Healthcare Reform – Clear Thinking on Healthcare

Bungled Payments

I write regularly about the need for patients to be able to make “value-sensitive decisions.” It means they make decisions about where they receive care (and also which insurance plans they choose) while considering both price and quality. One important step to helping patients do this is enabling them to know beforehand what the total price of the care episode will be.

That’s where bundled payments comes in. Their most important function is to give patients an apples-to-apples comparison of the total price of the care episode because they set a single price that includes all the things that might be needed in the care episode.

But when you start trying to turn bundled payments into pay for performance programs, that’s when they should be called bungled payments.

Which brings me to Medicare’s bundled payment models. There was a great article in JAMA recently by Joynt Maddox, Shashikumar, and Ryan, entitled Medicare’s Payment Models–Progress and Pitfalls.

Here’s an issue they wrote about regarding benchmarks: “Continuing to base benchmarks on historical costs will lead to a feedback loop disadvantaging participants with low spending. Those who reduce spending will have lower historical spending in future years and will receive lower benchmarks. They may find it more difficult to meet progressively lower benchmarks and will thus eventually pay penalties, despite being efficient.”

This sounds like what I wrote a few weeks ago: “Sure, this incentive has gotten us better quality for more money, and yeah eventually we’ll probably have higher quality overall, but it’s going to be at the cost of a lot of consternation of providers as we repeatedly take away their quality bonuses when we raise standards. Overall, this quality bonuses idea is just a frustrating and generally ineffective way to improve value.”

They suggest defining an “efficiency floor” that exempts anyone who meets that threshold from penalties. That’s reasonable for sure, but I suggest getting rid of the bonuses/penalties thing altogether.

Another thing they wrote in the article: “Second, the current benchmark method permits payout of large reward, offsetting any savings that the models achieve for CMS. . . . While the BPCI-A, OCM, and CJR payment models are associated with reductions in clinical spending, the bonuses these programs have paid have far exceeded the spending reductions they have incented.”

This sounds, again, like what I wrote a few weeks ago in the same blog post: “If our goal is to improve value, what we’ve just done is taken the higher-value providers and increased their price, which means their value has dropped back down to everyone else’s.”

They suggest creating a “stop-gain” provision to limit potentially excessive bonus payouts. That’s reasonable for sure, but I suggest getting rid of the bonuses/penalties thing altogether.

But wait! If we get rid of these administratively determined price adjustments (bonuses and penalties), how do we reward providers who deliver higher value?

We need, instead, to do a few things all at the same time. First, providers need the freedom to offer lower prices. Second, prospective patients need to be able to easily find those prices (and, preferably, patient-relevant quality information as well!). Third, patient’s insurance plans need to be designed such that patients end up paying less out of pocket when they choose a lower-priced provider.

If that could all happen, more people would start choosing the providers who offer better value. And what does that mean? It means the better-value providers would get more patients and more profit! And the lower-value providers would get less profit. So what we have is the same general outcome of rewarding the better providers and penalizing the worse ones, but instead of trying to do it administratively with all sorts of inefficiencies and distortions (all while not enabling more people to receive higher-value care), we have instead brought to bear on this challenge the dispersed preference information from the market. It will very effectively reward the ones who are truly worthy of being rewarded, penalize the ones who have lower value, AND more patients will get higher-value care immediately, which I would argue is our overall goal with these programs in the first place (you know, “value-based care“).

Helping Patients Choose Higher-Value Providers

Last week, I wrote about how quality metrics are misused by healthcare reformers. They’re almost exclusively tied to bonuses or penalties from insurers. In other words, they’re used to increase or decrease the price providers get paid. This is a form of administrative pricing, which is a super economically inefficient way to set prices. And I proposed the alternative use of quality metrics–to help patients choose higher-value providers.

We give people quality metrics and they seem to generally do a good job shopping for the best value in pretty much every other industry, which drives competition over value. So why do we fail so miserably in healthcare?

The first problem is that healthcare is missing the thing that motives people to shop around for the best value: their money is on the line. I wrote about this a couple weeks ago. We need people to pay a little more if they choose a higher-priced provider. But when prices are opaque or unknowable beforehand, or when their insurance plan makes them pay the same regardless of the provider’s price (or if the insurance plan is complex enough that the patient doesn’t understand that they’ll have to pay more if they choose a higher-priced provider), people don’t perceive that their money is on the line. In that last sentence, I just listed four issues preventing people from actually caring what the price is!

