The following also appears on The Health Care Blog, at
http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2009/12/your-money-or-your-wife.html#more
Talk about perfect timing. Just as the last “death panel” falsettos fade into the droning no-government- takeover chorus, along come those “faceless government bureaucrats” from the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force to stop the music in the nation’s busy and profitable mammography suites.
No more breast self-exams or mammograms for low-risk women under 50; mammograms only every other year after the age of 50; nothing for any woman over 74. That was the thunderclap pronouncement from the acrobatically acronymic USPSTF, the dreaded “they” from the gub’mint that has the folks at Fox in full fulmination.
While the House and Senate grind their way through a few thousand pages of legislation and one more battle in the perennial abortion rights Holy War, this abrupt about-face in cancer screening is all people want to talk about, when we’re talking about health reform, in corporate strategy meetings. And the mix of incredulousness and anxiety in their voices speak volumes: this startling news from the health care technocracy does not affect their business; rather, it seems profoundly and directly to affect them personally, men and women alike.
Why so sudden and radical a reversal, they all want to know, in the war against cancer we have been winning for decades? And so I, swallowing hard, explain that the very smart people on HHS’ AHRQ’s USPSTF have discovered that all the effort and money dedicated to breast cancer screening for women under 50 actually saves only one life for every 1,904 women screened - while generating too many false positives, hundreds of unnecessary biopsies, and excessive anxiety.
It’s a big waste of money, “they” now tell us, and that certainly works for me, I say, swallowing hard again. I’m a male medical economist, after all, a hard-headed advocate of hard numbers, data-driven medicine, solid evidence, and efficiency, and I despise waste almost as much as I despise cancer itself.
Unless, of course, that one case in 1,904 happens to be my wife. Or my sister. Or my daughter. Would I, looking at that same study data from across her fresh grave, countenance the inconvenience and cost for those other 1,903 women? You’re damn right I would.
Not unlike the health insurance executives infamous for denying experimental treatment for everyone in their plans except their own family members, I know what I know is best for the group, for the public health, and for society – and to hell with that. What is best for the group has nothing to do with what is best for my best friend, even though she is low-risk and 46 years old. She should be screened, every year; and if her commercial health plan now has government-sanctioned cover fire not to pay for it, I will. Early detection is the single most important and durable factor in individual cancer survival, the epidemiology and economics of the group be damned.
You Are a Study Population of One
As for the incredulous and anxious colleagues who keep asking me to interpret the new guidelines, this is not an academic discussion for me. I have lost two friends, so far, to breast cancer, one on the eve of her 40th birthday. I have “raced for the cure.” And I have wept and prayed alongside nine other friends who, so far, have managed to survive the disease, and the horrific brutality of its treatment. (If the epidemiology of my social circle seems jinxed for a 47-year-old, know that its epicenter is a synagogue; when it comes to breast cancer, Jews really are the chosen people.) Truth to tell, I of course despise cancer more than I despise waste, to the point where I cannot think about the subject rationally, and I don’t think I’m an anomaly among even the most educated health policy wonks.
No, this is not a reasonable nor responsible position to take on this incendiary subject. But I suspect it is the position that most otherwise reasonable and responsible Americans would take. For proof, we need look no further than the nearest NICU waiting room. Our cultural belief in the sacrosanct, unlimited dollar-value of an individual life – oddly American and manifest no more plainly than in our bloated, screeching tort system - explains much about why U.S. health care costs what it does.
It also provides a picture-window into how most Americans confront the health care system today, and will continue to confront it tomorrow, nudged along either by piecemeal health services research or kicked down the road by concerted reform, with their employer’s money or with their own. If those faceless government bureaucrats say “no” - not unlike the faceless bureaucrats behind the managed care curtain have been trying to do for 20 years - then we’ll just buy what we want with our own money. This triangulated market dynamic is precisely how we ended up with “flexible spending accounts” and multi-tier drug formularies.
Of course, American women may not swallow the breast cancer screening revisionism as easily as we have all swallowed the bitter pills of aggressive pharmacy benefit management. The “women’s health amendment” rammed through the Senate right after the USPSTF announcement is Exhibit A of the intense fear that breast cancer strikes in the body politic. But that amendment, like mostly symbolic abortion coverage and the dreaded public option, is one more trading card in the most critical Congressional negotiation since the 1960s, so it is best not to count on it mitigating the effects of the new guidelines.
More likely, we should consider the new guidelines as one more big step down the path to a bifurcated health care system of medically necessary versus psychologically soothing, of what gets covered versus what gets turned into a cash business. Time, legislation and benefit design will tell.
Retail Radiology
In the meanwhile, the radiologists of America can relax: the new guidelines will not be followed by most women and most doctors. If the technocracy wins out over the politicians, mammograms for low-risk women under 50 will simply migrate into the “self-pay” category.
For proof, we need look no further than the success of the pharmaceutical industry at selling drugs that have been booted off formularies and out of benefit plans altogether. Mammograms for women in their 40s will join Botox, massage therapy, executive physicals, faith healing, herbal remedies, and all the other medical confections gobbled up by a neurotic, narcissistic, superstitious society addicted to medical care. As Voltaire once noted, “medicine’s role is to entertain us while nature takes it course.”
And that’s the junk, not a serious procedure that, until a few weeks ago, was a cornerstone of breast cancer prevention for women all the way down into their 30s. Ample conference speaking experience has taught me that if you want to turn a roomful of noisy, fidgeting, Blackberrying people stone cold quiet, just say “breast cancer.”
This may have more to do with our complex collective angst about breasts, sex, and motherhood, than with our baseline angst about cancer, disability and death. As most heterosexual males discover, often abruptly at a certain point in early adolescence, there is something quite remarkable about the female breast. With the possible exception of the heart, the breast is more freighted with mystery and meaning than any other feature of human anatomy. Associated unconsciously with our earliest and most nurturing (and paralyzing) memories of sustenance versus starvation - and associated consciously with our desirability (or desire), gender identification, and self-worth (or pride in our mate’s projected worth) - the female breast is electrified with pre-verbal psychological energy. If this were not true, plastic surgery would be a radically smaller and less lucrative business, and we would not recognize the visual landscape of the typical retail newsstand, where today breasts dominate not only shrink-wrapped porn, and not only music, entertainment, and men’s lifestyle magazines, but many of the women’s lifestyle magazines as well. This is the wellspring of the fury over the findings, the next-day “women’s health amendment,” and the outsized shock and curiosity by so many of my otherwise level-headed health care business colleagues.
If the women’s health amendment is traded away for a few more votes in the House, the new guidelines will stand; and consistent with what the crackpots fear most about “death panels,” the findings of the USPSTF will drive what is and isn’t covered by a standardized, subsidized, reform-hatched health plan – whether administered by an “exchange,” a private plan, a non-profit co-op, the OPM’s FEHBP, or Halliburton.
As mentioned earlier, those findings will also quickly find their way into commercial health insurance plans. “Consumer-driven health care” - roughly translated as “consumers pay more for health care” - has been highly effective at shifting demonstrably “wasteful” medical spending (e.g., the high marginal costs for only marginally better medications) from the employer/health insurer risk pool to the individual’s wallet, HRA, FSA, or HSA. And if it were not for the tax-advantaged status of all that spending, we could easily write it off as no-harm/no-foul to the macro-economy.
But radiology businesses learned years ago to direct-bill patients for procedures they did not need, with the introduction of “full body scans” marketed to otherwise healthy people, or what I like to refer to as “recreational MRIs.” The business strategies for marketing newly “unnecessary” mammograms will surely be no different.
Is This Any Way to Run a Government Conspiracy?
