Category Archives: Physicians

Election 2020: What Exactly Is Joe Biden’s Healthcare Plan? And Really, Telehealth to Care for Our Patients?

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So, first I wanted to relate an experience, which exemplifies the failure of telehealth, or maybe the failure of healthcare workers who are taking advantage of the “new” health care system of patient care.

Consider the case a two weeks ago. As I was about to operate on a cancer surgery patient, I was asked to evaluate a patient healthcare conundrum. One of our nurse teammate’s husband was sick and no one knew what was the problem. He had lost 23 pounds over 3 ½ weeks, was dehydrated, appetite, sore throat, weak and needed to go to the emergency room multiple times for intravenous fluids. Each time he was told that they were very sorry but they had no idea what the problem was.

His Primary care physician would not see him in person, and he had another telehealth visit, which he was charged for and was prescribed an antibiotic with no improvement.

I asked if he had a COVID test which he did and it was negative.

I then asked if I could examine him or if she had any pictures. She had pictures, with no skin rashes except I noticed something interesting on the intraoral pictures, which showed left sided ulcers on his cheeks, left lateral posterior tongue and palate, again-only on the left side.

I asked if this was true in that the ulcers were only on one side of his mouth? When his wife responded with a yes to the question I then responded that he had intraoral shingles involving the nerve to the tongue, cheek, palate ( glossophyngeal nerve ) and sometimes also affected additional nearby cranial nerve, which is probably why he was having some of his stomach problem. She thought that was interesting and wanted to know what to do since he was about to have some gallbladder studies.

I outlined a treatment plan and low and behold he is getting better. My question is why didn’t anyone in the doc’s office or ER never complete a thorough physical exam? Oh, wait- how does one do a complete physical exam through the telehealth system? What about heart or lung disease patients, how does a nurse or physician listen to their heart or lungs, etc?? Are we physicians forgetting our teachings and training regarding the proper approach to physical diagnosis?

And now what about Biden’s proposal for health care?

Leigh Page pointed out that physicians — like all Americans — are trying to size up Joe Biden’s healthcare agenda, which the Democratic presidential nominee has outlined in speeches and on his official website.

Many healthcare professionals, patients, and voters of all political stripes think our current healthcare system is broken and in need of change, but they don’t agree on how it should change. In Part I of this article, we take a look at Biden’s proposals for changing the US healthcare system. Then, we include comments and analysis from physicians on both sides of the fence regarding the pros and cons of these proposed healthcare measures.

Part 1: An Overview of Biden’s Proposed Healthcare Plan

Biden’s proposed healthcare plan has many features. The main thrust is to expand access to healthcare and increase federal subsidies for health coverage.

If elected, “I’ll put your family first,” he said in a speech in June. “That will begin the dramatic expansion of health coverage and bold steps to lower healthcare costs.” He said he favored a plan that “lowers healthcare costs, gets us universal coverage quickly, when Americans desperately need it now.”

Below are Biden’s major proposals. They are followed by Part 2, which assesses the proposals on the basis of comments by doctors from across the political spectrum.

Biden Says We Should Restore the ACA

At a debate of the Democrat presidential candidates in June 2019, Biden argued that the best way to expand coverage is “to build on what we did during the Obama administration,” rather than create a whole new healthcare system, as many other Democratic candidates for president were proposing.

“I’m proud of the Affordable Care Act,” he said a year later in his June 2020 speech. “In addition to helping people with preexisting conditions, this is the law that delivered vital coverage for 20 million Americans who did not have health insurance.”

At the heart of the ACA are the health insurance marketplaces, where people can buy individual insurance that is often federally subsidized. Buyers select coverage at different levels ― Gold, Silver, and Bronze. Those willing to pay higher premiums for a Gold plan don’t have high deductibles, as they would with the Silver and Bronze plans.

Currently, federal subsidies are based on premiums on the Silver level, where premiums are lower but deductibles are higher than with the Gold plan. Biden would shift the subsidies to the Gold plan, where they would be more generous, because subsidies are pegged to the premiums.

In addition, Biden would remove the current limit on subsidies, under which only people with incomes less than 400% of the federal poverty level qualify for them. “Many families making more than 400% of the federal poverty level (about $50,000 for a single person and $100,000 for a family of four), and thus not qualifying for financial assistance, still struggle to afford health insurance,” the Biden for President website states.

Under the Biden plan, there would still be a limit on insurance payments as a percentage of income, but that percentage would drop, meaning that more people would qualify. Currently, the level is 9.86% or more of a person’s income; Biden would lower that level to 8.5%.