And then there are the issues of having only one option (like in a rural area) and non-shoppable services (like during emergencies) and non-shopping-when-you’re-already-established-with-a-provider. Yeah, there are a lot of reasons people don’t shop for prices in healthcare! But in spite of all that, there are some good studies that show that people will actually shop for services when all the stars align.

I know that even if people have a hard time knowing prices beforehand, they theoretically could still shop just as vigorously for the highest quality.

But I think there’s something that happens when people can’t shop for price that sorta stops them from thinking about shopping for quality too. I haven’t seen any studies that prove this, but I suspect it’s a thing.

So let’s talk about the people who say, “Well if I don’t know what I’m going to pay, I might as well try to find the best quality option.” They use a variety of sources since there isn’t one single well-known and useful quality source out there. Usually they rely on recommendations from their doctor or their friends and family. If that person had a good experience, that’s a reliable indicator of quality, right?

Or maybe they decide to be brave and try Googling quality metrics. They’ll find something, certainly. But chances are they’ll find quality metrics that aren’t super relevant to what they actually care about. For example, maybe they’ll discover Medicare’s Care Compare website. What does 3 stars even mean? Even drilling down, how useful is it to know that a hospital’s safety is “below the national average” in 2 out of 8 metrics? How does that get weighed against a high recommendation of the hospital from a family member? Or, is that quality rating ignored because the hospital’s lobby is spacious and it advertises meals prepared by well-known chefs?

Compare the relative uselessness of those quality metrics to the example of Seattle’s Virginia Mason Health System when they were redesigning their low-back pain care pathway. They figured out that people care most about how soon they can get back to work (it’s expensive to live in Seattle, if you didn’t know) and, among other changes, made same-day appointments available. This was the quality metric people cared about, and their low-back-pain market share doubled.

After reading all these barriers to people shopping for the best value in healthcare, I hope you can see that (1) this problem is perfectly explainable and (2) it’s totally fixable. Can someone please tell the Medicare administrators that most of their current efforts at “value-based purchasing” are going to be close to useless? And tell them to look at getting rid of some of these barriers to patients choosing high-value providers instead.

The True Usefulness of Quality Reporting Is Misunderstood

Last week I wrote about how cost sharing is misunderstood. This week I’ll continue in the same vein and talk about the same thing but related to quality measurement and reporting.

Quality measurement and reporting is becoming a pretty big thing. Just look at all the different Medicare programs (the big ones being MIPS and APMs) trying to achieve this thing they call “value-based purchasing” (which, in their estimation, seems to mean pretty much anything other than straight fee-for-service reimbursements). These programs involve lots of quality reporting requirements, and then compensation is directly tied to those quality metrics, usually through bonuses for high performers.

But this is the wrong way to use quality metrics.

Before I explain why I believe this is the wrong way, I need to clarify what my goal is with healthcare reform. I am interested in improving the value (Value = Quality / Price) our healthcare system delivers.

This is usually the part where people say, “If you want to improve value, you’ll make a lot more progress by preventing people from getting sick in the first place, so you should focus your efforts on public health initiatives!” Or, others will say, “You need to work on getting more people access to the healthcare system. Solve this issue first, then you can figure out how to improve the system’s value!”

I agree that those are very important issues. And I believe we need to work on both of them as well as this one of improving the value the system delivers at the same time. So I’ll keep writing about these things and figuring out how to fix our healthcare system in all these ways.

Anyway, let’s think about what is going on when a provider does a great job and has really high quality metrics and gets paid bonuses (say, 5% or so on top of what Medicare would otherwise have paid them) as a reward.

If our goal is to improve value, what we’ve just done is taken the higher-value providers and increased their price, which means their value has dropped back down to everyone else’s. Sure, this incentive has gotten us better quality for more money, and yeah eventually we’ll probably have higher quality overall, but it’s going to be at the cost of a lot of consternation of providers as we repeatedly take away their quality bonuses when we raise standards. Overall, this quality bonuses idea is just a frustrating and generally ineffective way to improve value. But I understand why it’s so popular–it’s an obvious way to encourage value.

Is there an alternative? Of course. We need to find some way to reward providers for providing extra quality. But how we do that, that’s the question.

What if we could find a way to get more patients to choose those higher-value providers? This would reward them with more profit, and now the providers with lower value are losing out on money because they’re losing market share. There would be no administrators at fault when a provider makes less money. No top-down program decisions to blame. PLUS, more patients would be getting higher-quality care immediately. That’s a pretty great system.

So, instead of using quality reporting to give administratively determined bonuses, we need to use them to help patients identify the best-quality providers so they can choose to receive care from them. This would involve measuring very different quality metrics–ones that patients actually care about.