Beyond the inevitable market durability of a now discredited procedure for women under 50, there is something quite odd about the timing of the new breast cancer screening guidelines, given the fury the news was certain to unleash. If nothing else, choosing to open this Pandora’s box of empiricism versus emotion just as Congress is preparing its final push on health reform is proof positive that there is certainly no orchestrated conspiracy inside the Beltway to lull us into accepting a government takeover of health care. It would seem designed, actually, to have just the opposite effect, stirring up even the most ardent supporters of reform over what those “faceless government bureaucrats” want to take away from us first.
Better still, if you were a left-wing conspiracy theorist, you could make a good case that this whole thing is the work of somebody on the far right: they set up the USPSTF to announce these guidelines now, just in time to enrage the country at the health care technocracy and foil the Democrats’ grand designs. Get the federal government to un-do a generation’s vaguely comforting beliefs about breast cancer prevention at the precise moment that half of Congress is trying to convince the other half that health care is long overdue for some central planning, and see what happens.
Back in the real world, the announcement is also perfectly timed for open enrollment season for employee benefits and its sundry financial planning tasks. The smart money would bet that smart women in their 40s are Googling the cost of a mammogram and putting about that much extra into their health care spending accounts.
Return to www.jdkonline.com
Friday, December 11, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Health Care Reform Lite: The Sky is NOT Falling, People!
By J.D. Kleinke
Also available on The Health Care Blog at http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2009/10/health-care-reform-lite-.html#more
“The only constant in health care is change.” It’s one of those shop-worn things you hear too often on health care’s rubber-chicken circuit; and not only is it not true, but it is exactly untrue.
The only constant in health care that I’ve actually witnessed, since I was first sentenced to the industry in 1989, is well - every fundamental thing about health care. Oh, and constant anxiety about change that never actually happens.
If you think I am overstating the case, let’s nostalgia-trip back to 1989 for a moment. We had a dysfunctional, third-party-payer, fee-for-service system that everyone hated, and everyone figured out how to navigate to their own enrichment. Hospitals merged, marketed themselves, made money, claimed not to be making money (except to Wall Street), added wings, and flew to the skies. Doctors worked mostly in small practices, embraced technologies they could bill for, resisted those they couldn’t, and found ways to game the system. Health insurers made lots of happytalk, generally walked in the opposite direction, raged against the inefficiency and disingenuousness of providers, and printed money, while Kaiser and a few other mutant plans did their own thing. Drug companies discovered miracle drugs, me-too drugs, and junk drugs, marketed all of them with equal fervor, and also printed money. Employers made speeches, shook their fists, and set up several dozens coalitions to fix "the problem." The Medicare Trust Fund was a decade away from insolvency; the Boomers were coming; Medicaid programs were grossly underfunded; medical malpractice was bankrupting the system; costs were “skyrocketing” along with the ranks of the uninsured; and life went on.
Of course, there is one thing different in 2009: everybody gets to carp about it on Facebook.
So too health care reform. When the “journalists” at Fox News, the red-faced demagogues in Congress, and the alarmists in your organization are done ranting about “ObamaCare” and the sky falling, understand that the essence of the health care bill(s) moving forward today is one very simple thing: a violent endorsement of the status quo, paid for with an artfully diffused redistribution costing on annualized basis less than 4 percent of the system’s annual $2.2 trillion haul.
Under the plan that looks most likely to pass after some classic Capitol Hill 3 a.m. horse-trading - this time between the grumpy far left and poll-sitting centrists on both sides of the aisle - health care “reform” will involve little of substance beyond the (1) a long overdue jamming of 46 million people currently outside the system into that system, and (2) an equally long overdue prohibition against health insurers kicking them back out. For the typical middle class taxpayer in denial of what could happen in 90 horrifically unlucky days at their job and within their bone marrow, i.e., the typical swing voter with coverage they might not be able to afford after simultaneously being fired and getting leukemia, #2 is worth the entire effort, and the reason any politician of calculation if not conscience should vote for the current plan.
But at the end of the legislative process, and as with the bitterly debated Medicare Drug Benefit in 2004, all we’re doing is expanding exactly what we have today for most Americans - to include (almost) all Americans. We’ll spread the economic pain around the system fairly evenly, via mandates, taxes and fees that will show up in new equilibrium prices for insurance, drugs, and devices. And the economics of finally putting everyone into the system – instead of waiting until they are on death’s door, a.k.a., the door to the emergency room - will more than offset the upfront costs of getting them there.
Best of all, that last bit of accounting - which lifts what everyone knows to be the worst economic and emotional drag on the entire system - has not been accounted for in the current plan’s financial scoring. Such accounting involves too multivariate a set of equations, too many interdependent factors, too many unknowables in the cost and epidemiology of unmanaged disease – and so the CBO had no way to consider the most profound part of the entire initiative. Meaning: the systemic economic effects of including everyone in the system are gravy. Billions of dollars worth of gravy, if you believe any of the estimates of what the “safety net” costs all of us every year via the madness of hospital-to-insurer-to-employer-to-us cross-subsidy.
My point about how the Medicare Drug Benefit has played out in the past five years bears repeating. When the “Part D” benefit was debated in Congress, the hysterics on the right screamed on cue about “government bureaucrats” in our medicine cabinets, an entitlement that will bankrupt the country, etc.; while the hysterics on the left carped about the evils of capitalism, the program’s outrageous use of money-making corporations to deliver products to people, etc. Out of that political sausage-grinder came a classically American public health care program of government funding and corporate delivery. The health plans, specialty drug plans, and PBMs that administer the program - and the drug companies that supply it - did not get everything they wanted, but they got enough to stay in business, make some money, and deliver long needed care to millions of people who previously couldn’t afford it. Yes, many of the plans did especially well thanks to Federal subsidies, included in the “Medicare Advantage” program to prove the efficiency of the private sector; but that was a bone to the right, not the left, to support the program, so we’ll ignore that pesky irony.
The Medicare Drug Benefit may be working no more perfectly than anything else in health care, but it is working just fine for millions of Americans who had too often been forced to choose between medicine and food, between certain death and slow starvation. Maybe that’s why so few on the right or the left have brought it up in the debate: its embodiment of political compromise and its programmatic success constitute enough actual empirical evidence to sully anyone’s ideological polemics.
Consider the Medicare Drug Benefit a perfect trial run for what we all should hope will pass into law in the next few months: health insurance market reform. It’s not true health care reform – this would apparently require an Act of God rather than an Act of Congress. But the bill(s) before Congress today will finally let the health care system function like something closer to an actual system, because the worst external perturbations to that system – the chronically uninsured, chronically sick, and chronically most expensive to care for – are finally included.
And if you are running a health care organization and worrying about the effects of “health care reform lite,” take note of what happened to those involved in the Medicare Drug Benefit: a few organizations failed miserably, some have profited mightily, and most have muddled through, figured out the rules of the new game, and are doing just fine. Just like most everyone in 1989.
----
J.D. Kleinke is a medical economist, author, and health information industry pioneer. He has been instrumental in the creation of four health care information organizations; served on several public and privately-held health care information company boards; and written about health care business policy for The Wall Street Journal. His work has also appeared in JAMA, Barron's, the British Medical Journal, Modern Healthcare, and numerous other publications. His books include Bleeding Edge: The Business of Health Care in the New Century (1998), Oxymorons: The Myth of a U.S. Health Care System (2001), and Catching Babies, a novel about the training of OB/GYNs, which will be published next year.
Also available on The Health Care Blog at http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2009/10/health-care-reform-lite-.html#more
“The only constant in health care is change.” It’s one of those shop-worn things you hear too often on health care’s rubber-chicken circuit; and not only is it not true, but it is exactly untrue.
The only constant in health care that I’ve actually witnessed, since I was first sentenced to the industry in 1989, is well - every fundamental thing about health care. Oh, and constant anxiety about change that never actually happens.
