The battle of the anecdotes: Gird yourself for Obamacare’s newest fight

January 7, 2014June 12, 2015 admin

By Sarah Kliff

Below is an interesting piece by Sarah Kliff on how the Affordable Care Act is changing the American health-care system — and being changed by it. At this stage, the report card for the program depends largely on who you ask.

Fliers promoting the Get Covered Illinois health insurance marketplace sit in a box at the Bureau County Health Department offices in Princeton, Illinois, U.S., on Wednesday, Dec. 18, 2013. Todays deadline for Americans to sign up for Obamacare health coverage effective Jan. 1 was extended until midnight tomorrow as heavy traffic to the online enrollment system caused a queuing system to be activated.

If you want to believe Obamacare is going great, you should call up Linda Browne. She’s a 62-year-old retired accountant from California who already has an appointment to see her new primary-care doctor at Kaiser Permanente, the new health insurer she signed up with through Covered California.

“I thought I would have to wait a long time,” Browne says. “But when I called, they said she had an appointment Wednesday for a physical.”
If you’d prefer to believe Obamacare is going terribly, then Michael D. Scott has got a story for you. He’s a 36-year-old Texan who turned up at a pharmacy last week trying to fill a $700 prescription for anti-seizure medication — only to find the technicians had no record of his enrollment.
“I’m stuck,” says Scott, who takes the prescription to treat a genetic condition called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. “I’m going to have to start buying a couple days’ worth on my own if they can’t figure things out. It’s disappointing.”

Both Browne and Scott signed up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. Browne has had the law work pretty well; Scott has spent hours on the phone with customer service representatives (actually, he spent one hour and 37 minutes on his last call — yes, he timed it). And stories like theirs are about to become central to the next Obamacare fight, what I like to think of as the battle of the anecdotes.

The battle of the anecdotes is all-but-guaranteed because access to health care is really difficult to measure, even more so than the number of people who have enrolled or how well HealthCare.gov is functioning. With enrollment, for example, HealthCare.gov can track all the people who pick a private insurance plan, as can the 14-state based insurance exchanges. That’s how we know 2.1 million people have selected private insurance plans (although we don’t know how many have paid their first month’s premium, which is due, for January coverage, by this Friday).

The federal government can gauge how well HealthCare.gov is working by tracking how long it takes pages to load, or how many enrollment files — known as ‘834s’ — contain errors. And the call centers know, too, how long customers have to wait to get a person on the line.

But when it comes to access to health care, there’s no analogous metric. Our health-care system is really fragmented. Since HealthCare.gov shoppers are buying private coverage, and not a government plan, we have no central clearing house to understand whether more shoppers are having an experience like Scott in Texas — or like Browne in California.

Nonprofit institutions do study these types of questions. The Commonwealth Fund, for example, regularly looks at how long patients in different countries have to wait to see a primary-care doctor or a particular surgeon. But these surveys take months to conduct and analyze, meaning that we will probably have to wait until late 2014 or early 2015 to get a sense of what access looks like under the Affordable Care Act.

Enter the anecdote, which can be great to understand how new policy programs are impacting the way that Americans receive health care. But they can also be a really terrible way to gauge whether Obamacare is going great — or is a complete disaster. One or two stories don’t do a great job of capturing the experience of the millions of Americans who have signed up for health plans.

And even the anecdotes themselves can be nuanced, portrayed in different ways to make Obamacare seem great, or horrible. Take Browne: She called for an appointment in her new network the morning of Jan. 2. But she couldn’t get through to a real, live person until that afternoon; she kept getting a message that said “all circuits are busy.”

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Driving a New Bargain in Health Care

October 23, 2013June 12, 2015 Doug

By TYLER COWEN, professor of economics at George Mason University

Interesting piece on possible compromises that both political parties could agree to in improving the health care law.

The Affordable Care Act has gotten off to a rocky start. Federal and state online health insurance exchanges, which opened for business at the beginning of the month, have been bedeviled by technical snags. And opposition to the law from some House Republicans blocked funding for the entire federal government, leading to its partial shutdown.

In fact, with all the conflict and vituperation over Obamacare, it sometimes seems that one of the few things Democrats and Republicans agree on is that the law is imperfect at best. And they also agree that it could be improved. Even if a bipartisan deal to create a better health care system seems far off today, it’s not too soon to start imagining what a future bargain might look like.

Just to get started, I will assume that, at some point, Democrats will be willing to acknowledge that not everything has worked out as planned with the legislation, and that they would consider a rewrite that would expand coverage. I’ll also assume that Republicans will acknowledge that a feasible rewrite of the bill cannot give the Democrats nothing. And Republicans will need to recognize that repeal of Obamacare should not be their obsession, because they would then be leaving the nation with a dysfunctional yet still highly government-oriented health care system, not some lost conservative paradise. Both sides have a lot to gain, and, at some point, they should realize it.

Let’s look at some of the current problems in the health care system and see whether they might be patched up.

Even under Obamacare, many people will not have health insurance coverage, including two-thirds of poor blacks and single mothers and more than half the low-wage workers who lacked coverage before the law was enacted. That is largely because of the unwillingness of 26 governors to expand Medicaid coverage as the original bill had intended. The Supreme Court struck down that portion of the Affordable Care Act, however, giving states a choice.