Can we do it? I believe we can. There’s a lot to how we could make this happen, and I’ll talk more about that next week.

Is the pharmacy benefit manager market competitive?

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

This last week, I spoke with someone who works at an insurer. When I asked if it’s relatively easy for them to identify the pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) that’s offering the best deal, they said that it is, with caveats.

Quick sidenote: I’m finding kind people to answer my probing questions about PBMs, but I’ve also faced a fair amount of hesitancy in general. I think it’s because they worry what is going to happen with the information they are giving. I’m committed to being as transparent and unbiased as possible about the information I receive, and I’m equally committed to not disclosing any of my sources. So I guess that means I cannot prove the reliability of the information I’m sharing, but it’s worth it as long as I maintain access to good sources to help me understand this stuff!

Remember that for a market to be competitive it needs (1) multiple competitors, (2) the customers need to be able to identify the value (price and quality) of each competitor, and (3) the customers need incentives to choose the highest-value option.

The PBM market fulfills all these criteria pretty well. There are plenty of competitors (three big ones, several midsize ones, and lots of smaller ones). So, when an insurer submits a request for proposal (RFP), they will get multiple offers. Identifying the value of the proposals received is doable, if a bit tricky, as discussed below. And the insurer has incentives to choose the highest-value option–getting a great comprehensive formulary with the desirable meds makes for happy members, and lowering the costs goes to their bottom line (assuming there are no annoying medical loss requirement issues).

Let’s talk about the challenges that come into play when they try to identify the highest-value option. It’s actually pretty straightforward–these are incredibly complex contracts, to the point that regular healthcare consultants are not deeply specialized enough. And PBMs leverage that by trying to define things in ways that save them money. To the extent that, if an insurer wants to identify the best PBM proposal, they will probably need a consultant that specializes in helping insurers contract with PBMs. They need the help of someone who knows all the PBMs’ tricks.

I won’t even get into all the complexities of those contracts, partly because I don’t know many of them and partly because those details don’t change the big-picture incentives I’m talking about.

But the good news is that, with the right knowledge/assistance, insurers are able to make value-sensitive decisions in the PBM market! In fact, apparently many insurers submit an RFP every few years to make sure what they’re getting from their current PBM is still competitive, otherwise they’re probably leaving money on the table.

So, that’s one question answered. More to come.

Transitioning to Value Instead of Volume in the Drug Market?

In response to some of my recent posts on pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), as well as my overall interest lately in understanding the drug market better, someone asked what a value-based PBM would look like. Interesting question!

When analyzing healthcare from a “value versus volume” perspective, realizing exactly what we mean by that is an important starting point.

Consider what we mean when we say that healthcare providers are “rewarded for volume.” This is usually interpreted to mean healthcare providers are paid in a fee-for-service way–they deliver a service, they get paid. Which means they make more money when they deliver more services, so the incentive is to deliver as many services as possible.

And when we say that providers are “rewarded for value,” this is usually referring to some form of capitation, which means they get paid per head (that’s where the capit part of capitation comes from). In other words, providers would, for example, get paid a monthly fee for every patient whose care they are responsible for. Which means they make more money when they deliver fewer services (which, theoretically, happens when they are doing the right things to prevent their patients from getting sick).

These two methods of reimbursement are seen as “good” and “bad.” Capitation and its variations have good incentives (to prevent illness) and fee for service has bad incentives.

But they’re not opposites, like two sides of a coin or something. They are actually two different ends of a single spectrum. That spectrum is the “breadth of products/services sold as a single unit” spectrum. (I should come up with a better name for it.)

At one end of the spectrum, you have people buying very narrowly defined things. Like if a hospital really did send you a bill for every single nursing task and bandage and bag of saline and tablet of acetaminophen you received while you were there. This is the essence of fee for service–buying narrowly defined things. A doctor visit here, a procedure there.

The other end of the spectrum is buying very broadly defined things. Like paying a healthcare organization an annual fee for covering every single healthcare need that you could possibly have during that year, all inclusive. Every surgery and cancer treatment and emergency department visit etc. would be included.

I’ve written about all this before (way back in 2013!), but the way to figure out where on the spectrum the service should sit (i.e., how broadly defined the product/service should be) is to think about it from the patient’s perspective to see what “job” they want done that it’s fulfilling for them.

The easy example is if someone needs a hip replacement, let’s say they’ve tried all the conservative measures and now their job is simply to get their hip replaced and then recover/rehab from that. So why would they pay separately for the surgeon’s time, the OR time, the anesthesiologist’s time, the medications administered, the hardware used, the physical therapy appointments, the pre-op and post-op appointments, etc., when they could just pay a single lump sum to get their job fulfilled?