If you think I am overstating the case, let’s nostalgia-trip back to 1989 for a moment. We had a dysfunctional, third-party-payer, fee-for-service system that everyone hated, and everyone figured out how to navigate to their own enrichment. Hospitals merged, marketed themselves, made money, claimed not to be making money (except to Wall Street), added wings, and flew to the skies. Doctors worked mostly in small practices, embraced technologies they could bill for, resisted those they couldn’t, and found ways to game the system. Health insurers made lots of happytalk, generally walked in the opposite direction, raged against the inefficiency and disingenuousness of providers, and printed money, while Kaiser and a few other mutant plans did their own thing. Drug companies discovered miracle drugs, me-too drugs, and junk drugs, marketed all of them with equal fervor, and also printed money. Employers made speeches, shook their fists, and set up several dozens coalitions to fix "the problem." The Medicare Trust Fund was a decade away from insolvency; the Boomers were coming; Medicaid programs were grossly underfunded; medical malpractice was bankrupting the system; costs were “skyrocketing” along with the ranks of the uninsured; and life went on.
Of course, there is one thing different in 2009: everybody gets to carp about it on Facebook.
So too health care reform. When the “journalists” at Fox News, the red-faced demagogues in Congress, and the alarmists in your organization are done ranting about “ObamaCare” and the sky falling, understand that the essence of the health care bill(s) moving forward today is one very simple thing: a violent endorsement of the status quo, paid for with an artfully diffused redistribution costing on annualized basis less than 4 percent of the system’s annual $2.2 trillion haul.
Under the plan that looks most likely to pass after some classic Capitol Hill 3 a.m. horse-trading - this time between the grumpy far left and poll-sitting centrists on both sides of the aisle - health care “reform” will involve little of substance beyond the (1) a long overdue jamming of 46 million people currently outside the system into that system, and (2) an equally long overdue prohibition against health insurers kicking them back out. For the typical middle class taxpayer in denial of what could happen in 90 horrifically unlucky days at their job and within their bone marrow, i.e., the typical swing voter with coverage they might not be able to afford after simultaneously being fired and getting leukemia, #2 is worth the entire effort, and the reason any politician of calculation if not conscience should vote for the current plan.
But at the end of the legislative process, and as with the bitterly debated Medicare Drug Benefit in 2004, all we’re doing is expanding exactly what we have today for most Americans - to include (almost) all Americans. We’ll spread the economic pain around the system fairly evenly, via mandates, taxes and fees that will show up in new equilibrium prices for insurance, drugs, and devices. And the economics of finally putting everyone into the system – instead of waiting until they are on death’s door, a.k.a., the door to the emergency room - will more than offset the upfront costs of getting them there.
Best of all, that last bit of accounting - which lifts what everyone knows to be the worst economic and emotional drag on the entire system - has not been accounted for in the current plan’s financial scoring. Such accounting involves too multivariate a set of equations, too many interdependent factors, too many unknowables in the cost and epidemiology of unmanaged disease – and so the CBO had no way to consider the most profound part of the entire initiative. Meaning: the systemic economic effects of including everyone in the system are gravy. Billions of dollars worth of gravy, if you believe any of the estimates of what the “safety net” costs all of us every year via the madness of hospital-to-insurer-to-employer-to-us cross-subsidy.
My point about how the Medicare Drug Benefit has played out in the past five years bears repeating. When the “Part D” benefit was debated in Congress, the hysterics on the right screamed on cue about “government bureaucrats” in our medicine cabinets, an entitlement that will bankrupt the country, etc.; while the hysterics on the left carped about the evils of capitalism, the program’s outrageous use of money-making corporations to deliver products to people, etc. Out of that political sausage-grinder came a classically American public health care program of government funding and corporate delivery. The health plans, specialty drug plans, and PBMs that administer the program - and the drug companies that supply it - did not get everything they wanted, but they got enough to stay in business, make some money, and deliver long needed care to millions of people who previously couldn’t afford it. Yes, many of the plans did especially well thanks to Federal subsidies, included in the “Medicare Advantage” program to prove the efficiency of the private sector; but that was a bone to the right, not the left, to support the program, so we’ll ignore that pesky irony.
The Medicare Drug Benefit may be working no more perfectly than anything else in health care, but it is working just fine for millions of Americans who had too often been forced to choose between medicine and food, between certain death and slow starvation. Maybe that’s why so few on the right or the left have brought it up in the debate: its embodiment of political compromise and its programmatic success constitute enough actual empirical evidence to sully anyone’s ideological polemics.
Consider the Medicare Drug Benefit a perfect trial run for what we all should hope will pass into law in the next few months: health insurance market reform. It’s not true health care reform – this would apparently require an Act of God rather than an Act of Congress. But the bill(s) before Congress today will finally let the health care system function like something closer to an actual system, because the worst external perturbations to that system – the chronically uninsured, chronically sick, and chronically most expensive to care for – are finally included.
And if you are running a health care organization and worrying about the effects of “health care reform lite,” take note of what happened to those involved in the Medicare Drug Benefit: a few organizations failed miserably, some have profited mightily, and most have muddled through, figured out the rules of the new game, and are doing just fine. Just like most everyone in 1989.
----
J.D. Kleinke is a medical economist, author, and health information industry pioneer. He has been instrumental in the creation of four health care information organizations; served on several public and privately-held health care information company boards; and written about health care business policy for The Wall Street Journal. His work has also appeared in JAMA, Barron's, the British Medical Journal, Modern Healthcare, and numerous other publications. His books include Bleeding Edge: The Business of Health Care in the New Century (1998), Oxymorons: The Myth of a U.S. Health Care System (2001), and Catching Babies, a novel about the training of OB/GYNs, which will be published next year.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Nursing a Health 2.0 Hangover
So it’s the morning after the big Health 2.0 bash and the hangover is awful. My head is awash with flashing screens of medical alerts, rainbow-colored demos of virtual patients flitting from one personal health app to the next, and a blur of snappy, almost sneering answers to the same old questions about user adoption, ROI, and business models. I just spent two days getting high on health care’s highest high-concept, I can’t log into my own health plan’s portal to look up a simple eligibility thing, and it’s dull, gray cloudy morning in San Francisco.
Whither the 2.0 revolution you’ve been reading about all week? Was the blueprint unfurled before the cognoscenti by Matt Holt and the NorCal health care keiretsu? Was there an exhibitor booth handing out the magic bullets, along with the usual pens and mugs? Um - no.
Perhaps it’s my own perennial impatience with health care’s miserable status quo; perhaps it’s a sign of the inevitable coming of age for the 2.0 community, or space, or ecosystem, or whatever the corporate concept jockeys are calling a market this year. But at the risk of offending Matt and my other good friends in the keiretsu, this year’s conference felt for the first time oddly normative, almost reminiscent of other conferences like HIMSS and the World Health Congress, where Big New Health Care Ideas run headlong into The Great and Powerful Health Care Inertia Machine.
This year, 2.0 was the usual messy dialectic between e-fantasies deployable in “the cloud” and the deadening reality of who will buy, who will use, and who will pay for all this stuff back here on earth. As in years past, the conference pitted The Entrepreneurs against The Suits, with the indefatigable Adam Bosworth and Keas dancing on the tightrope strung between the two, with a useful-looking product and a credible sounding business model (the more mercenary features of which, I am guessing, are hidden somewhere below the surface of the demo). Not counting the ready-for-primetime Keas, its partner Quest Diagnostics, and the omnipresent and omnipatient folks at Microsoft, this year the establishment players at 2.0 seemed less willing than in years past to play straw man and/or nod enthusiastically at the magic tricks (depending on the choreography of the session) that define the art form. The Suits were there, in greater number than ever; but those on stage seemed far less willing than in years past to jump up and shout that yes, they and their entrenched organizations were indeed on board with all these wonderful ideas designed to make their organizations less relevant, less proprietary, and less in control of everything in health care.
In fact, many actually pushed back, some defiantly. And for a few very scary hours in the middle of day one of 2.0, it felt like The Suits were actually winning.