“We’re going to lower premiums for people buying coverage on their own by guaranteeing that no American ever has to spend more than 8.5% of their income on health insurance, and that number would be lower for lower-income people,” Biden said in the June speech.

Add a Public Option, but Not Medicare for All

In the primary, Biden parted company from rivals who backed Medicare for All, a single-payer health system that would make the government pay for everyone’s healthcare. “I understand the appeal of Medicare for All,” he said in a video released by his campaign. “But folks supporting it should be clear that it means getting rid of Obamacare, and I’m not for that.” But he nor anyone else who supported Obamacare has come up with a way to finance this type of healthcare system.

However, Biden embraced a “public option” that would allow people to buy into or be subsidized into “a Medicare-like” plan. It is unclear how similar the public option would be to regular Medicare coverage, but the Biden campaign has made it clear that it would not take funds from the Medicare trust fund, which is expected to start losing funds by 2026.

The more than 150 million Americans who have employer-sponsored insurance could keep it, but they could still buy into the public option if they wanted to. In addition, the public option would automatically enroll ― at no cost to them ― some 4.8 million low-income Americans who were excluded from the ACA’s Medicaid expansion when many states chose to opt out of the Medicaid expansion.

In addition, the 37 states that participate in expanded Medicaid could switch coverage to the new public option, provided that they continue to pay their current share of the costs. (In June, Oklahoma became the 37th state to allow the expansion, following the results of a ballot measure.)

“We need a public option now more than ever, especially when more than 20 million people are unemployed,” Biden said in the June speech. “That public option will allow every American, regardless of their employment status, the choice to get a Medicare-like plan.”

Lower the Medicare Age

In spring 2020, Biden proposed lowering the age to qualify for Medicare from 65 to 60. This provision is not included among the official policies listed on the Biden for President website, but it has been cited by many, including the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force.

This provision would bring almost 23 million people into Medicare, including 13.4 million from employer-sponsored coverage, according to one analysis. It’s not clear whether these people would buy into Medicare or simply be covered. Their care would not be paid for by the Medicare Trust Fund but would use tax dollars instead. Oh, finally, we find out that our taxes would go up. How much is the problem as we consider all the other programs that Biden and Harris have promoted.

Provide Relief in the Covid-19 Pandemic

Biden would cover the cost of COVID-19 testing and the cost of health coverage for people laid off during the pandemic.

“Testing unequivocally saves lives, and widespread testing is the key to opening our economy again,” Biden said in his June speech. “To fix the economy, we have to get control over the virus.”

Prescription Drug Reform

Biden would repeal a Bush-era exception that bars the Medicare program from negotiating prescription drug prices for the Part D prescription drug benefit. “There’s no justification for this except the power of prescription drug lobbying,” the Biden for President website states.

In addition, Biden’s prescription drug reform plan would do the following:

• Limit launch prices for drugs. The administration would establish an independent review board that would assess the value of new drugs and would have the power to set limits on their prices. Such drugs are “being abusively priced by manufacturers,” the Biden for President site says.

• Limit price increases to inflation. As a condition of participation in government programs, drug prices could not rise more than the general inflation rate. Biden would impose a tax penalty on drug makers whose prices surpassed inflation.

• Allow consumers to buy prescription drugs from other countries. Biden would allow consumers to import prescription drugs from other countries, provided the US Department of Health and Human Services certifies that those drugs are safe.

• Stop tax breaks for pharma ads: Biden would drop drug makers’ tax breaks for advertising, which amounted to $6 billion in 2016.

Stop Surprise Billing

Biden proposes to stop surprise billing, which occurs when patients receive care from a doctor or hospital that is not in their insurer’s network. In these situations, patients can be surprised with very high bills because no payment limit has been negotiated by the insurer.

Twenty-eight states have enacted consumer protections to address surprise medical billing, but Congress has not passed such a measure. One proposed solution is to require payers to pay for out-of-network services on the basis of a benchmark, such as the average Medicare rate for that service in a specific geographic area.

Closely Monitor Healthcare Mergers

Biden would take a more active stance in enforcing antitrust laws against mergers in the healthcare industry.

“The concentration of market power in the hands of a few corporations is occurring throughout our health care system, and this lack of competition is driving up prices for consumers,” the Biden for President website states.

Overhaul Long-term Care

Biden’s latest plan calls for a $775 billion overhaul of the nation’s caregiving infrastructure. Biden says he would help create new jobs, improve working conditions, and invest in new models of long-term care outside of traditional nursing homes.