When we buy a plane ticket, we don’t pay a separate bill for the airplane depreciation, the fuel, the pilot’s time, the flight attendant’s time, the snack, etc., right? No, we just pay for the single plane ticket that includes all the products and services that go into getting us from point A to point B.

Using that principle of identifying the job to be done and then defining the service as broadly as is necessary to allow the patient to pay a single price for getting that job fulfilled will allow anyone to determine where on the “breadth of products/services sold as a single unit” spectrum anything in the world should sit.

So what about the drug market?

Much of the time, we know pretty well how long we’ll be on a medication. If it’s an asthma med, such as an inhaled corticosteroid, usually the patient will be on it for years or decades, so just knowing how much it costs per month is probably the right breadth of services.

Or, if it’s not a chronic medication, such as a cure for hepatitis C, figuring out the total cost of your direct-acting antiviral regimen is pretty easy if you at least know how much each pill will cost you and how many days (weeks) your treatment course will last.

My point is that the drug market, even though you’re typically buying either a short course of pills or a monthly allotment of them, is already “value based” because the breadth of products is attuned to the job you have for the medication (“keep my asthma at bay for 1 month,” or, “cure my hepatitis C”).

How do PBMs fit into all this?

Well, they’re middlemen. As far as I can tell, even though they’re the ones making the formularies, they aren’t really doing anything to actively shift the breadth of products sold one way or another, which is good because it already seems to be sitting on the spectrum in a good place.

Is there a role for including medications in capitated arrangements so that patients’ diabetes and hypertension and heart failure meds are all included in their annual or monthly fee? I guess that’s possible–it would encourage providers to choose cheaper meds, and it would decrease financially motivated medication nonadherence. So maybe PBMs would be involved in coordinating those efforts.

Ultimately, the big improvements that will change the drug market aren’t so much going to come from optimizations in the volume versus value space, but rather they will come from increasing competition and value-sensitive decisions. And maybe from limiting the degree to which PBMs distort the market? But I’m still figuring that one out.

Maybe This Is How PBMs Started Getting Kickbacks?

In case you haven’t been following all the riveting posts I’ve been writing lately about pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), here are the main ones:

Pharmacy Benefit Managers: Kind of a Mystery to Me

I’m Still Confused by PBMs But Trying to Fix That

Why Does GoodRx Exist, and How Does It Work

In the “I’m still Confused by PBMs” article, I went through the step by step process of PBMs coming into existence, which they did by filling a need in the market for companies to help consumers pay the correct copay right up front when they buy a medicine.

This time, I want to think more about how they went from that simple software solution (integrating an insurer’s formulary into the pharmacy’s software system so that it can spit out the right out-of-pocket price on the cash register when a patient buys a medicine) to being seen by many as the “shady middlemen.”

The starting point is the position they found themselves in the market. They were responsible for creating formularies for several different insurers. Their goal, assuming the PBM industry is competitive, is to help insurers have the most generous formulary for the cheapest.

I bet at some point, some young upstart working for a PBM had an idea . . .

Young upstart: “If we want to offer a cheaper formulary than our competitor, why don’t we try to negotiate directly with drug manufacturers to lower the costs of the drugs?”

Old manager, feeling superior: “But how are we going to do that? You don’t understand that drug manufacturers only negotiate with pharmacy wholesalers. The wholesalers are the only party to which manufacturers sell their drugs. Nobody else buys directly from the manufacturers, so no one else can negotiate with manufacturers.” And then, with a taunting eyebrow raise, “Unless you are suggesting something radical, like that we start backward integrating to act as drug wholesalers as well?”

Young upstart, undaunted: “Not at all. How about this. Why don’t we pay a visit to a drug manufacturer that is selling a medication that has several competitors in the same drug category and make them an offer they can’t refuse. We could tell them we’ll put their medication in the lowest copay tier and all the other medications in that same category will still be in the middle copay tier. They will sell way more of their medicine and make a lot more money. But, in return, they have to pay us a “rebate” for every transaction of their medication that we process. They still make more money because they’re selling so much more of their medication, and we get some of it.”

Old manager, interest piqued: “And how is this going to allow us to offer a cheaper formulary than our competitors?”

Young upstart, gaining momentum: “We’ll simply charge less for insurers to use our formulary. Sure, they’ll have to pay a slightly larger share of the total cost of that specific medicine, but the lower price we offer them will more than make up for that. And the best part is, everyone wins! The drug manufacturer wins by increasing profit, the patient wins by paying a lower copay, the insurer wins by getting a cheaper overall formulary, and we win because we keep some of the rebate!”