Will many red-state governors eventually accept the act’s Medicaid extension, which is sometimes portrayed as a financial free lunch, since federal aid covers most of the coverage expansion? It’s not clear that they will. If the Republicans win the White House in 2016 and perhaps the House and Senate as well, they may cut off federal funds for that Medicaid expansion. In the meantime, many states don’t want to extend their Medicaid rolls, because such benefits are hard to withdraw once granted.

There is a deeper problem with relying heavily on Medicaid as the backbone of health care for the poor. The fact that so many governors have found political gain in opposing a nearly fully-funded Medicaid expansion suggests that long-term support for Medicaid is weaker than it appeared just a few years ago. Furthermore, in cyclical downturns, the increase in Medicaid coverage after a climb in unemployment puts much strain on state budgets.

A separate issue concerns employers who are shedding insurance coverage, whether by dropping retirees, moving more workers to part-time status, withholding coverage and paying fines mandated by law, or simply not hiring more workers in the first place. The magnitude of these effects is not yet clear, but over time we can expect that new businesses and new hiring will be structured to minimize costly insurance obligations. It’s no accident that the Obama administration handed out more than 1,000 exemptions from the employer coverage mandate, and postponed the employer mandate until 2015: both actions reflected underlying problems in the legislation. Ideally, the health care law should minimize what is essentially an implicit tax on hiring.

One way forward would look like this: Federalize Medicaid, remove its obligations from state budgets altogether and gradually shift people from Medicaid into the health care exchanges and the network of federal insurance subsidies. One benefit would be that private insurance coverage brings better care access than Medicaid, which many doctors are reluctant to accept.

To help pay for such a major shift, the federal government would cut back on revenue sharing with the states and repeal the deductibility of state income taxes. The states should be able to afford these changes because a big financial obligation would be removed from their budgets.

By moving people from Medicaid to Obamacare, the Democrats could claim a major coverage expansion, an improvement in the quality of care and access for the poor, and a stabilization of President Obama’s legacy — even if the result isn’t exactly the Affordable Care Act as it was enacted. The Republicans could claim that they did away with Medicaid, expanded the private insurance market, and moved the nation closer to a flat-tax system by eliminating some deductions, namely those for state income taxes paid.

At the same time, I’d recommend narrowing the scope of required insurance to focus on catastrophic expenses. If insurance picks up too many small expenses, it encourages abuse and overuse of scarce resources.

In sum, poorer Americans would get a guarantee of coverage and, with private but federally subsidized insurance, gain better access to quality care for significant expenses than they have now with Medicaid. Private insurance pays more and is accepted by many more doctors. But on the downside, the insured care would be less comprehensive than under current definitions of Obamacare’s mandate.

With a cheaper and more modest insurance package mandated under a retooled law, employers would be less intent on dropping coverage. That would help in job creation. It also would lower the federal cost of the subsidies through the exchanges, both because employers would cover more workers and because the insurance policies would be cheaper.

This wouldn’t be an ideal health care system, but it may be the best we can do, considering where we stand today.

No Easy Answers on Financing Long – Term Care

September 30, 2013June 12, 2015 Doug

By JUDITH GRAHAM, NY Times

This article points out the difficulty in financing long term care for the elderly. Experts believe more focus should be on finding ways to provide affordable care within the efforts to reform Medicare and Medicaid. For now, families continue to bear the brunt of the cost associated with caring for the elderly.

The federal Long-Term Care Commission published its full report on Wednesday, but it did little to change the perception that substantial relief for caregivers will be a long time coming.

The commission had endorsed a package of 28 recommendations late last week, prior to the release of the full report. Among other measures, the recommendations call for recognizing caregivers as members of “care teams,” including information about caregivers in patient records, assessing caregivers’ need for support, and making services like respite care more widely available.

But this group of 15 experts couldn’t agree on how to pay for long-term care services needed by frail older adults or people with disabilities. The full report doesn’t change that.

Currently, only those who are impoverished and qualify for Medicaid get significant assistance from the government for long-term care. For the most part, middle-class families are left to bear the burdensome expenses: $18 an hour on average for homemaker services, $19 an hour for home healthcare aids, $3,405 a month for assisted living, $230 a day for a private nursing home room, according to the latest report from Genworth Financial.

How to ease this financial burden was the most important issue facing the commission. In the end, the report proposed two alternatives: some kind of government insurance program for long-term care, or some kind of private insurance option. Then commission members essentially threw up their hands, admitting they couldn’t agree.

When my colleague Paula Span wrote about the commission earlier this year, she asked whether its work would elicit a yawn or a cheer. For many, the answer is neither. Even some commission members feel a sharp sense of frustration and disappointment.

One is Judy Feder, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, who voted against the commission’s final recommendations on the grounds that they didn’t fulfill Congress’s charge to come up with a comprehensive solution. I asked her about a statement from six of her fellow commissioners insisting that any new long-term care program not enlarge public budgets.

“The current system has a budgetary implication,” Dr. Feder said. “It sticks it to families.”

Another disappointed member is Judith Stein, executive director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy. “The vision in the majority report is not much more than we have now,” she said. “It is, ‘Plan, understand, think about savings and insurance, and provide for those who are impoverished.’ That kind of approach doesn’t meet our long-term care needs now, and it won’t meet them in the future.”

While several of the commission’s recommendations are welcome, they will make a difference only “around the margins,” Ms. Stein said.
Families will bear the consequences, said Ms. Stein and other experts. Elderly spouses will continue to struggle to care for each other, and adult children will strain to balance jobs and the needs of frail parents and their own children. Untold numbers of aging Americans won’t get enough care, and caregivers will suffer from stress and depression, endangering their own health.