Maybe it was the order of things. The conference dedicated to technologies, tools and services emerging to support a health care system that actually engages and empowers patients opened up with a panel on “clinical groupware.” The discussion quickly de-morphed into a barely browser-based show-and-tell about what wired physicians are using in practice today, and the crowd grew oddly restive. And while I think he intended it as a statement about how often we have to pull back to jump forward, Stephen Sigal, a cardiologist on the panel, mentioned having to de-install his practice’s EMR, GE’s Centricity, for security reasons. (It was the first time I’d ever seen an entire conference audience lift their heads from their PDAs in perfect unison.)
Things went from oddly nervous to outright ugly in the next session, which empanelled several executives from various health plans to critique, aloud, various user applications, a scary mash-up of corporate sales presentation and American Idol.
Faced with the crisp and highly navigable health benefits manager tool from Intuit - one with concise drop-down menus explaining those geeky health benefits terms no one has ever really understood - Chris Ohman of Kaiser retorted that he would love to be able to provide that kind of helpful information to members, but the regulators would never allow it. Pesky regulators: always making it so hard for insurance companies to help people!
On the same panel, Mohan Nair - introduced as a “serial entrepreneur in health care information technology” but listed in the actual program as the Executive Vice President of Regence BlueCross BlueShield - let the crowd know that he had been at Regence “studying the problems of health care for the past six years and realized that the system is broken.” Hold the phone! He then threw a cold bucket of water on the panel’s spontaneous and important debate on the true cost impact of health 2.0 tools by stating, categorically, that none of the things designed to help people improve their behavior or lifestyles will reduce health costs. Really. (I guess all those Regence billboards in Portland last year about improving my behavior and lifestyle really were about risk-selection.)
With what little air remained in the room, Daniel Kogan of tiny HealthWorldWeb - like Nair, an entrepreneur with a day job - showed what the typical patient looking for a new provider on a health plan web site has to endure, then compared it to the same kind of search informed by actual knowledge of the patient’s wants and needs. The result was a narrowing of results from hundreds of physicians scattered willy-nilly across a market delivered by the health plan, to three physicians, all matched perfectly to the patient’s situation, delivered by the intelligent search.
Completely off the point but oddly on cue, Nair responded to Kogan’s throwdown by saying he was “tired of feeling demonized” by comments about health plans not being trusted. I would be tired of it too, if every time I opened up any credible research on the subject (cf. Markle/Connecting for Health, The Commonwealth Fund, Kaiser Family, et al., ad infinitum) I confronted the same perennial fact.
Nair’s remark inspired Fred Goldstein of U.S. Preventive Medicine to reveal that his company had seized upon that demonization with a marketing strategy not uncommon in the post-managed care era. “We realized that people don’t want to share with their health plan that they smoke, drink and hang out all night,” he said, “so we’re going direct to their employers.”
The conference’s opening morning 2.0 fantasy vs. 1.0 reality free-for-all ground to its inevitable, depressing halt when Ingrid Lindberg, “Customer Experience Officer” of Cigna - having announced earlier Cigna’s recent discovery that members were actually customers - wondered aloud how health 2.0 tools would ever gain market traction, given that “people spend 30 minutes picking their health insurance but four hours [a day] watching flat screen TVs.” Maybe it has something to do with the number of health insurance plans offered by Cigna’s actual predominant customer, i.e., large corporations, i.e., one to three choices of insurers - versus the 600+ choices, five or six of them pretty good, on my TV every day.
Luckily, the conference got back on the rails by lunchtime on the first day during some great hands-on creative tool-building exercises (which became fun team-building exercises), and stayed there for the duration. One manic and visionary entrepreneur after another explained how in the future, everything in health care will be digitized, our medical data will flow as freely as tap water (but never spill anywhere), and with all these nifty applications, no one will get sick, go to the hospital or die. More importantly, there were plenty of people with the wherewithal in the audience to fund, acquire, and/or execute on these bold visions. And the whole thing climaxed yesterday afternoon with a carnival-style presentation by several of the companies involved in the Health 2.0 Accelerator project. (“H2X,” as they call it and as far as I can tell, is an odd amalgam of personal health applications providers and infrastructure builders, who are working together to adopt data standards for information movement, e.g., CCR, and create a complex but seamless health information management experience for consumers across products and services in a sort of “co-opetition” (remember that 190s classic?) model.
Kudos to Marty Tenenbaum, founder of CommerceNet – an entrepreneur who no longer needs a day job - for conceptualizing, funding and mentoring this ambitious and interesting project. Because “acceleration” is the only thing health 2.0 needs at this point. Ideas, ambitious people, and gee-whizz technologies we got. And naysayers we got, as we saw on day one, many of whom occupy powerful positions within our health care “system.”
So maybe that’s the best cure for a health 2.0 hangover: the sobering perspective that this isn’t a party, there is a lot of hard and important work to do, and a real revolution in health care won’t be coming easy or fast. If the American polity defines systemic health reform as a few long overdue tweaks to the regulation of health insurance and a few billion in subsidies to people who consume ten times that in ER costs when their uninsured status boils over into medical catastrophe, then I suppose the whole health 2.0 movement really is moving at breakneck speed.
Back to work!
(cross-posted from The Health Care Blog -- Permalink)
Whither the 2.0 revolution you’ve been reading about all week? Was the blueprint unfurled before the cognoscenti by Matt Holt and the NorCal health care keiretsu? Was there an exhibitor booth handing out the magic bullets, along with the usual pens and mugs? Um - no.
Perhaps it’s my own perennial impatience with health care’s miserable status quo; perhaps it’s a sign of the inevitable coming of age for the 2.0 community, or space, or ecosystem, or whatever the corporate concept jockeys are calling a market this year. But at the risk of offending Matt and my other good friends in the keiretsu, this year’s conference felt for the first time oddly normative, almost reminiscent of other conferences like HIMSS and the World Health Congress, where Big New Health Care Ideas run headlong into The Great and Powerful Health Care Inertia Machine.
This year, 2.0 was the usual messy dialectic between e-fantasies deployable in “the cloud” and the deadening reality of who will buy, who will use, and who will pay for all this stuff back here on earth. As in years past, the conference pitted The Entrepreneurs against The Suits, with the indefatigable Adam Bosworth and Keas dancing on the tightrope strung between the two, with a useful-looking product and a credible sounding business model (the more mercenary features of which, I am guessing, are hidden somewhere below the surface of the demo). Not counting the ready-for-primetime Keas, its partner Quest Diagnostics, and the omnipresent and omnipatient folks at Microsoft, this year the establishment players at 2.0 seemed less willing than in years past to play straw man and/or nod enthusiastically at the magic tricks (depending on the choreography of the session) that define the art form. The Suits were there, in greater number than ever; but those on stage seemed far less willing than in years past to jump up and shout that yes, they and their entrenched organizations were indeed on board with all these wonderful ideas designed to make their organizations less relevant, less proprietary, and less in control of everything in health care.
In fact, many actually pushed back, some defiantly. And for a few very scary hours in the middle of day one of 2.0, it felt like The Suits were actually winning.
Maybe it was the order of things. The conference dedicated to technologies, tools and services emerging to support a health care system that actually engages and empowers patients opened up with a panel on “clinical groupware.” The discussion quickly de-morphed into a barely browser-based show-and-tell about what wired physicians are using in practice today, and the crowd grew oddly restive. And while I think he intended it as a statement about how often we have to pull back to jump forward, Stephen Sigal, a cardiologist on the panel, mentioned having to de-install his practice’s EMR, GE’s Centricity, for security reasons. (It was the first time I’d ever seen an entire conference audience lift their heads from their PDAs in perfect unison.)
Things went from oddly nervous to outright ugly in the next session, which empanelled several executives from various health plans to critique, aloud, various user applications, a scary mash-up of corporate sales presentation and American Idol.