Restore Funding for Planned Parenthood

Biden would reissue guidance barring states from refusing Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood and other providers that refer for abortions or that provide related information, according to the Biden for President website. This action would reverse a Trump administration rule.

Boost Community Health Centers

Biden promises to double federal funding for community health centers, such as federally qualified health centers, that provide care to underserved populations.

Support Mental Health Parity

Biden says he supports mental health parity and would enforce the federal mental health parity law and expand funding for mental health services.

Part 2: Physicians’ Opinions on Biden’s Healthcare Plans: Pro and Con

Biden’s plans to expand coverage are at the heart of his healthcare platform, and many see these as the most controversial part of his legislative agenda.

Biden’s Medicare expansion is not Medicare for All, but it can be seen as “Medicare for all who want it.” Potentially, millions of people could enter Medicare or something like Medicare. If the Medicare eligibility age is dropped to 60, people could switch from their employer-sponsored plans, many of which have high deductibles. In addition, poor people who have no coverage because their states opted out of the Medicaid expansion would be included.

The possibility of such a mass movement to government-run healthcare alarms many people. “Biden’s proposals look moderate, but it is basically Medicare for All in sheep’s clothing,” said Cesar De Leon, DO, a family physician in Naples, Florida, and past president of the county’s medical society.

Reimbursements for Doctors Could Fall- No, Will Fall!

A shift of millions of people into Medicare would likely mean lower reimbursements for doctors. For example, the 13.4 million people aged 60 to 65 who would switch from employer-sponsored coverage to Medicare would be leaving some of the best-paying insurance plans, and their physicians would then be reimbursed at Medicare rates.

“Biden’s plan would lower payments to already cash-strapped doctors and hospitals, who have already seen a significant decrease in reimbursement over the past decade,” De Leon said. “He is trying to win the support of low-income voters by giving them lower healthcare prices, which doctors and hospitals would have to absorb.

“Yes, the US healthcare system is dysfunctional,” De Leon added, “but the basic system needs to be fixed before it is expanded to new groups of people.”

The American Association of Neurological Surgeons/Congress of Neurological Surgeons warns against Biden’s proposed government-run system. “We support expanding health insurance coverage, but the expansion should build on the existing employer-based system,” said Katie O. Orrico, director of the group’s Washington office. “We have consistently opposed a public option or Medicare for All.

“Shifting more Americans into government-sponsored healthcare will inevitably result in lower payments for physicians’ services,” Orrico added. “Reimbursement rates from Medicare, Medicaid, and many ACA exchange plans already do not adequately cover the costs of running a medical practice.”

Prospect of Higher Taxes- Absolutely, grab your wallets and your retirement funds!!

Paying for ambitious reforms means raising taxes. Biden’s plan would not make the Medicare trust fund pay for the expansions and would to some extent rely on payments from new beneficiaries. However, many new beneficiaries, such as people older than 60 and the poor, would be covered by tax dollars.

Altogether, Biden’s plan is expected to cost the federal government $800 billion over the next 10 years. To pay for it, Biden proposes reversing President Trump’s tax cuts, which disproportionately helped high earners, and eliminating capital gains tax loopholes for the wealthy.

“Rather than tax the average American, the Democrats will try to redistribute wealth,” De Leon said.

“The elephant in the room is that taxes would have to be raised to pay for all these programs,” said Gary Price, MD, president of the Physicians Foundation. Because no one likes higher taxes, he says, architects of the Biden plan would try to find ways to save money, such as tamping down reimbursements for physicians, to try to avoid a public backlash against the reforms.

“Physicians’ great fear is that efforts to keep taxes from getting too high will result in cutting physician reimbursement,” he said.

Impact of COVID-19

Perhaps an even larger barrier to Biden’s health reforms comes from the COVID-19 crisis, which didn’t exist last year, when health reform was the central issue in the presidential primary that pitted Biden against Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the chief proponent of Medicare for All.

“The top two issues on voters’ minds right now are the pandemic and the economy,” said Daniel Derksen, MD, a family physician who is professor of public health policy at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “Any other concerns are pushed down the list.”

The COVID-19 crisis is forcing the federal government to spend trillions of dollars to help businesses and individuals who have lost income because of the crisis. Will there be enough money left over to fund an ambitious set of health reforms?

“It’s not a good time to start reforms,” warned Kevin Campbell, MD, a cardiologist in Raleigh, North Carolina. “Given the current pressures that COVID-19 has placed on physicians, healthcare systems, and hospitals, I don’t believe that we can achieve meaningful change in the near term.”

