordability and cost protection. In the absence of bipartisan Congressional agreement on legislation, several states are currently pursuing their own solutions. But if current trends continue, the federal government will likely confront growing pressure to provide a national solution to America’s incipient health care affordability crisis.

 

 

 

 

 

Medicare Beneficiaries Feel The Pinch When They Can’t Use Drug Coupons

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https://khn.org/news/medicare-beneficiaries-feel-the-pinch-when-they-cant-use-drug-coupons/

This week, I answered a grab bag of questions about drug copay coupons and primary care coverage on the health insurance marketplace.

Q: My doctor wants me to take Repatha for my high cholesterol, but my Medicare drug plan copayment for it is $618 a month. Why can’t I use a $5 drug copay coupon from the manufacturer? If I had commercial insurance, I could. I’m on a fixed income. How is this fair?

The explanation may offer you little comfort. Under the federal anti-kickback law, it’s illegal for drug manufacturers to offer people any type of payment that might persuade them to purchase something that federal health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid might pay for. The coupons can lead to unnecessary Medicare spending by inducing beneficiaries to choose drugs that are expensive.

“The law was intended to prevent fraud, but in this case it also has the effect of prohibiting Part D enrollees from using manufacturer copay coupons … because using the coupon would be steering Medicare’s business toward a particular entity,” said Juliette Cubanski, associate director of the Program on Medicare Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

The coupons typically offer patients with commercial insurance a break on their copayment for brand-name drugs, often reducing their out-of-pocket costs to what they would pay for inexpensive generic drugs. The coupons help make expensive specialty drugs more affordable for patients. They can also increase demand for the drugmaker’s products. If patients choose to use the coupons to buy a higher-cost drug over a generic, the insurer’s cost is likely to be more than what it would otherwise pay.

In addition, consumers should note that the copay cards often have annual maximums that leave patients on the hook for the entire copayment after a certain number of months, said Dr. Joseph Ross, associate professor of medicine and public health at Yale University who has studied copay coupons.

The coupons may discourage patients from considering appropriate lower-cost alternatives, including generics, said Leslie Fried, a senior director at the National Council on Aging.

According to a 2013 analysis co-authored by Ross and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 62 percent of 374 drug coupons were for brand-name drugs for which there were lower-cost alternatives available.

Q: Last year, my marketplace plan covered five primary care visits at no charge before I paid down my $2,200 deductible. This year, it doesn’t cover any appointments before the deductible, and I had to pay $80 out-of-pocket when I went to the doctor. Is that typical now? It makes me think twice about going.

Under the Affordable Care Act, marketplace plans are required to cover many preventive services, including an annual checkup, without charging consumers anything out-of-pocket. Beyond that, many marketplace plans cover services such as some primary care visits or generic drugs before you reach your deductible.

The likelihood of having a plan that offers some cost sharing for primary care before you reach your deductible (rather than requiring you to pay 100 percent of the cost until you hit that amount) varies significantly depending on whether you’re in a bronze, silver or gold plan, according to a recent analysis by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

In 2018, 77 percent of silver-level plans offered some cost sharing for primary care visits before enrollees had paid off their typical deductible of $3,800, the analysis found. In most cases, that means people owe a copayment or coinsurance charge for each visit until they reach their deductible. A small number of plans offered a limited number of no-cost or low-cost visits first, and then people using more services either had to pay the full charge for each visit or owed cost sharing until the deductible was met.

Bronze plans were much stingier in what they offered for primary care before people reached their deductible, which was $6,400 or higher in half of plans. Only 38 percent of bronze plans offered any primary care coverage before the deductible, and generally patients still had to pay a copayment or coinsurace. A smaller percentage of bronze plans offered limited visits at no cost or low cost before the deductible.

The share of people who chose bronze plans grew from 23 percent in 2017 to 29 percent this year, said Katherine Hempstead, a senior policy adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. While premiums are typically significantly lower in bronze plans than other “metal”-level plans, it can be worthwhile to check out how plans handle primary care services before the deductible, she said.