Faced with the crisp and highly navigable health benefits manager tool from Intuit - one with concise drop-down menus explaining those geeky health benefits terms no one has ever really understood - Chris Ohman of Kaiser retorted that he would love to be able to provide that kind of helpful information to members, but the regulators would never allow it. Pesky regulators: always making it so hard for insurance companies to help people!
On the same panel, Mohan Nair - introduced as a “serial entrepreneur in health care information technology” but listed in the actual program as the Executive Vice President of Regence BlueCross BlueShield - let the crowd know that he had been at Regence “studying the problems of health care for the past six years and realized that the system is broken.” Hold the phone! He then threw a cold bucket of water on the panel’s spontaneous and important debate on the true cost impact of health 2.0 tools by stating, categorically, that none of the things designed to help people improve their behavior or lifestyles will reduce health costs. Really. (I guess all those Regence billboards in Portland last year about improving my behavior and lifestyle really were about risk-selection.)
With what little air remained in the room, Daniel Kogan of tiny HealthWorldWeb - like Nair, an entrepreneur with a day job - showed what the typical patient looking for a new provider on a health plan web site has to endure, then compared it to the same kind of search informed by actual knowledge of the patient’s wants and needs. The result was a narrowing of results from hundreds of physicians scattered willy-nilly across a market delivered by the health plan, to three physicians, all matched perfectly to the patient’s situation, delivered by the intelligent search.
Completely off the point but oddly on cue, Nair responded to Kogan’s throwdown by saying he was “tired of feeling demonized” by comments about health plans not being trusted. I would be tired of it too, if every time I opened up any credible research on the subject (cf. Markle/Connecting for Health, The Commonwealth Fund, Kaiser Family, et al., ad infinitum) I confronted the same perennial fact.
Nair’s remark inspired Fred Goldstein of U.S. Preventive Medicine to reveal that his company had seized upon that demonization with a marketing strategy not uncommon in the post-managed care era. “We realized that people don’t want to share with their health plan that they smoke, drink and hang out all night,” he said, “so we’re going direct to their employers.”
The conference’s opening morning 2.0 fantasy vs. 1.0 reality free-for-all ground to its inevitable, depressing halt when Ingrid Lindberg, “Customer Experience Officer” of Cigna - having announced earlier Cigna’s recent discovery that members were actually customers - wondered aloud how health 2.0 tools would ever gain market traction, given that “people spend 30 minutes picking their health insurance but four hours [a day] watching flat screen TVs.” Maybe it has something to do with the number of health insurance plans offered by Cigna’s actual predominant customer, i.e., large corporations, i.e., one to three choices of insurers - versus the 600+ choices, five or six of them pretty good, on my TV every day.
Luckily, the conference got back on the rails by lunchtime on the first day during some great hands-on creative tool-building exercises (which became fun team-building exercises), and stayed there for the duration. One manic and visionary entrepreneur after another explained how in the future, everything in health care will be digitized, our medical data will flow as freely as tap water (but never spill anywhere), and with all these nifty applications, no one will get sick, go to the hospital or die. More importantly, there were plenty of people with the wherewithal in the audience to fund, acquire, and/or execute on these bold visions. And the whole thing climaxed yesterday afternoon with a carnival-style presentation by several of the companies involved in the Health 2.0 Accelerator project. (“H2X,” as they call it and as far as I can tell, is an odd amalgam of personal health applications providers and infrastructure builders, who are working together to adopt data standards for information movement, e.g., CCR, and create a complex but seamless health information management experience for consumers across products and services in a sort of “co-opetition” (remember that 190s classic?) model.
Kudos to Marty Tenenbaum, founder of CommerceNet – an entrepreneur who no longer needs a day job - for conceptualizing, funding and mentoring this ambitious and interesting project. Because “acceleration” is the only thing health 2.0 needs at this point. Ideas, ambitious people, and gee-whizz technologies we got. And naysayers we got, as we saw on day one, many of whom occupy powerful positions within our health care “system.”
So maybe that’s the best cure for a health 2.0 hangover: the sobering perspective that this isn’t a party, there is a lot of hard and important work to do, and a real revolution in health care won’t be coming easy or fast. If the American polity defines systemic health reform as a few long overdue tweaks to the regulation of health insurance and a few billion in subsidies to people who consume ten times that in ER costs when their uninsured status boils over into medical catastrophe, then I suppose the whole health 2.0 movement really is moving at breakneck speed.
Back to work!
(cross-posted from The Health Care Blog -- Permalink)
Health 2.0 a-Go-Go: A Revolution By Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet
During the standard what’re-you-doing-this-week segment of a Sunday
barbecue, I told a neighbor who works in the real world that I was
“going to the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco,” a sort of random
zeitgeist check on a phrase I use so often at work I don’t really
remember what it means.
"Don't know what the hell that is," he said, his jaw tightening. "But
I'm sure it'll be better than health 1.0. Anything would be better than
the mess we have now!”
Wow, I thought; he just set the world outdoor speed record for
eruption-of-health-care-anger - and in the midst of the Olympic season
for same.
My friend’s outburst was a weird if completely uninformed endorsement of
the Health 2.0 conference booting up at San Francisco’s Design Center
Concourse in the morning.
But in an era when smoldering resentment and
unvarnished rage have come to pass for political dissent (i.e., when a
simple proposal to clean up the worst messes in the health insurance
marketplace is decried as a “governmental takeover”), my left-leaning
neighbor is in accidental agreement with everyone - left or right – just
itching to CTRL-ALT-DELETE the entire health care system, for no more
intelligible reason than the whole thing sucks.
He also happens, if accidentally, to be very much in agreement with many
of us health care 2.0 types - left, right, or strawberry – flocking in
exponentially increasing numbers to the Health 2.0 Conference for three
years running. Forget the hype, the promise of orgiastic punditry, or
the funhouse atmosphere created by the event’s irrepressible creator and
THCB editor Matt Holt. Regardless of your politics or business agenda,
we are at Health 2.0 because we know that, as a society, economy, health
system, whatever – we can do better than health 1.0, should do better,
must do better.
So what exactly is health 2.0? Isn’t it really just a younger, hipper HIMSS?
Younger and hipper, maybe – because the entire point of labeling
something “2.0” is to stick out your tongue at 1.0, at your uncool
parents in stretchy jeans and Velcro shoes who, after decades of earnest
hard work, still couldn’t figure out how to computerize most of the US
health care system. “2.0” screams delineation, divergence, bye-bye. And
there seem to be as many ways of delineating “then from now” as there
are smart people, of all ages, putting serious work into solving health
care’s plethora of problems with 2.0-associated information
technologies, services and tools.
A good example is Phil Marshall of WebMD, who happened to be sitting
next to me on the airplane from Portland to San Francisco en route to
the conference. “1.0 was passive information,” he says, “2.0 engages the
patient.” Then he rattles off a long list of application and service
types that did not exist in the real world, let alone in health care, a
few years ago.
A technologist would say precisely the same thing, if in the language of
development languages and architectures that enable the same
connectivity or interactivity. A business strategist would also say the
same thing, albeit in the language of sustainable revenue models finally
emerging in the 2.0 world, after years of snappy slides and wishful
thinking. (Note to newcomers: perennial fundraising for ventures that
work perfectly in PowerPoint are not sustainable revenue models.)
But essentially Phil is spot-on: “health 2.0” means that the patient
gets to talk back. What the patient wants and needs finally matter. And
this belated revolution - from provider autocracy to patient autonomy,
from Doctor-as-High-Priest to shared provider/patient decision-making,
from bricks ‘n’ mortar medical delivery to cybercare - is bigger,
broader, and more profoundly de- and re-stabilizing to health care
organizations of all types than anything information technology could
ever bring to bear. Technology is the means to an end, despite what
decades of technologists have tried to convince the business
strategists, who in turn have tried to convince the investment
community. And so maybe, finally, the specific technologies associated
with health 2.0 are cheap enough and unobtrusive enough to get out of
the way, and let all of us focus on the point: what the patient wants
and needs.