If a public insurance program is unaffordable, as several commission members claimed, might the private market supply a solution to the aging population’s need for affordable long-term care? That seems unlikely. Premiums for private long-term care insurance have been rising dramatically, policies are becoming more restrictive, insurers have been exiting the market, and bureaucratic red tape makes it difficult for many individual and families to receive expected benefits.

Financially, the only way to make private insurance work is to spread risk over a wide base of policy holders. But the cost of long-term care coverage makes it unlikely that millions of healthy people will purchase policies. This was the economic calculus that doomed the Class Act, the voluntary long-term care insurance program that was originally part of the Affordable Care Act.

Is there a way forward? The long-term care commission recommended two options: convening a White House conference on aging to consider long-term care policies, and establishing yet another advisory committee to continue its work. But, said Dr. Joanne Lynn, a geriatrician who directs the Center for Elder Care and Advanced Illness at the Altarum Institute, “The administration has shown no interest in having that happen, and here we are on the cusp of the largest generation in history growing old.”

She believes that it’s a mistake to separate long-term care from broader reforms of Medicare and the health care delivery system. The two systems of caring for people with disabilities and older adults need to be much more tightly integrated, Dr. Lynn said. Savings from eliminating inappropriate medical care — by some estimates, as much as one-third of all care — could be used to finance the expansion of long-term care services, she suggested.

As for another commission, is there any reason to hope it will be more successful in tackling critical issues when advocates of smaller government are committed to standing against a new federal insurance program for long-term care that might rely, at least in part, on public financing?

“I think this will be a hard discussion, but it is one that we as a country will have to grapple with,” said Dr. Bruce Chernof, the commission’s chairman and president of the SCAN Foundation in California. He sees the seeds of a potential compromise embedded in the commission’s report. The two primary financing options considered by the commission share “some commonalities,” he said, including agreement on the need for strong public programs and a role for the private sector.

“If you look carefully at these two perspectives, you can begin to see a way forward.”

How to Charge $546 for Six Liters of Saltwater

August 29, 2013June 12, 2015 Doug

This article exposes some of the ways medical product suppliers and hospitals mark up products, sometimes 1,000 times, to capture profitable revenue from sick patients and their insurance companies. Another example of all of the players getting caught with their hand in the cookie jar. Will it ever change?

By NINA BERNSTEIN for the NY TImes
It is one of the most common components of emergency medicine: an intravenous bag of sterile saltwater.

Luckily for anyone who has ever needed an IV bag to replenish lost fluids or to receive medication, it is also one of the least expensive. The average manufacturer’s price, according to government data, has fluctuated in recent years from 44 cents to $1.

Yet there is nothing either cheap or simple about its ultimate cost, as I learned when I tried to trace the commercial path of IV bags from the factory to the veins of more than 100 patients struck by a May 2012 outbreak of food poisoning in upstate New York.

Some of the patients’ bills would later include markups of 100 to 200 times the manufacturer’s price, not counting separate charges for “IV administration.” And on other bills, a bundled charge for “IV therapy” was almost 1,000 times the official cost of the solution.

It is no secret that medical care in the United States is overpriced. But as the tale of the humble IV bag shows all too clearly, it is secrecy that helps keep prices high: hidden in the underbrush of transactions among multiple buyers and sellers, and in the hieroglyphics of hospital bills.
At every step from manufacturer to patient, there are confidential deals among the major players, including drug companies, purchasing organizations and distributors, and insurers. These deals so obscure prices and profits that even participants cannot say what the simplest component of care actually costs, let alone what it should cost.

And that leaves taxpayers and patients alike with an inflated bottom line and little or no way to challenge it.

A Price in Flux

In the food-poisoning case, some of the stricken were affluent, and others barely made ends meet. Some had private insurance; some were covered by government programs like Medicare and Medicaid; and some were uninsured.

In the end, those factors strongly (and sometimes perversely) affected overall charges for treatment, including how much patients were expected to pay out of pocket. But at the beginning, there was the cost of an IV bag of normal saline, one of more than a billion units used in the United States each year.

“People are shocked when they hear that a bag of saline solution costs far less than their cup of coffee in the morning,” said Deborah Spak, a spokeswoman for Baxter International, one of three global pharmaceutical companies that make nearly all the IV solutions used in the United States.

It was a rare unguarded comment. Ms. Spak — like a spokesman for Hospira, another giant in the field — later insisted that all information about saline solution prices was private.

In fact, manufacturers are required to report such prices annually to the federal government, which bases Medicare payments on the average national price plus 6 percent. The limit for one liter of normal saline (a little more than a quart) went to $1.07 this year from 46 cents in 2010, an increase manufacturers linked to the cost of raw materials, fuel and transportation. That would seem to make it the rare medical item that is cheaper in the United States than in France, where the price at a typical hospital in Paris last year was 3.62 euros, or $4.73.

Middlemen at the Fore

One-liter IV bags normally contain nine grams of salt, less than two teaspoons. Much of it comes from a major Morton Salt operation in Rittman, Ohio, which uses a subterranean salt deposit formed millions of years ago. The water is local to places like Round Lake, Ill., or Rocky Mount, N.C., where Baxter and Hospira, respectively, run their biggest automated production plants under sterility standards set by the Food and Drug Administration.