 

 

Health Care Is an Investment, and the U.S. Should Start Treating It Like One

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https://hbr.org/2018/04/health-care-is-an-investment-and-the-u-s-should-start-treating-it-like-one

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We invest billions of dollars each year in medicines, new technologies, doctors, and hospitals — all with the goal of improving health, arguably our most prized commodity. Yet, investments in the U.S. health care system woefully underperform relative to those made in health care in other countries. For instance, the U.S. spends nearly 7–10% more of its national income on health care than other similar countries and yet life expectancy at birth remains, on average, two to three years lower.

To be sure, many factors influence health outcomes and the investments the health care system makes are only one input. But a large reason why investments in health care underperform is because we invest so much in services that are clearly low-value — i.e., offer little or no clinical benefit relative to the cost — and likely many more where the returns are gray. Investing limited health care dollars into low-value services crowds out our ability to spend on high-value services. So if we want to see better outcomes, we need to start to think like investors.

Examples of significant investments in low-value care services abound in the U.S. health care system, ranging from expensive imaging for benign medical conditions to routine pre-operative testing before low-risk surgeries like cataract surgery. Some research estimates that 42% of Medicare beneficiaries receive some form of low-value care.

Many factors contribute to our failure to disinvest from low-value services and invest more heavily in high-value services. For one thing, physicians, insurers, and patients often have limited data on the relative value of different health care services. There is an abundance of high-quality comparative effectiveness data for pharmaceuticals, largely because of the drug approval process, but there’s less data on the value of other expensive investments into health, such as doctor visits and hospitalizations. Put differently, there is no equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration for a large chunk of the health care sector, which means evidence on value in these sectors takes long to produce, in part because nobody requires that evidence to be generated. Furthermore, even when we have good evidence that a treatment or service is highly valuable, we frequently underuse it. Many medications for chronic conditions such as heart disease, e.g., statins, are routinely underused.

Physicians and businesses also generate income from performing low-value services. They may even be able to order these services themselves, effectively generating their own business. (For example, a cardiologist who performs and reads nuclear stress tests, which are frequently low value, has the ability to order these studies for his or her patient.) So reducing investments in low-value care services means spending less on doctors, hospitals, and other health care technologies. But, like pharmaceuticals, each of these entities is represented by powerful lobbyists (such as physician and hospital organizations), who will strongly oppose any steps to reduce payments.

Patients also frequently lack the information and ability to evaluate whether or not low value studies should be performed, and to hold their physicians accountable for choosing to provide low-value care. This issue is further complicated by the fact that labeling care as low-value is context dependent — advancing imaging for back pain is often not useful but sometimes it is. And moreover, some physicians may order unnecessary low-value testing because of the perceived threat of liability. Despite significant efforts to make physicians and patients aware of low-value services, we’ve observed little improvement in reigning in use.

Overinvesting in low-value services by physicians, payers, and patients leads to the underinvestment in high-value services. But affordability and timing is another critical issue that stymies investment in high-value care. Many high-value treatments take several years to yield significant health benefits. Because patients regularly change insurers, any individual insurer has less incentive to commit to investing in an expensive, high-value treatment if the return on investment could end up accruing to a competitor. Short-term budget constraints among both public and private insurers, and the fact that re-allocating resources away from low value services takes time, further limit investments in high-value services.

Consider, for example, the debate around the pricing of new Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) therapies. HCV is a chronic infectious disease that affects 3 million or more Americans. If untreated, HCV can cause liver dysfunction, liver failure, cirrhosis, and ultimately death. Until recently, the only available treatments for HCV were complex, multi-drug regimens with severe side effects and only modest efficacy. In the last half decade, however, several new HCV treatments have been developed with cure rates exceeding 90%. These new treatments typically cost $40,000-$50,000 per treatment course, but they have been shown to be cost effective over the long-term, as they can help patients avoid terminal liver disease, which is extremely expensive to treat, and reduce morbidity and mortality due to progressive liver disease.

Many physicians, experts in public health, and, of course, representatives of the pharmaceutical companies which produce these new treatments contend that these drugs should be made available to all patients with HCV who could benefit from them. But both private and public payers have raised objections over the price of these therapies, in large part because the population of patients who require treatment is so large. Payers contendthat they simply cannot afford to cover the cost of these drugs for all patients who are eligible for them and still provide coverage for other health care services that patients use. And state Medicaid agencies and small insurers frequently assert that short-term budget constraints prevent them from paying for costly, high value therapies like those for HCV.