Old manager, ever skeptical: “If everyone wins, then where is the money coming from?”

Young upstart: “The money comes from the other drug manufacturers, whose market share goes down. That profit that they’re losing is being divvied up among (1) us, (2) the drug manufacturer we’re contracting with, and (3) the insurers using our cheaper formularies, some of which will be passed on to patients.”

Old manager: “Ok, that makes sense, but this sounds too good to be true. You haven’t mentioned pharmacies yet–how would this impact them?”

Young upstart: “I was hoping you’d ask. This won’t impact pharmacies at all. They won’t even know about this transaction between us and the drug manufacturer. As far as they’re concerned, all they see is that they’re still getting paid the negotiated price for the medication, it’s just that patients are paying less and the insurer is paying more.”

Old manager, nodding: “So the patient pays less but the insurer pays more. Yet the insurer is saving money overall because our formulary is cheaper enough to more than compensate for that.”

Young upstart: “Exactly.”

And that is what I imagine to be the start of PBMs negotiating “kickbacks” with drug manufacturers. It was all in the name of PBMs being able to offer lower-priced formularies to insurers by orchestrating a way to help some drug manufacturers sell more drugs and get rebates/kickbacks/volume discounts in return.

This surely boosted the profitability of the PBMs that started doing it, which, when others heard about it, started doing the same thing.

Eventually, every drug manufacturer started paying some kind of rebate to PBMs, which means it became a zero sum endeavor overall for manufacturers because the net effect of having a higher market share through a specific PBM but a lower market through the others that made deals with their competitors means that they end up with essentially the same market share, the only difference being that now they are paying money to PBMs to avoid losing that market share.

Shady middlemen indeed. But I can’t blame them for doing it–this is what capitalism and competition is all about. It’s just a market failure that this specific strategy turns out to be a cost-increaser in the market.

The Non-financial Reasons for Unwarranted Regional Variations in Care Delivery

Ever since the start of residency, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has been delivered to my mailbox without me ever subscribing to it. They keep threatening to stop sending them if I don’t pay for a subscription, but I keep finding the journals in my mailbox. Usually I will glance at the titles of the articles and read the ones I find interesting. That is why, this week, I am writing about what I read in the viewpoint article, Reducing Low-Value Care and Improving Health Care Value, by Drs. Allison Oakes and Thomas Radomski.

They start the article by talking about how there’s a lot of low-value care delivered in U.S. healthcare, even in the absence of financial incentives for delivering more care. They cite some studies from places like the VA system and the Alberta, Canada, system (my home province!), showing how they, too, deliver lots of low-value care. This is their great encapsulation of that important insight: “The provision of low-value care when financial incentives are not present suggests that there are other motivating forces that contribute to overuse. . . .”

Next, they talk about regional variation, saying that from one region to another, there are “systemic differences in care delivery.” But how could doctors act so differently from one region to another? Their answer, at least in part, is that “organizational culture influences patterns of low-value service use. Individual organizations have distinct overuse profiles.” I like that phrase: distinct overuse profiles.

And it’s true. Very true. I’ve worked in the midwest, the northwest, and the mountain west, and I see it. For example, almost no one ordered blood ammonia levels at one hospital, and at another it’s an almost expected part of any workup of confusion, even if the patient has no liver history.

Another example: Just today a colleague was telling me about how if she ever ordered a certain kind of fluids (LR), she would get multiple phone calls checking to see if she’d really meant to order that. Evidence is fairly convincing these days that LR is usually better than normal saline, but that hadn’t caught on at her old hospital. At her new hospital, there’s literally a pop-up warning for anyone who tries to order normal saline that says, “LR is better.” And it offers to switch the order to LR for you.

Another example: At my current hospital, I very frequently see a urinalysis ordered on patients who presented to the ED without any complaints that would make me suspect a UTI. And since urinalyses are commonly falsely positive, those questionable urinalysis orders frequently lead to questionable antibiotic administrations. At other hospitals, the ED physicians’ culture is to have a much higher threshold for ordering urinalyses, and even when they are ordered, the likelihood of treating “asymptomatic bacteruria” is much lower.

Another example: The likelihood of the radiologist reading a chest x-ray as having an opacity that could be pneumonia seems to be different from hospital to hospital. And even if the patient hasn’t had any other symptoms of pneumonia, if they have any sort of respiratory complaint and the chest x-ray report says possible opacity “consider pneumonia,” it seems they always end up getting admitted for pneumonia and started on antibiotics.