But even before the finished product is sold by the case or the truckload, the real cost of a bag of normal saline, like the true cost of medical supplies from gauze to heart implants, disappears into an opaque realm of byzantine contracts, confidential rebates and fees that would be considered illegal kickbacks in many other industries.

IV bags can function like cheap milk and eggs in a high-priced grocery store, or like the one-cent cellphone locked into an expensive service contract. They serve as loss leaders in exclusive contracts with “preferred manufacturers” that bundle together expensive drugs and basics, or throw in “free” medical equipment with costly consequences.

Few hospitals negotiate these deals themselves. Instead, they rely on two formidable sets of middlemen: a few giant group-purchasing organizations that negotiate high-volume contracts, and a few giant distributors that buy and store medical supplies and deliver them to hospitals.

Proponents of this system say it saves hospitals billions in economies of scale. Critics say the middlemen not only take their cut, but they have a strong interest in keeping most prices high and competition minimal.

The top three group-purchasing organizations now handle contracts for more than half of all institutional medical supplies sold in the United States, including the IVs used in the food-poisoning case, which were bought and taken by truck to regional warehouses by big distributors.
These contracts proved to be another black box. Debbie Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Cardinal Health, one of the three largest distributors, said she could not discuss costs or prices under “disclosure rules relative to our investor relations.”

Distributors match different confidential prices for the same product with each hospital’s contract, she said, and sell information on the buyers back to manufacturers.

A huge Cardinal distribution center is in Montgomery, N.Y. — only 30 miles, as it happens, from the landscaped grounds of the Buddhist monastery in Carmel, N.Y., where many of the food-poisoning victims fell ill on Mother’s Day 2012.

Among them were families on 10 tour buses that had left Chinatown in Manhattan that morning to watch dragon dances at the monastery. After eating lunch from food stalls there, some traveled on to the designer outlet stores at Woodbury Common, about 30 miles away, before falling sick.

The symptoms were vicious. “Within two hours of eating that rice that I had bought, I was lying on the ground barely conscious,” said Dr. Elizabeth Frost, 73, an anesthesiologist from Purchase in Westchester County who was visiting the monastery gardens with two friends. “I can’t believe no one died.”

About 100 people were taken to hospitals in the region by ambulance; five were admitted and the rest released the same day. The New York State Department of Health later found the cause was a common bacterium, Staphylococcus aureus, from improperly cooked or stored food sold in the stalls.

Mysterious Charges

The sick entered a health care ecosystem under strain, swept by consolidation and past efforts at cost containment.
For more than a decade, hospitals in the Hudson Valley, like those across the country, have scrambled for mergers and alliances to offset economic pressures from all sides. The five hospitals where most of the victims were treated are all part of merged entities jockeying for bargaining power and market share — or worrying that other players will leave them struggling to survive.

The Affordable Care Act encourages these developments as it drives toward a reimbursement system that strives to keep people out of hospitals through more coordinated, cost-efficient care paid on the basis of results, not services. But the billing mysteries in the food poisoning case show how easily cost-cutting can turn into cost-shifting.

A Chinese-American toddler from Brooklyn and her 56-year-old grandmother, treated and released within hours from the emergency room at St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital, ran up charges of more than $4,000 and were billed for $1,400 — the hospital’s rate for the uninsured, even though the family is covered by a health maintenance organization under Medicaid, the federal-state program for poor people.
The charges included “IV therapy,” billed at $787 for the adult and $393 for the child, which suggests that the difference in the amount of saline infused, typically less than a liter, could alone account for several hundred dollars.

Tricia O’Malley, a spokeswoman for the hospital, would not disclose the price it pays per IV bag or break down the therapy charge, which she called the hospital’s “private pay rate,” or the sticker price charged to people without insurance. She said she could not explain why patients covered by Medicaid were billed at all.

Eventually the head of the family, an electrician’s helper who speaks little English, complained to HealthFirst, the Medicaid H.M.O. It paid $119 to settle the grandmother’s $2,168 bill, without specifying how much of the payment was for the IV. It paid $66.50 to the doctor, who had billed $606.

At White Plains Hospital, a patient with private insurance from Aetna was charged $91 for one unit of Hospira IV that cost the hospital 86 cents, according to a hospital spokeswoman, Eliza O’Neill.

Ms. O’Neill defended the markup as “consistent with industry standards.” She said it reflected “not only the cost of the solution but a variety of related services and processes,” like procurement, biomedical handling and storage, apparently not included in a charge of $127 for administering the IV and $893 for emergency-room services.

The patient, a financial services professional in her 50s, ended up paying $100 for her visit. “Honestly, I don’t understand the system at all,” said the woman, who shared the information on the condition that she not be named.

Dr. Frost, the anesthesiologist, spent three days in the same hospital and owed only $8, thanks to insurance coverage by United HealthCare. Still, she was baffled by the charges: $6,844, including $546 for six liters of saline that cost the hospital $5.16.
“It’s just absolutely absurd.” she said. “That’s saltwater.”

Last fall, I appealed to the New York State Department of Health for help in mapping the charges for rehydrating patients in the food poisoning episode. Deploying software normally used to detect Medicaid fraud, a team compiled a chart of what Medicaid and Medicare were billed in six of the cases.

But the department has yet to release the chart. It is under indefinite review, Bill Schwarz, a department spokesman, said, “to ensure confidential information is not compromised.”