However, supporters of Biden’s reforms think that now, during the COVID-19 crisis, is precisely the right time to enact healthcare reform. When millions of Americans lost their jobs because of the pandemic, they also lost their insurance coverage.

“COVID-19 has made Biden’s healthcare agenda all the more relevant and necessary,” said Don Berwick, MD, who led the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) under President Obama. “The COVID-19 recession has made people more aware of how vulnerable their coverage is.”

Orrico at the neurosurgeons group acknowledges this point. “The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed some cracks in the US healthcare system,” she said. “Whether this will lead to new reforms is hard to say, but policymakers will likely take a closer look at issues related to unemployment, health insurance coverage, and healthcare costs due to the COVID-19 emergency.”

Many Physicians Want Major Reform

Although many doctors are skeptical of reform, others are impatient for reform to come and support Biden’s agenda ― especially its goal to expand coverage.

“Joe Biden’s goal is to get everyone covered,” said Alice Chen, MD, an internist who is a leader of Doctors for Biden, an independent group that is not part of the Biden campaign. “What brings Democrats together is that they are united in the belief that healthcare is a right.”

In January, the American College of Physicians (ACP) endorsed both Medicare for All and the public option. The US healthcare system “is ill and needs a bold new prescription,” the ACP stated.

The medical profession, once mostly Republican, now has more Democrats. In 2016, 35% of physicians identified themselves as Democrats, 27% as Republicans, and 36% as independents.

Many of the doctors behind reform appear to be younger physicians who are employed by large organizations. They are passionate about reforming the healthcare system, and as employees of large organizations, they would not be directly affected if reimbursements fell to Medicare levels ― although their institutions might subsequently have to adjust their salaries downward.

Chen, for example, is a young physician who says she has taken leave from her work as adjunct assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, to raise her young children.

She is the former executive director of Doctors for America, a movement of thousands of physicians and medical students “to bring their patients’ experiences to policymakers.”

“Doctors feel that they are unseen and unheard, that they often feel frankly used by large health systems and by insurance companies,” Chen said. “Biden wants to hear from them.”

Many idealistic young physicians look to health system leaders like Berwick. “I believe this nation needs to get universal coverage as fast as we can, and Biden’s policies present a path to get there,” the former CMS director said. “This would be done chiefly through Biden’s public option and his plans to expand coverage in states that have not adopted the ACA Medicaid expansion.”

But what about the potential effect of lowering reimbursement rates for doctors? “The exact rates will have to be worked out,” Berwick said, “but it’s not just about who pays physicians, it’s about how physicians get paid.” He thinks the current fee-for-service system needs to be replaced by a value-based payment system such as capitation, shared savings, and bundled payments.

The Biden-Sanders Task Force

Berwick was a member of the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force, which brings together supporters of Biden and Sanders to create a shared platform for the Biden campaign.

The task force issued a report in early July that recommended a variety of healthcare reforms in addition to expanding access to care. One of them was to find ways to address the social determinants of health, such as housing, hunger, transportation, and pollution, which can harm health outcomes.

Chen specifically cites this provision. “We need to focus on the social determinants of heath and try to encourage better health,” she said. “I remember as a doctor advising a patient who was a young mother with several small children that she needed to exercise more. She asked me, ‘When am I supposed to exercise, and who will watch my kids?’ I realized the predicament that she was in.”

Price is also glad to see the provision in Biden’s plan. “Social determinants of health has been a key focus of the Physicians Foundation,” he said. “To my knowledge, this is the first time that a political candidate’s healthcare policy has included this point.

“Physicians are not in control of the social determinants of health, even though they affect their reimbursements,” he said. Under Medicare’s Merit-based Incentive Payment System, for example, doctors are penalized when their patients don’t meet certain health standards, such as when diabetes patients can’t get their A1C levels under control, he says.

However, Price fears that Biden, in his efforts to make peace with Sanders supporters, may have to some degree abandoned his moderate stance on health reform.

Is the Nation Ready for Another Health Reform Battle?

Clearly, many Democrats are ready to reform the system, but is the nation ready? “Are American voters ready for another major, Democratic-led health reform initiative?” asked Patricia Salber, MD, an internist and healthcare consultant who runs a blog called The Doctor Weighs In.