These are just a few examples of how the practice of clinical medicine is so different from facility to facility in 1,000 tiny ways. And I understand why it happens.

In residency, your practice patterns are being strongly shaped by what your attendings do. But they’re also shaped, to a large degree, by the personal studying you’re doing and by presentations given at noon conferences and morning reports, where the presenter has spent a lot of time reviewing the newest evidence on the topic. There is a ton of active learning, and your connection to the newest evidence is fairly strong. Although, possibly as a side-effect of this, you also seem to add rare diagnoses to your differential more often, and this probably leads to more low-yield testing.

After residency, working as a regular attending not affiliated with a residency program, the focus is very different. The overall goal of practicing medicine is the same–delivering great care for patients–but there isn’t nearly as much active talk about ways your group might be practicing low-value care. (Instead, ensuring adequate coding and documentation dominates the discussion topics.) The connection to the newest evidence is a lot weaker. And there seems to be more of a focus on avoiding malpractice, which leads to having a lower threshold for ordering tests and scans for common diseases, which also counts as low-yield testing when the diagnosis in question is unlikely in that given scenario.

Individual physicians will still learn new things through personal study, but it’s an uphill battle to justify doing something different than your colleagues. So as you take over your colleagues’ lists of patients when you come on service, and as you take over newly admitted patients from the night before, you are frequently seeing and slowly being influenced by how others in your group are practicing medicine. The practice patterns naturally homogenize. I was once asked by a colleague to send an email to my hospitalist group about the evidence backing up something that I was doing because it was different than the other hospitalists.

This is how particular practice patterns spread and homogenize throughout an organization. Combine those effects with the other active pushes for practice pattern changes that come through leadership communications and EMR integrations (like the “LR is better” pop-up warning), and distinct overuse profiles start to make a lot of sense.

All these cultural factors that lead to systemic but regionally different low-value care delivery will need more than simply top-down Medicare reimbursement changes.

I stand by my solution that, if value-sensitive decisions in healthcare became more widespread, the financial incentives for decreasing low-value care would not only change the macro incentives, but they would be strong enough to induce healthcare managers/clinical leaders to go about finding creative and effective ways to make the organizational changes necessary overcome the cultural factors I’ve talked about in this post.

The Argument for Putting a Price on People’s Lives

There are arguments out there that say we need to cover everything for everyone; that it’s immoral to ration care. Each human life is priceless, and choosing not to pay for a service that could save or prolong a life is trying to put a price on something that is priceless. It violates the moral test of government:

The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
Former U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey

I disagree. And having recently read The Road to Serfdom by Hayek, I’ll put it in his terms because he’s given the best explanation of the counter-argument.

If we spend all that money on healthcare and ignore all the other potential uses for that same money, we are making a huge spending decision without even being able to determine whether that money was put to its best use.

How about an example?

If a grandma has the choice to (1) spend $300,000 on cancer treatment that is likely to give her about two more months of life or (2) spend that same sum on 4 years of university tuition for her granddaughter who would not otherwise be able to afford university, what would she choose? Maybe some would choose to live two months longer, but I suspect most grandmothers would put a price on their own life by choosing a better use for that money.

I know–she’s getting to make the decision for herself, which is a very important difference. But I hope the principle is clear: Governments could choose to spend a huge portion of their limited resources on covering every single healthcare service for every single person, but that crowds out other virtuous options, such as school lunches for low-income kids, housing programs for the homeless, mental health treatment for incarcerated individuals, . . .

(Incidentally, in the context of the grandma’s decision, it seems better for the grandma herself to decide what’s best with the money, which is the same argument I have been giving all along that we should allow patients to bear directly some percentage of the cost differential between their various options.)

If we don’t let micro- and macro-considerations of the alternative uses of limited resources enter into our economic decisions, we are headed down the same road that all planned economies in the past have traveled.

NEJM’s Fundamentals of U.S. Health Policy, Part 7b: My Commentary on Creating a More Efficient Delivery System

In last week’s post, I summarized this article, which is the last in the Fundamentals of U.S. Health Policy series published by The New England Journal of Medicine. The article was written by Michael Chernew, Ph.D., and discusses the role of market forces (more specifically, competition) in improving our healthcare delivery system.

I’m heavily biased toward using competition inasmuch as it is possible (for good reason), but that doesn’t mean I’m blind to our failed attempts at improving competition in healthcare. And Dr. Chernew does a great job summarizing many of those failed attempts while remaining optimistic that competition still has a role in improving our healthcare delivery system.