For Obamacare, Some Hurdles Still Ahead

August 9, 2013June 12, 2015 Doug

President Obama and his advisers hope the healthcare overhaul will do two things. The first is to extend coverage to tens of millions of Americans who today lack health insurance. The second is to hold the line on rising health care costs. This article describes some hurdles to achieving those two goals. While you are enjoying a vacation this summer, hopefully you will have time to ponder the impacts Health Care Reform will have on you and your family.

By Eduardo Porter, NY Times

Like other big employers, in the mid-1990s Harvard University was struggling with the ballooning cost of providing health insurance.
It chose what was a novel solution for the time. It dropped its standard deal — a subsidy that rose in line with the price of the insurance policy — and switched some 10,000 workers on its payroll to a fixed subsidy that encouraged them to shop around for care.

For Harvard’s accountants, the change worked wonders. A study a couple of years later by David M. Cutler, a Harvard economist, and Sarah Reber, a Harvard graduate, concluded that competition among insurers cut the university’s health bill by 5 to 8 percent.
But not everybody was equally pleased. Families of workers who chose the Preferred Provider Organization offered by Blue Cross/Blue Shield — the most comprehensive plan, with lots of doctors and hospitals on its network — faced a $500-a-year jump in their out-of-pocket spending on health care.

Younger and healthier workers canceled their P.P.O. plans, enrolling in cheaper H.M.O. options or dropping Harvard insurance altogether. Left with a sicker patient base, the P.P.O. raised its premiums further, which prompted the next layer of relatively healthy customers to leave.
And so on. In 1997, Blue Cross/Blue Shield withdrew its P.P.O. from the market, making it a victim of what economists call the death spiral of adverse selection.

In a couple of months the nation is set to experience a similar shock on a very large scale: the greatest change in how Americans pay for health care since the advent of Medicare nearly half a century ago.

Come October, millions of uninsured people will be able to choose one of several health plans, offered at four different tiers of service and cost through new health exchanges coming onstream in every state.

Cheap “bronze” plans will shoulder some 60 percent of patients’ medical expenses. Pricey “platinum” plans will cover at least 90 percent. But insurers will not be allowed to exclude people with pre-existing conditions, or charge more for the sick, or put a lifetime cap on medical costs. Their policies will have to cover a minimum standard of medical care. And the government will subsidize those who cannot afford to buy the policies.

President Obama and his advisers hope the overhaul will do two things. The first is to extend coverage to tens of millions of Americans who today lack health insurance. The second is to hold the line on rising health care costs.

“Over time, success will depend on what happens to the cost curve,” Professor Cutler told me. “If we don’t bend the cost curve, everything will fail. The government won’t be able to afford it. Nobody will be able to afford it.”

In theory, the overhaul could meet both goals. Millions of new Americans armed with a subsidy and shopping among plans would bring consumer choice to bear, finally, on the health care industry. Insurers would compete to create policies that offered the most value for money, pressuring hospitals and doctors on behalf of all of us.

Yet despite the care the administration took in establishing incentives and safeguards, even some of Obamacare’s most committed backers are wondering whether the experiment will work as advertised — or, like Harvard’s P.P.O., go off the rails along the way.

Adverse selection is perhaps the direst threat. For Obamacare to work, millions of healthy, young, uninsured Americans must join a health plan to counterbalance the sicker millions who are most likely to buy insurance. Otherwise, health plans on the exchanges will have to raise premiums to shoulder the higher costs.

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The $2.7 Trillion Medical Bill

June 4, 2013June 12, 2015 Doug

The fragmented health care market in the United States has driven up costs, putting deep economic strains on consumers and the country. The Affordable Care Act promises to help Americans become insured and obtain access to the system. What about reducing health care cost? Reducing the cost of care has been more elusive. In the mean time consumers need to find trusted partners to reduce medical bills.

Colonoscopies Explain Why U.S. Leads the World in Health Expenditures

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, NY Times

Deirdre Yapalater’s recent colonoscopy at a surgical center near her home here on Long Island went smoothly: she was whisked from pre-op to an operating room where a gastroenterologist, assisted by an anesthesiologist and a nurse, performed the routine cancer screening procedure in less than an hour. The test, which found nothing worrisome, racked up what is likely her most expensive medical bill of the year: $6,385. That is fairly typical: in Keene, N.H., Matt Meyer’s colonoscopy was billed at $7,563.56. Maggie Christ of Chappaqua, N.Y., received $9,142.84 in bills for the procedure. In Durham, N.C., the charges for Curtiss Devereux came to $19,438, which included a polyp removal. While their insurers negotiated down the price, the final tab for each test was more than $3,500. “Could that be right?” said Ms. Yapalater, stunned by charges on the statement on her dining room table. Although her insurer covered the procedure and she paid nothing, her health care costs still bite: Her premium payments jumped 10 percent last year, and rising co-payments and deductibles are straining the finances of her middle-class family, with its mission-style house in the suburbs and two S.U.V.’s parked outside. “You keep thinking it’s free,” she said. “We call it free, but of course it’s not.”

In many other developed countries, a basic colonoscopy costs just a few hundred dollars and certainly well under $1,000. That chasm in price helps explain why the United States is far and away the world leader in medical spending, even though numerous studies have concluded that Americans do not get better care. Whether directly from their wallets or through insurance policies, Americans pay more for almost every interaction with the medical system. They are typically prescribed more expensive procedures and tests than people in other countries, no matter if those nations operate a private or national health system. A list of drug, scan and procedure prices compiled by the International Federation of Health Plans, a global network of health insurers, found that the United States came out the most costly in all 21 categories — and often by a huge margin.