Yes, for the next two days at Health 2.0, we will be gee-whizzing over a
mind-bending array of new applications, web services, platforms,
un-platforms, and devices - many of which actually work and are in use
today. And of course there will be lots of magic tricks, vaporware,
investor-type presentations that hinge on the missing “and then a
miracle happens” slide, and of course one demo that will explode, slowly
and spectacularly, in the hands of an erstwhile entrepreneur. But we
will also see feats of imagination in the hands of able people with
their feet in the ground, people building technologies that liberate
complex medical data from legacy systems, connect patients with
communities and clinical trials, throughput lab test-results from
primary care physician to specialist to surgeon and back again;
technologies that track outcomes, monitor progress, and send alerts to
providers, health plans, coaches and caregivers; and, when it’s all
prescribed and delivered – technologies for crashing the reimbursement
barricades erected back in the darkest ages of “managed care.” But these
technologies are the details of the 2.0 story, not the story itself.
The real story is the belated revolution of “modern” medicine. The
countless miracles and monstrosities generated in our lifetimes by
modern medicine is a hundred years old right about now, if you date its
beginning to the introduction of the first antibiotic. In the late 1980s
through the early part of the current decade, commercial managed care’s
unleashing of the toxic brew of economic power and engineering process
was supposed to be the “2.0-ing” of health care - the long overdue and
true modernization of classical modern medicine gone mad with greed,
money, inefficiency, and arrogance. That revolution was roundly rejected
not just by those targeted for the makeover, i.e., self-serving
fee-for-service providers, but by much of American society who, in a 1.0
world, had no say-so about any of it for years.
The “2.0-ing” of our health care system today - the one most obviously
associated with technology but driven by so many more economic and
cultural factors (e.g, health plan design, economic incentive
re-alignment, feminization of the physician workforce, the
democratization of information, you name it) - is radically different as
a cultural phenomenon. This time, it isn’t the health insurance
companies taking on an impervious, fee-for-service system; this time,
it’s us, the patients, the people. And thanks in part to managed care
and its introduction of often brutal methods for separating patients
from their providers, we have all learned - often with our own
co-payment dollars - precisely how much we value access, immediacy,
shock capacity, flexibility, convenience, and choice.
Once again, this has little to do with technology. People started
clamoring for the real health 2.0 revolution long before they became
“Facebook friends” with people they couldn’t stand in high school, and
still wouldn’t be able to stand if they actually had to see them again
every day. I expect that the bizarre and delicious delight that is the
Facebook phenomenon will get significant play at this year’s conference,
as it shows that notions of community inconceivable only a few years ago
are not only possible, and not only fringe, but are as re-defining as
the Internet itself in how we inhabit much of our lives. And so too it
goes in health care: we are NOT partying like it’s 1999, and thank God
for that. Technology and information, rather than money and process, are
making the belated and true health 2.0 revolution possible. But unlike
the last attempt at health care revolution, which showed up too often
dressed in the sheep’s clothing of managed care, this time most of us
actually want it.
Thanks to our technology-enabled experiences back in the real world, we
seem suddenly to have discovered that we cannot email our physicians.
And that we can’t get access to our own medical information. And that we
have to find a working fax machine to get a copy of something. Huh?
After two decades of smart people scratching their heads “why won’t docs
use EMRs? How can we get them to start using computers?” I think we
finally found a way: shame. Over the past two years, every physician I
have encountered, professionally and socially, who was finally buying
and installing their first EMR cited none of the usual homilies (e.g.,
reimbursement, quality, efficiency, modernization, etc.) for the
decision; rather, all reported being embarrassed that it took them so
long to get around to it.
Now we're really not partying like it’s 1999, when even the suggestion
to a physician friend that an EMR might worth thinking about would lead
to a tantrum or firstfight or worse. Apparently, enough politicians of
both stripes have finally made enough speeches about the subject; enough
colleagues, administrators, and people at health plans said it enough
times; and most importantly, enough patients looked at them funny when
they started writing down everything the nurse had written down five
minutes earlier, in the same “chart.”
Sometimes, the zeitgeist works just fine; sometimes it works well enough
to foment a real health care revolution.
(cross-posted from The Health Care Blog -- Permalink)
barbecue, I told a neighbor who works in the real world that I was
“going to the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco,” a sort of random
zeitgeist check on a phrase I use so often at work I don’t really
remember what it means.
"Don't know what the hell that is," he said, his jaw tightening. "But
I'm sure it'll be better than health 1.0. Anything would be better than
the mess we have now!”
Wow, I thought; he just set the world outdoor speed record for
eruption-of-health-care-anger - and in the midst of the Olympic season
for same.
My friend’s outburst was a weird if completely uninformed endorsement of
the Health 2.0 conference booting up at San Francisco’s Design Center
Concourse in the morning.
But in an era when smoldering resentment and
unvarnished rage have come to pass for political dissent (i.e., when a
simple proposal to clean up the worst messes in the health insurance
marketplace is decried as a “governmental takeover”), my left-leaning
neighbor is in accidental agreement with everyone - left or right – just
itching to CTRL-ALT-DELETE the entire health care system, for no more
intelligible reason than the whole thing sucks.
He also happens, if accidentally, to be very much in agreement with many
of us health care 2.0 types - left, right, or strawberry – flocking in
exponentially increasing numbers to the Health 2.0 Conference for three
years running. Forget the hype, the promise of orgiastic punditry, or
the funhouse atmosphere created by the event’s irrepressible creator and
THCB editor Matt Holt. Regardless of your politics or business agenda,
we are at Health 2.0 because we know that, as a society, economy, health
system, whatever – we can do better than health 1.0, should do better,
must do better.
So what exactly is health 2.0? Isn’t it really just a younger, hipper HIMSS?
Younger and hipper, maybe – because the entire point of labeling
something “2.0” is to stick out your tongue at 1.0, at your uncool
parents in stretchy jeans and Velcro shoes who, after decades of earnest
hard work, still couldn’t figure out how to computerize most of the US
health care system. “2.0” screams delineation, divergence, bye-bye. And
there seem to be as many ways of delineating “then from now” as there
are smart people, of all ages, putting serious work into solving health
care’s plethora of problems with 2.0-associated information
technologies, services and tools.
A good example is Phil Marshall of WebMD, who happened to be sitting
next to me on the airplane from Portland to San Francisco en route to
the conference. “1.0 was passive information,” he says, “2.0 engages the
patient.” Then he rattles off a long list of application and service
types that did not exist in the real world, let alone in health care, a
few years ago.
A technologist would say precisely the same thing, if in the language of
development languages and architectures that enable the same
connectivity or interactivity. A business strategist would also say the
same thing, albeit in the language of sustainable revenue models finally
emerging in the 2.0 world, after years of snappy slides and wishful
thinking. (Note to newcomers: perennial fundraising for ventures that
work perfectly in PowerPoint are not sustainable revenue models.)
But essentially Phil is spot-on: “health 2.0” means that the patient
gets to talk back. What the patient wants and needs finally matter. And
this belated revolution - from provider autocracy to patient autonomy,
from Doctor-as-High-Priest to shared provider/patient decision-making,
from bricks ‘n’ mortar medical delivery to cybercare - is bigger,
broader, and more profoundly de- and re-stabilizing to health care
organizations of all types than anything information technology could
ever bring to bear. Technology is the means to an end, despite what
decades of technologists have tried to convince the business
strategists, who in turn have tried to convince the investment
community. And so maybe, finally, the specific technologies associated
with health 2.0 are cheap enough and unobtrusive enough to get out of
the way, and let all of us focus on the point: what the patient wants
and needs.