I completely agree with his conclusion that where the market fails, we need government involvement. It’s a conclusion that is commonly agreed upon amongst researchers in this field.

But the difference between me and most other health policy researchers is this: I believe the market will work to a much greater degree than others do. Maybe this is because my original bias toward decentralized decisions and efficiency led me to question harder why all those supposedly market-improving reforms failed.

Others may say, “Well, all these reforms failed, so I guess the market just won’t work in healthcare, so let’s see what the government can do to fix this mess instead.” But I say, “Let’s figure out why they failed. And if the reason they failed is because markets just won’t work in healthcare, great! Let’s turn to the government for help.”

The answers I’ve found over the last several years about why all those competition-improving efforts have failed tell me that markets can work to an extensive degree in healthcare, we’ve just never created the environment for it to happen.

I’m passionate about this because if we don’t understand that environment and then create it, the future fiscal health of most countries will sooner or later be ruined because the non-market government solutions they’ve come up with so far are insufficient at stimulating the cost-reducing innovation necessary to make healthcare systems sustainable.

My concerns with Dr. Chernew’s paper are in the section where he lists all the ways transparency efforts and benefit design change efforts have failed and then gives as the explanation for these failures that, “The core problem is that for markets to work, patients must face the economic consequences of their choices, but labor-market concerns dampen employers’ enthusiasm for adopting plans that impose such consequences.”

Translation: Employers don’t want to force employees to face big out-of-pocket spending in the plans they offer them because that’s not popular among employees, which will lead to employee dissatisfaction and possibly even lead to the best recruits choosing other jobs. And so employers are unwilling to adopt the insurance plan benefit designs that are necessary to make competition work in healthcare.

I disagree for a few reasons. First, an insurance plan does not have to make the patient pay the entire price out of pocket for them to be price sensitive. They only have to make the patient pay some of the price difference between their provider options. Second, employers can offer a few plan options to employees, only one of which would impose such requirements. Third, if there were multiple plan options to choose from, the one with such requirements would likely be fairly popular because the premium would be much lower on account of all the savings generated by those requirements leading enrollees to choose lower-priced providers.

The main potential limiter to the popularity of such a plan would probably be in its implementation. Is there an app that the patient can use that would easily tell them the provider options in their region and what their out-of-pocket cost would be for each one? Better yet, does that app also integrate patient-relevant quality information? Such apps are out there. And providing an explanation about the benefit design purpose and the accompanying app in the plan’s description would probably overcome a big chunk of the issues causing people not to use transparency information.

So I disagree with Dr. Chernew’s implication that competition in healthcare is going to be fairly limited because employers are unwilling to implement such plans. I actually wonder if there aren’t already groups of large employers banding together in different regions of this country making plans to all make such benefit designs available to their employees at the same time in an effort to get so many people in the region choosing based on quality and price that the providers are forced to respond in value-improving ways. (If any employers are out there considering such an attempt, I am happy to advise!)

But I do think that this last topic was the perfect one to end the series with, and Dr. Chernew was one of the best people they could have chosen to address the topic so effectively. How to increase the efficiency of the delivery system is the big challenge that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats seem to have an answer to, but it’s the issues that is going to loom larger in the future, especially if we turn to more administrative pricing and quickly discover that the price floor (the point at which the price is too low because it makes providers unprofitable) is actually incredibly high.

Well, that wraps it up for this series. I learned a ton and I appreciate NEJM’s efforts to educate more people about health policy!

NEJM’s Fundamentals of U.S. Health Policy, Part 7a: Creating a More Efficient Delivery System

It’s a market. Photo by Mark Stebnicki on Pexels.com

This is the last part of the Fundamentals of U.S. Health Policy series! And it’s a super interesting one. Michael Chernew, Ph.D., wrote about the role of market forces in U.S. health care. Since this is squarely in my area of focus, I have a lot of thoughts. Thus, this week I’ll stick to summarizing Dr. Chernew’s article, and then next week I’ll provide some commentary.

Forewarning, I’m following the paper’s logic flow, which, to my brain, is a little meandering, so it’s easy to lose one’s place, but I’ll clarify as much as I can now and then attempt to provide additional insight next week.

Remember how Total Healthcare Spending = Price x Quantity? (Well, actually, it’s the sum of the price x quantity of all the different services being provided in our healthcare system.) Dr. Chernew is basically using that equation when he starts out by saying that our challenge is to reduce the quantity of low-value services provided and to lower prices.

And then the big question . . .

What role should markets play in doing that?