In cases like this, it may be instructive to think about the circumstances through the lens of a portfolio manager who is choosing how to allocate investments. When given the opportunity to invest in an expensive asset, with high potential for significant future returns on investment, an investment manager would not pass it over due to lack of funds, because this capital could likely be acquired at a cost below the asset’s expected return. The manager would reduce holdings in investments with lower expected returns and re-allocate these funds into more promising investments. If the investment were valuable enough, the manager might even find ways to raise additional capital to invest in this asset.

In health care, this means at least two things: (1) wrestling with the factors that continue to promote use of low-value services (like lack of information and financial incentives for patients, and inappropriately structured financial incentives for physicians) and (2) recognizing that high-value investments often require large financial outlays today that ultimately reap future benefits.

Aside from reducing the use of low-value services, one potential solution is to identify and develop sources of long-term financing for high-value services. Mortgages exist to spread the costs of a home or a car out over a longer period of time, thereby allowing people to buy a product that they otherwise could not afford. Similar approaches could be used to help finance high-value health care investments that otherwise would be unaffordable.

For both public and private insurers, a long-term view should be feasible. State governments already rely heavily on capital markets to finance infrastructure investments and it’s quite possible that the returns on these investments fall below high-value health care investments like HCV drugs. Private insurers could also access private capital markets and design contracts with other insurers that allow them to partake in some of the long-term benefit of early high-value care when individuals switch between plans. For instance, an insurer that covers HCV therapy for an individual could, in theory, be compensated by future insurers, even Medicare, that treat that patient and benefit from that patient already being cured of HCV.

Ultimately, reducing investments in low-value care will require coordinated action from many actors. Patients and providers need more robust and up-to-date information on the value of different services. Insurers must look hard at the services they cover and discourage utilization of low-value services and encourage use of high-value services, even those that are high cost. Innovators developing new drugs, devices, and procedures should look beyond profits alone and incorporate the need to add value into their investments. And policymakers must create incentives for all of the above to consider value when making decisions about how to invest their health care dollars.

These actions are important because not only does underinvesting in high-value services make them less accessible, it may also make them less available in the future. Many expensive high-value treatments — like HCV therapies, new cancer treatments, and gene therapies — are the product of extensive research and development, which are undertaken because the expected returns are thought to exceed the known costs. A failure to reduce investments in low-value care and reinvest these resources in high-value therapies will reduce incentives to develop future therapies that can deliver significant value to patients.

 

 

 

‘What The Health?’ Medicaid, Privacy And Tom Price’s Return

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https://khn.org/news/podcast-khns-what-the-health-medicaid-privacy-and-tom-prices-return/

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President Donald Trump’s former New York doctor says Trump’s lawyer and private head of security “raided” his office and took the medical files relating to Trump, an act described by White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders as “standard operating procedure.” Except that’s not how the federal health privacy law is supposed to work.

Meanwhile, Seema Verma, who heads the federal agency in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, met with reporters for a wide-ranging discussion of states’ efforts to remake their Medicaid programs and the administration’s goals of encouraging people to work to help lift them out of poverty.

Plus, Robert Blendon, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and its T.H. Chan School of Public Health, talks about how health issues fit into the complex politics of the 2018 midterm elections.

This week’s panelists for KHN’s “What the Health?” are Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News, Joanne Kenen of Politico, Alice Ollstein of Talking Points Memo and Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times.

Among the takeaways from this week’s podcast:

  • Five states are seeking permission from federal officials to impose a lifetime limit on Medicaid eligibility. But despite the many changes the Trump administration officials have been making to Medicaid, they have shown no public interest in this yet.
  • Trump is considering regulations that would defund Planned Parenthood from the Title X Family Planning Program. Although anti-abortion groups would applaud such a move, it could backfire on the Republicans in November by energizing a wave of blue voters in the midterm elections.
  • Although former HHS Secretary Tom Price raised eyebrows this week with his comment disparaging the removal of the penalty for not having insurance, that stance is somewhat consistent with the administration’s earlier promise to find new ways to regulate the insurance markets.

Plus, for “extra credit,” the panelists recommend their favorite health stories of the week they think you should read, too.