Americans pay, on average, about four times as much for a hip replacement as patients in Switzerland or France and more than three times as much for a Caesarean section as those in New Zealand or Britain. The average price for Nasonex, a common nasal spray for allergies, is $108 in the United States compared with $21 in Spain. The costs of hospital stays here are about triple those in other developed countries, even though they last no longer, according to a recent report by the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation that studies health policy.

While the United States medical system is famous for drugs costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and heroic care at the end of life, it turns out that a more significant factor in the nation’s $2.7 trillion annual health care bill may not be the use of extraordinary services, but the high price tag of ordinary ones. “The U.S. just pays providers of health care much more for everything,” said Tom Sackville, chief executive of the health plans federation and a former British health minister.

Colonoscopies offer a compelling case study. They are the most expensive screening test that healthy Americans routinely undergo — and often cost more than childbirth or an appendectomy in most other developed countries. Their numbers have increased manyfold over the last 15 years, with data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggesting that more than 10 million people get them each year, adding up to more than $10 billion in annual costs. Largely an office procedure when widespread screening was first recommended, colonoscopies have moved into surgery centers — which were created as a step down from costly hospital care but are now often a lucrative step up from doctors’ examining rooms — where they are billed like a quasi operation. They are often prescribed and performed more frequently than medical guidelines recommend.

The high price paid for colonoscopies mostly results not from top-notch patient care, according to interviews with health care experts and economists, but from business plans seeking to maximize revenue; haggling between hospitals and insurers that have no relation to the actual costs of performing the procedure; and lobbying, marketing and turf battles among specialists that increase patient fees.

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Tips for Lowering Your Medical Bills

May 8, 2013June 12, 2015 J Roberts

Don’t be intimidated by high medical bills. What patients don’t realize is a review to find errors and working with the provider can often enable you to reduce medical bills. To enhance your outcome, enlist the services of a medical bill negotiation expert. With the help of a professional who can provide data, most providers will negotiate and offer some type of discount on out-of-pocket medical expenses. Here are some excellent tips that every health care consumer should know when faced with large and expensive medical bills.

By Alice Park, Time Magazine Online

It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally you can catch a mistake on a restaurant check or a miscalculated receipt from the grocery store. Hospital bills, however, are another matter: as many as 8 out of 10 bills for health care services contain errors, according to Medical Billing Advocates of America. Since Americans spend nearly $7,000 per capita on health care every year — and since these expenses climb steadily, at an average annual rate of 6.5% — it’s probably worth scrutinizing the remittance from your last hospital visit. It just might save you hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

According to medical-billing advocates, who are the health care world’s equivalent of tax-refund specialists, there are ways to protect yourself from huge health care expenditures both before you’re seen by a doctor and after you receive your bill. “When you are in the hospital, you should concentrate on getting better,” says Kevin Flynn, president of HealthCare Associations, a company that helps patients decipher their medical bills. “Do what is best medically first, then worry about the finances second.”

At the emergency room or in the hospital:

If you are insured, ask to be seen by a doctor who participates in your insurance plan. Just because a hospital is considered in-network by your plan doesn’t mean that all the physicians who work there are as well. This may not always be possible, but if your preference is noted in your file, once you receive your bill, you may be able to negotiate with the hospital to accept your insurer’s higher in-network reimbursement rate, leaving you with a smaller financial responsibility, even if you are seen by an out-of-network doctor.

For the same reason, if you are able to, ask to have any lab testing that is sent outside the hospital to be sent to facilities that participate in your insurer’s plan.

If possible, ask about the tests the doctor or nurses are ordering. If a less expensive test can provide the same information, then request that option. In some cases, for example, less expensive ultrasound tests are just as effective as costly CT scans.

Once you get your bill:

Always ask for an itemized bill so you can see every charge.

Ask for an explanation, in writing, from the hospital’s billing department for any disputed charges.

If you go to the hospital at night and end up being admitted after midnight, make sure your charges for the room start on the day you start occupying the room.

Check the level of room for which you were charged. Hospitals charge for ER services by level, depending on the amount of equipment and supplies needed, with Level 1 requiring the fewest (e.g., a nosebleed) and Level 5 representing an emergency (trauma, heart attack). Question the level indicated on your bill and ask for a written explanation of why that level was billed. Hospitals have their own criteria for determining levels and should make this available upon request. “They don’t freely hand this information out, but they will send it to you if you ask for a written response,” says Pat Palmer, founder of Medical Billing Advocates of America.

Doctors also charge for ER services by level, also ranging from 1 to 5. Their levels are standardized, and physicians are required to meet three criteria to justify billing at each level. Question the level listed on your bill and ask for a written explanation of why that level was billed by your physician.

The hospital level should be equal to or lower than that of the doctor-billed level; if it’s higher, that’s a red flag that there may be a billing error.

Question charges for what seem like routine items, such as warm blankets, gloves and lights. These should be included as part of the facility fee.

Question any additional readings of tests or scans. You should be charged only once for one doctor’s reading of a scan, unless it is a second opinion or consultation.