Yes, for the next two days at Health 2.0, we will be gee-whizzing over a
mind-bending array of new applications, web services, platforms,
un-platforms, and devices - many of which actually work and are in use
today. And of course there will be lots of magic tricks, vaporware,
investor-type presentations that hinge on the missing “and then a
miracle happens” slide, and of course one demo that will explode, slowly
and spectacularly, in the hands of an erstwhile entrepreneur. But we
will also see feats of imagination in the hands of able people with
their feet in the ground, people building technologies that liberate
complex medical data from legacy systems, connect patients with
communities and clinical trials, throughput lab test-results from
primary care physician to specialist to surgeon and back again;
technologies that track outcomes, monitor progress, and send alerts to
providers, health plans, coaches and caregivers; and, when it’s all
prescribed and delivered – technologies for crashing the reimbursement
barricades erected back in the darkest ages of “managed care.” But these
technologies are the details of the 2.0 story, not the story itself.
The real story is the belated revolution of “modern” medicine. The
countless miracles and monstrosities generated in our lifetimes by
modern medicine is a hundred years old right about now, if you date its
beginning to the introduction of the first antibiotic. In the late 1980s
through the early part of the current decade, commercial managed care’s
unleashing of the toxic brew of economic power and engineering process
was supposed to be the “2.0-ing” of health care - the long overdue and
true modernization of classical modern medicine gone mad with greed,
money, inefficiency, and arrogance. That revolution was roundly rejected
not just by those targeted for the makeover, i.e., self-serving
fee-for-service providers, but by much of American society who, in a 1.0
world, had no say-so about any of it for years.
The “2.0-ing” of our health care system today - the one most obviously
associated with technology but driven by so many more economic and
cultural factors (e.g, health plan design, economic incentive
re-alignment, feminization of the physician workforce, the
democratization of information, you name it) - is radically different as
a cultural phenomenon. This time, it isn’t the health insurance
companies taking on an impervious, fee-for-service system; this time,
it’s us, the patients, the people. And thanks in part to managed care
and its introduction of often brutal methods for separating patients
from their providers, we have all learned - often with our own
co-payment dollars - precisely how much we value access, immediacy,
shock capacity, flexibility, convenience, and choice.
Once again, this has little to do with technology. People started
clamoring for the real health 2.0 revolution long before they became
“Facebook friends” with people they couldn’t stand in high school, and
still wouldn’t be able to stand if they actually had to see them again
every day. I expect that the bizarre and delicious delight that is the
Facebook phenomenon will get significant play at this year’s conference,
as it shows that notions of community inconceivable only a few years ago
are not only possible, and not only fringe, but are as re-defining as
the Internet itself in how we inhabit much of our lives. And so too it
goes in health care: we are NOT partying like it’s 1999, and thank God
for that. Technology and information, rather than money and process, are
making the belated and true health 2.0 revolution possible. But unlike
the last attempt at health care revolution, which showed up too often
dressed in the sheep’s clothing of managed care, this time most of us
actually want it.
Thanks to our technology-enabled experiences back in the real world, we
seem suddenly to have discovered that we cannot email our physicians.
And that we can’t get access to our own medical information. And that we
have to find a working fax machine to get a copy of something. Huh?
After two decades of smart people scratching their heads “why won’t docs
use EMRs? How can we get them to start using computers?” I think we
finally found a way: shame. Over the past two years, every physician I
have encountered, professionally and socially, who was finally buying
and installing their first EMR cited none of the usual homilies (e.g.,
reimbursement, quality, efficiency, modernization, etc.) for the
decision; rather, all reported being embarrassed that it took them so
long to get around to it.
Now we're really not partying like it’s 1999, when even the suggestion
to a physician friend that an EMR might worth thinking about would lead
to a tantrum or firstfight or worse. Apparently, enough politicians of
both stripes have finally made enough speeches about the subject; enough
colleagues, administrators, and people at health plans said it enough
times; and most importantly, enough patients looked at them funny when
they started writing down everything the nurse had written down five
minutes earlier, in the same “chart.”
Sometimes, the zeitgeist works just fine; sometimes it works well enough
to foment a real health care revolution.
Let the 2.0 show begin!
(cross-posted from The Health Care Blog -- Permalink)
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Death Panels? Puh-leeze!
In a great post on The Health Care Blog
http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2009/08/death-panels-palliative-care-and-the-dangers-of-modern-mccarthyism-.html
Bob Wachter goes macro-politico with a title that sums it up all too chillingly: "Death Panels, Palliative Care, and the Dangers of Modern McCarthyism," and my spleen gets the best of me...
The health care reform debate has been turned into a fetid dumping ground not just for right-wing fanatics and the disgruntled fools who follow them, but for the sprawling, unconscious anxieties of people who know nothing about medicine or how health care financing and delivery really works. Death panels? Puh-leeze!
Aside from those transparently on the anti-Obama warpath, what is really driving the hysteria about the belated modernization of reimbursement for end-of-life care is nothing more complicated than fear: an unalloyed fear of death, a primordial revulsion at the gruesome reality that awaits all of us sooner or later and, more broadly, the infantile fear we all have regarding the loss of control of our bodies, minds, and lives.
Unfortunately, it's far easier to rage against government (or against health plans, or drug companies, if you're left-wing and equally unconscious) than it is to rage against mortality, or God's silence, or one's self for decades of smoking, eating garbage, and exercising nothing more than one's mouth. The "death panel" nutjobs seem to be laboring under the weird self-delusion that their categorical tirades against "government health care" might somehow mitigate the hardest fact of life, i.e., that life ends, no matter who we vote for, or what nonsense we choose to believe about health care and government's role in the system.
The government may or may not be able to fix a broken health insurance market with regulation even the health insurers now acknowledge is necessary. But in the end, government no matter how large, small or non-existent, will not be able to bail us out of the saddest fact of life. Instead of muddying up the reform debate, these folks need to grow up, see a therapist, take a philosophy course, or actually read their Bibles...
http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2009/08/death-panels-palliative-care-and-the-dangers-of-modern-mccarthyism-.html
Bob Wachter goes macro-politico with a title that sums it up all too chillingly: "Death Panels, Palliative Care, and the Dangers of Modern McCarthyism," and my spleen gets the best of me...
The health care reform debate has been turned into a fetid dumping ground not just for right-wing fanatics and the disgruntled fools who follow them, but for the sprawling, unconscious anxieties of people who know nothing about medicine or how health care financing and delivery really works. Death panels? Puh-leeze!
Aside from those transparently on the anti-Obama warpath, what is really driving the hysteria about the belated modernization of reimbursement for end-of-life care is nothing more complicated than fear: an unalloyed fear of death, a primordial revulsion at the gruesome reality that awaits all of us sooner or later and, more broadly, the infantile fear we all have regarding the loss of control of our bodies, minds, and lives.
Unfortunately, it's far easier to rage against government (or against health plans, or drug companies, if you're left-wing and equally unconscious) than it is to rage against mortality, or God's silence, or one's self for decades of smoking, eating garbage, and exercising nothing more than one's mouth. The "death panel" nutjobs seem to be laboring under the weird self-delusion that their categorical tirades against "government health care" might somehow mitigate the hardest fact of life, i.e., that life ends, no matter who we vote for, or what nonsense we choose to believe about health care and government's role in the system.
The government may or may not be able to fix a broken health insurance market with regulation even the health insurers now acknowledge is necessary. But in the end, government no matter how large, small or non-existent, will not be able to bail us out of the saddest fact of life. Instead of muddying up the reform debate, these folks need to grow up, see a therapist, take a philosophy course, or actually read their Bibles...
Monday, September 14, 2009
What Health Care "System?"