He finally gets to the answer at the end, which is that markets and government should both be used to complement each other. Markets can be leveraged inasmuch as they will help, and this should be paired with the government regulations needed to help them work as well as they can.

I won’t list his specific recommendations quite yet about how we could do that because first I need to review what he says in the rest of the article about markets and how they work.

First, he says that markets are the “foundation of our economy,” and they promote efficient production and cost-reducing innovation. He doesn’t exactly give the step-by-step explanation of how they do that, but you can gather it from his next several paragraphs. Markets create competition, which is when consumers (in this case, patients) have “the ability and incentives . . . to seek low-price, high-quality providers. . . .” And because of that competitive pressure to win consumers, the players in a market are forced to innovate in ways that make production more efficient.

Great, so a good healthcare market will help patients choose low-price, high-quality providers. Unfortunately, healthcare markets are more imperfect than other markets. Want a big piece of evidence for this? Look at the extent of unwarranted price variations that exist in healthcare. It’s way more than in other markets.

But why is the healthcare market so bad?

“Competition in health care fails for several fundamental reasons. First, patients often lack the information needed to assess both their care needs and the quality of their care. Second, illness and health care needs are inherently difficult to predict, exposing people to financial risks that they must insure against. This risk gives rise to an insurance system that shields patients from the price of care, dampening their incentive to use care judiciously and to seek care from providers offering high-quality care at affordable prices. The information problem, amplified by insurance, reduces the ability and incentives for patients to seek low-price, high-quality providers and impedes well-functioning markets. This problem has been magnified lately by consolidation of health care providers.”

So, basically, it’s difficult for patients to really know what care they need, they have a hard time assessing quality of care, they’re shielded from prices because of insurance, and consolidation has limited their options. The result of all that is they have neither the ability nor the incentives to choose low-price, high-quality providers.

This, by the way, sounds almost exactly like what I’ve written (or linked to) a thousand times before, which is that patients need to start making value-sensitive decisions, and to do that they need (1) multiple options, (2) the ability to identify the value of each option, and (3) the incentive to choose the highest-value option.

Regarding consolidation, he gives some interesting data, which show that only 51% of markets have 3 or more hospital systems.

Based on all of that, many would conclude that we should abandon markets altogether in healthcare. But he says, “The weaknesses associated with market-based health care systems are severe, but that does not mean the market should be abandoned.”

And then he proceeds to give a few examples of beneficial things that have come from markets already, such as new payment models, telemedicine, a shift from inpatient to outpatient care, and narrow networks (which allows for lower prices).

Those, however, end up being overshadowed by the list of ways we’ve tried and failed to bolster market function by providing patients with better information about quality and prices and by changing insurance benefit designs.

The summary of this section of the paper is that giving patients better information about quality and prices have had very little success because . . .

Patients rarely use price- and quality-transparency tools
These sorts of decisions are complex
Patients fear disrupting their relationships with their physicians

Changing benefit designs to get patients to directly pay for more of their care (e.g., implementing high deductibles) has had a larger effect on utilization, but it hasn’t significantly impacted the market because . . .

What tends to happen is higher-value and lower-value care both decrease
Not enough patients end up getting steered toward higher-value providers to actually impact market prices.

He provides his explanation for all these failures: “The core problem is that for markets to work, patients must face the economic consequences of their choices, but labor-market concerns dampen employers’ enthusiasm for adopting plans that impose such consequences.”

In the realm of getting patients to choose higher-value insurance plans, there’s been a little bit of headway with insurance exchanges, although there are many drawbacks to those, too . . .

Beneficiaries make poor plan choices
Insurance exchanges induce more price sensitivity, which leads people to choose lower-premium plans that impose greater financial risk on them, which they often cannot bear

And, to make things worse, many of the downsides of insurance exchanges can worsen inequity.

Dr. Chernew is not exactly giving a glowing review of market-based reform attempts, is he? His comments are all accurate though.

Next, though, he says that “in evaluating their merits, we need to compare them with other systems, such as government-run models.” And government-run models have their own set of limitations.

Luckily, we are not facing an either-or decision. The important question is how government and markets can complement one another. “We do not need to abandon markets–we can make them better.”

Finally, getting to his recommendations about how to use markets and government to complement each other, he says we could work to increase the effectiveness of transparency initiatives, limit provider consolidation, and impose gentle regulations to prevent the most severe market failures (like limits on surprise billing and instituting price caps on the most excessive prices).

Dr. Chernew’s conclusion is that, “If we fail to improve market functioning, stronger government involvement will most likely be needed.” Agreed.

Next week, I’ll give my thoughts on all this!

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