If you received anesthesia, check that you were charged for only one anesthesiologist. Some hospitals use certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs) but require that an anesthesiologist supervise the procedure, so some bills will contain charges from both, which amounts to double billing.

(more…)

Affordable Care Act Rate Shock?

April 19, 2013June 12, 2015 Doug

By Kathleen Phalen-Tomaselli,TheStreet.com

Come January 1 of next year, those with the lowest health insurance risk may be hit the hardest with premium increases as high as 40%. “The rules are changing,” says Robert Zirkelbach, vice president of strategic communications for the American Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) in Washington, D.C.

If you are young, healthy and qualify for non-group coverage, you could face rate hikes forcing you to reconsider how you spend your health care dollars. Here’s what’s happening: The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, reaches maturity the first of the year. Designed to tackle the problem of insuring the nation’s estimated 48 million uninsured in addition to increasing benefits for such services maternity care and reproductive aid—all while lowering premium rates for older Americans. But the new provisions come with a price.

And because of new age rating band requirements tied to the ACA, the 18 to 44 age group’s premiums will increase while the over 57 group will decrease. Today, the ratio for age rating bands is 5:1, which means insurers can charge older individuals five times more than younger insureds. Come January 1, the band ratio reduces to 3:1. Take, for example, a 24-year-old who pays $1,200 annually for non-group coverage today could. He could see an overnight increase to $1,800, while a 60-year-old paying $6,000 today will pay $5,400 in 2014, according to the AHIP.
Nonetheless, in the report “Timely Analysis of Immediate Health Policy Issues” published last month by the Urban Institute Health Policy Center in Washington, D.C., lead author Linda J. Blumberg concludes that such predictions are over inflated. Citing government subsidies available to help defray such increases for those earning less than 400% of the federal poverty level, Blumberg says that subsidies will help this age group obtain expanded coverage. Even so, according to the report, “Premiums for 21-to 27-year-olds are $850 lower under (the)5:1 (age band rating) than under (the)3:1 rating.”

The problem with counting on subsidies to defray higher premiums is that, “40% will not be eligible for subsidies,” says Zirkelbach. He goes on to explain that 7.6 million of those in the non-group category in 2011 earned more than 400% of the federal poverty level.

According to an Oliver Wyman study, the cut-off for subsidies is closer to 250% of the federal poverty level—in other words, those earning less than $25,000. There will be no subsidies for individuals earning more than $50,000.

Along with tax subsidies, the ACA calls for the expansion of state Medicaid programs to help those with lower incomes. But, depending on where you live, this may not be an option. The Supreme Court recently ruled that states can decide on whether they will participate. At this point, many states remain undecided with some governors, like Gov. Tom Corbett(R-PA), saying they have no intention of expanding an already stretched program.

To further compound the issue of higher premiums, the health care reform law includes a new $100 billion sales tax on health insurance that will continue to drive up costs. AHIP predicts this increase may be as high as $300 per family.

The Congressional Budget office says the taxes will, “largely be passed through to consumers in the form of higher premiums.” A 2011 Oliver Wyman analysis estimates that this tax alone—not accounting for age rating bands or expanded coverage—will increase premiums over a ten-year period by $2,150 for individuals and an average of $5,080 for families.

Currently, federal and state governments are establishing health care exchanges—much like a one-stop health insurance supermarket—and individuals will be able to select plans starting October 1.

What are your options?

Pay the higher premiums that will also offer you more coverage. Opt-out of coverage and pay the federal uninsured penalty of about $95 in 2014. Or choose a catastrophic plan available for those up to age 27.

What does Zirkelbach hope for? A repeal of the health care tax and a phasing in of the age rating bands. Is there still time to hope? “It’s hard to say,” he says. “Maybe when taking a closer look at this they will re-visit these issues.”

Three Ways to Slash Your Medical Bills

July 13, 2012July 17, 2012 J Roberts

Medical Cost Advocate’s CEO Derek Fitteron was recently interviewed for Fox Business. Read the following BLOG post to learn more about reducing medical costs. Dont forget to negotiate your medical bills and save money. It’s worth the effort. In these difficult economic times, why pay list price when you may be able to save.

By: Donna Fuscaldo

FOXBusiness

Published July 10, 2012

Many things in life are negotiable, including medical bills.

“More and more billing offices, whether it’s a hospital or doctor’s office, are much more receptive to bargaining,” says Nancy Fase Guernon, director of operations at CareCounsel, an health advocacy firm. “There’s definitely ways to negotiate the bill.”

According to a survey of Angie’s List members who asked for discounts from their doctors, 74% said they were successful. “We’ve heard some great success stories from members who have successfully negotiated with their health care provider,” says Angie Hicks, founder of the peer-review website. “It doesn’t hurt to ask. You’ll be amazed at what you can save and still get great care.”

From making sure your bill is correct to negotiating ahead of a procedure there are ways to get as much as 40% off your medical bill. Here’s how:

Step One: Check the accuracy of the bill

Medical billing mistakes are common, so review the invoice carefully before submitting payment. Experts say it’s common for a procedure to be coded wrong by the doctor’s office and lead to excess charges.

Patients should review their health insurance plan to know what is and is not covered. “You want to make sure if it’s the insurance company’s responsibility to pay it, it’s paying what it should according to the plan,” says Fase Guernon.

If you don’t have insurance or are going out of network and are paying out of pocket, Derek Fitteron, founder and CEO of Medical Cost Advocate, advises getting a full cost estimate of the procedure upfront to avoid any surprises at the end and you avoid getting overcharged.