In the screaming match that passes for today's health care reform debate, fear and sanctimony are running the show, while rationality, data and decorum have left the building. Why does everyone seem hellbent on blaming everyone else for bad faith? Because we are ALL victims of a situation beyond anyone's control - and victims tend not to be rational, nor data-driven, nor decorous.
So let's see if we can agree on one simple fact: there is no US health care “system.” What we call our “system” is, in daily practice, a sprawling hodgepodge of historic accidents (e.g., job-based insurance); ideological conflict (e.g. government/corporations good/evil or vice versa); and competing economic schemes with enormous amounts of cash in play. Health care in America combines the tortured, politicized complexity of the U.S. tax code with a conundra of intractable political, cultural, and religious disagreements about personal rights and responsibilities.
This may not be news to us health care lifers, even if it is to the idealists in the Obama Administration or the opportunists on Wall Street, but every time policymakers, corporate health benefits purchasers, insurance companies, or entrepreneurs try to fix something in our health care system, they run smack into its central reality: the primary producers and consumers of medical care are uniquely, stubbornly self-serving as they chew through vast sums of other people’s money. Doctors and hospitals are driven by irresolvable conflicts between personal gain and ethical responsibilities; patients are driven by the acrimony and anguish that accompany life-and-death medical decisions; consumers, paying for the most part with everybody’s money but their own, demand that the system serve them with the immediacy and flexibility of other industries; and health insurers are trapped in the middle, trying to keep everybody happy. A group of highly imaginative, energetic people armed with the world’s largest Mark-n-Wipe board could not purposefully design a more complex, dysfunctional system if they tried. The result is a $2 trillion-per-year fiasco in slow motion, a bloody mess narrated with moral shrillness and played out one competing anecdote after another. Death panels? Puh-leeze. Read the actual bill, and you'll be forced to admit that what's really driving the hysteria is fear - of government, of death, of the loss of control - not anything written by anyone in Washington.
So where do we go from here? Quite simply: somewhere else. Now. Another decade of the status quo, and we will have squandered both the political moment for real change ushered in with the election of President Obama, and we will confront the inevitable collapse of our non-system, one that finally fails not just the un-insured and under-insured, but one that fails all of us, including those screaming loudest to protect the status quo. How else to explain why (1) most Americans think the health care "system" is a mess while (2) most Americans are scared to death of changing it. This paradox is rooted in the fact that our health care "system" is a disaster, while at the same time, our medical industrial complex still produces, year after year, the world's greatest medical miracles. If you don't think so, ask anyone old enough to remember the AIDS quilt, or what a breast cancer diagnosis used to mean, or how we used to treat chronic schizophrenia.
That's the $2 trillion question: how can we save American medicine while junking American health care? Maybe if we only stop screaming long enough to have a real discussion about it...
So let's see if we can agree on one simple fact: there is no US health care “system.” What we call our “system” is, in daily practice, a sprawling hodgepodge of historic accidents (e.g., job-based insurance); ideological conflict (e.g. government/corporations good/evil or vice versa); and competing economic schemes with enormous amounts of cash in play. Health care in America combines the tortured, politicized complexity of the U.S. tax code with a conundra of intractable political, cultural, and religious disagreements about personal rights and responsibilities.
This may not be news to us health care lifers, even if it is to the idealists in the Obama Administration or the opportunists on Wall Street, but every time policymakers, corporate health benefits purchasers, insurance companies, or entrepreneurs try to fix something in our health care system, they run smack into its central reality: the primary producers and consumers of medical care are uniquely, stubbornly self-serving as they chew through vast sums of other people’s money. Doctors and hospitals are driven by irresolvable conflicts between personal gain and ethical responsibilities; patients are driven by the acrimony and anguish that accompany life-and-death medical decisions; consumers, paying for the most part with everybody’s money but their own, demand that the system serve them with the immediacy and flexibility of other industries; and health insurers are trapped in the middle, trying to keep everybody happy. A group of highly imaginative, energetic people armed with the world’s largest Mark-n-Wipe board could not purposefully design a more complex, dysfunctional system if they tried. The result is a $2 trillion-per-year fiasco in slow motion, a bloody mess narrated with moral shrillness and played out one competing anecdote after another. Death panels? Puh-leeze. Read the actual bill, and you'll be forced to admit that what's really driving the hysteria is fear - of government, of death, of the loss of control - not anything written by anyone in Washington.
So where do we go from here? Quite simply: somewhere else. Now. Another decade of the status quo, and we will have squandered both the political moment for real change ushered in with the election of President Obama, and we will confront the inevitable collapse of our non-system, one that finally fails not just the un-insured and under-insured, but one that fails all of us, including those screaming loudest to protect the status quo. How else to explain why (1) most Americans think the health care "system" is a mess while (2) most Americans are scared to death of changing it. This paradox is rooted in the fact that our health care "system" is a disaster, while at the same time, our medical industrial complex still produces, year after year, the world's greatest medical miracles. If you don't think so, ask anyone old enough to remember the AIDS quilt, or what a breast cancer diagnosis used to mean, or how we used to treat chronic schizophrenia.
That's the $2 trillion question: how can we save American medicine while junking American health care? Maybe if we only stop screaming long enough to have a real discussion about it...
Employers & Health Care, Episode 19327
Consider this note from the CEO of a once-growing technology company in the midst, like too many these days, of a major restructuring.
"As you guys saw from the draft termination letter from [our current health plan], we have had this policy in place for only 13.75 months - 4.25 months short of the number that puts the HIPAA 'portability' guarantee into place for our people. As I understand it, under the law we are all eligible for that guarantee regardless, as we had coverage from [our previous health plan] in the months prior to 8/1. But adding a second look-back carrier to prove that to any third and subsequent carrier inserts one more node of potential administrative failure which the third carrier would fully exploit to deny somebody coverage for any big medical stuff. So regardless of any other administrative decisions re: our people, let's keep this restored coverage in place with [current health plan] until we pass the 18-month mark, in the interest of minimizing potential points of failure on the one thing that could ruin one of our people faster than anything else out there."
Unless we want to write this off as paranoia and/or micro-management, let's consider a really basic question: why should the CEO of a technology company be this knowledgeable - and this anxious in this much detail - about health insurance regulations and how they play out in the real world? Is this anyway to run an economy?
The right answer, as with so much in health care is political. Health insurance should be completely portable for all US citizens, among all licensed health plan carriers; if one element of the Obama health reform package survives the next political storm, this should be it - so that the busy people charged with growing the US economy out of this miserable hole can focus on their real jobs.
In the meanwhile, if you were reporting to or consulting with this CEO, would you agree with what he says his company should do?
"As you guys saw from the draft termination letter from [our current health plan], we have had this policy in place for only 13.75 months - 4.25 months short of the number that puts the HIPAA 'portability' guarantee into place for our people. As I understand it, under the law we are all eligible for that guarantee regardless, as we had coverage from [our previous health plan] in the months prior to 8/1. But adding a second look-back carrier to prove that to any third and subsequent carrier inserts one more node of potential administrative failure which the third carrier would fully exploit to deny somebody coverage for any big medical stuff. So regardless of any other administrative decisions re: our people, let's keep this restored coverage in place with [current health plan] until we pass the 18-month mark, in the interest of minimizing potential points of failure on the one thing that could ruin one of our people faster than anything else out there."
Unless we want to write this off as paranoia and/or micro-management, let's consider a really basic question: why should the CEO of a technology company be this knowledgeable - and this anxious in this much detail - about health insurance regulations and how they play out in the real world? Is this anyway to run an economy?
The right answer, as with so much in health care is political. Health insurance should be completely portable for all US citizens, among all licensed health plan carriers; if one element of the Obama health reform package survives the next political storm, this should be it - so that the busy people charged with growing the US economy out of this miserable hole can focus on their real jobs.
In the meanwhile, if you were reporting to or consulting with this CEO, would you agree with what he says his company should do?
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