Fitteron also suggests asking for an itemized bill so you can review the charge for every procedure. “Sometimes there are mistakes and those mistakes might include bills for the wrong procedures or procedures that didn’t happen.”

Step Two: Negotiate Up Front

Think of negotiating health care like shopping for a car. A dealership wants your business and will working with you—same idea applies to a doctor. For instance, many times doctors will reduce their price if you pay in cash or pay for the procedure ahead of time.

According to Hicks, some hospitals and doctors will cut a health-care bill by as much as 50% if you pay in cash on the day of service. “We had a member from Washington D.C. who saved $9,000 on his mother’s in-home care by bargaining ahead of her treatment.”

To negotiate ahead of time, experts say it pays to do your homework. Procedure prices vary be region, so know what know what is common in your area before negotiating. “Do the research so you are not throwing out numbers. That can be insulting,” says Fitteron.

Step Three: Be honest about your financial situation

If you get hit with a medical bill that you can’t afford, the best thing to do is call your doctor or hospital and honestly explain your financial situation. Often times the medical facility will be willing to reduce the bill as long as you agree to pay something.

“If you ask the billing office for a discount and you are willing to pay something right then more times than not they will knock down the bill 30% to 40%,” says Fase Guernon.

Some providers will set up interest-free payment plans. Hicks points to one member who saved $4,000 by talking to her doctor about her financial concerns. The member couldn’t afford the costs that weren’t covered by the insurer so the doctor agreed to collect just the insurance portion, she says.

“Too many consumers aren’t aware of just how much power they have to negotiate their health-care costs. There are many great doctors, dentists and other health-care specialists out there who are willing and eager to work with their patients to provide them with high quality, affordable care,” says Hicks.

Sixteen percent of Americans unable to pay medical bills, according to Consumer Reports’ Trouble Tracker Index

October 24, 2011April 13, 2012 admin

Medical Cost Advocate recently appeared in the September issue of Consumer Reports. One of the key points of this article is the assertion that consumers should line up a medical billing advocate or their own alternatives proactively. Don’t wait until its too late to do your research and find a health care negotiator.

Consumer Reports: How to Haggle With Your Doctor or Hospital

YONKERS, NY — When we visit our doctors, we don’t typically think of ourselves as “consumers” or buyers of health care, but in these tough times, that is precisely the role a patient needs to play to avoid drowning in a sea of medical bills. What are the best strategies for haggling with your doctor or hospital? A new report in the October issue of Consumer Reports and online at www.ConsumerReportsHealth.org features advice from Consumer Reports’ medical expert and M.D., John Santa.

According to the latest Consumer Reports Index, which gauges the health of the economy from the consumer perspective, 16.3 percent of Americans are unable to afford medical bills.

“Americans are overwhelmed by health costs and many people simply can’t pay their bills, can’t afford their medications,” says John Santa, M.D., M.P.H., director of the Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center. “The last thing most patients want to do is haggle with their doctors, but a little bit of negotiating can go a long way. It’s also important to know that there are tremendous variations in health care costs—knowing this can help a consumer get a hand up and politely insist on the fairest possible price.”

Here’s Consumer Reports’ advice for three possible scenarios:

You’re healthy.The optimal time for patients to talk with their healthcare providers about costs is before any have been incurred. While doctors have a professional obligation to take a patient’s financial resources into account, patients should raise the issue with their doctors to let them know that costs are important to them. “For a variety of reasons, doctors are likely to suggest the most expensive options first. But you might be surprised by your doctor’s willingness to change course, for example prescribing fewer expensive brand name drugs or choosing watchful waiting over a costly diagnostic test,” says Santa.

The unexpected occurs. A patient lands in the hospital without the benefit of any planning and gets slammed with a huge bill, say $15,000 for a coronary angiogram, and insurance ends up covering only a fraction of the bill. Consumer Reports recommends these approaches to get the greatest reduction to their bill:

Sit down with the doctor who ordered or performed the hospital services to find out how the hospital costs ran so high. Were all the services needed and reasonably priced? Consumers can judge for themselves by checking www.healthcarebluebook.com which lists the going rates for many medical services for free. Closely examine each bill to identify errors, which are common.
Consumers should not assume the price on their bill is set in stone. Providers often discount rates substantially to insurers and others, so why shouldn’t a consumer ask for the same rate reduction? Consumers should dispute any charges they think their insurance company ought to cover.
Patients should not pay their bill until they have exhausted all of their options, but they should make clear to the hospital’s billing department that reaching a resolution is important to them. They might consider making a discounted offer they think would be manageable within a set time period. Consumers can consult one of the reputable groups that, for a fee, can help reduce the size of medical bills, such as Medical Cost Advocate (localhost/wp1).

You’re having an elective surgery. This situation allows for more planning and research into the best procedure, doctor, hospital, drug or other option. “Use your time wisely to do the research because variations in health-care costs can be significant, and providers will gladly let you overpay for a service that you could get for less,” says Santa. Keep in mind the following advice:

Consumers should shop around, talk to different providers, and bargain for what they think is a fair price.
Consumers shouldn’t hesitate to ask for the price upfront and get it in writing. Request an itemized list of all potential charges.
As with any purchase, consumers should beware of any offer that sounds too good to be true. If a provider suggests a shortcut, be wary and ask a lot of questions, and check out providers that are unfamiliar.