“I’ve been around long enough to remember the fight over President Clinton’s health plan and then President Obama’s plan,” she said. Each time, she says, there seemed to be a great deal of momentum, and then there was a backlash. “If Biden is elected, I hope we don’t have to go through the same thing all over again,” Salber said.

Derksen believes Biden’s proposed healthcare reforms could come close to rivaling President Obama’s Affordable Care Act in ambition, cost, and controversy.

He shares Biden’s goal of extending coverage to all ― including paying the cost of covering low-income people. But the result is that “Biden’s agenda is going to be a ‘heavy lift,’ as they say in Washington,” he said. “He has some very ambitious plans to expand access to care.”

Derksen speaks from experience. He helped draft part of the ACA as a health policy fellow in Capitol Hill in 2009. Then in 2011, he was in charge of setting up the ACA’s insurance marketplace for the state of New Mexico.

Now Biden wants to begin a second wave of health reform. But Derksen thinks this second wave of reform could encounter opposition as formidable as those Obama faced.

“Assuming that Biden is elected, it would be tough to get this agenda passed ― even if he had solid Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate,” said Derksen,

According to polls by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), 53% of Americans like the ACA, while 37% dislike it ― a split that has been relatively stable for the past 2 years, since the failed GOP effort to repeal the law.

In that KFF poll, the public option fared better ― 68% of Americans support the public option, including 42% of Republicans. These numbers help explain why the Biden campaign moved beyond its support of the ACA to embrace the public option as well.

Even when Democrats gain control of all the levers of power, as they did in 2009, they still have a very difficult time passing an ambitious healthcare reform bill. Derksen remembers how tough it was to get that massive bill through Congress.

The House bill’s public option might have prevailed in a reconciliation process between the two bills, but that process was cut short when Sen. Ted Kennedy died and Senate Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority. The bill squeaked through as the Senate version, without the public option.

The ACA Has Survived-But at What Cost?

The ACA is much more complex piece of legislation than the public option.

“The ACA has survived for a decade, despite all efforts to dismantle it,” Salber said. “Biden wants to restore a law that the Republicans have been chipping away at. The Republicans eliminated the penalty for not having coverage. Think about it, a penalty of zero is not much of a deterrent.”

It was the loss of the ACA penalty in tax year 2019 that, paradoxically, formed the legal basis for the latest challenge of the ACA before the Supreme Court, in a suit brought by the Trump administration and 18 Republican state attorneys general.

The Supreme Court will make its ruling after the election, but Salber thinks the suit itself will boost both Biden and the ACA in the campaign. “I think most people are tired of all the attempts to repeal the ACA,” she said.

“The public now thinks of the US healthcare system as pathetically broken,” she added. “It used to be that Americans would say we have the best healthcare system in the world. I don’t hear that much anymore.”

Physicians who oppose the ACA hold exactly the opposite view. “Our healthcare system is in shambles after the Obamacare fiasco,” Campbell said. “Even if Biden has a Democrat-controlled House and Senate, I still don’t think that there would be enough votes to pass sweeping changes to healthcare.”

Biden Could Choose Issues Other Than Expanding Access

There are plenty of proposals in the Biden healthcare plan that don’t involve remaking the healthcare system.

These include making COVID-19 testing free, providing extra funding for community health centers, and stopping surprise billing. Proposals such as stepping up antitrust enforcement against mergers would involve administrative rather than Congressional action.

Some of these other proposals could be quite expensive, such as overhauling long-term care and paying for health insurance for laid-off workers. And another proposal ― limiting the prices of pharmaceuticals ― could be almost as contentious as expanding coverage.

“This proposal has been talked about for many years, but it has always met with strong resistance from drug makers,” said Robert Pearl, MD, former CEO of the Permanente Medical Group and now a faculty member at Stanford School of Medicine and Graduate School of Business.

Pearl thinks the first item in Biden’s drug plan ― to repeal a ban against Medicare negotiating drug prices with drug makers ― would meet with Congressional resistance, owing to heavy lobbying and campaign contributions by the drug companies.

In addition, Pearl thinks Biden’s plans to limit drug prices ― barring drug makers from raising their prices above the general inflation rate and limiting the launch prices for many drugs ― enter uncharted legal waters and could end up in the courts.

Even Without Reform, Expect Lower Reimbursements

Although many doctors are concerned that Biden’s healthcare reforms would reduce reimbursements, Pearl thinks reimbursements will decline even without reforms, owing in part to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Employer-based health insurance has been the bedrock of the US healthcare system, but Pearl says many employers have long wanted to get rid of this obligation. Increasingly, they are pushing costs onto the employee by raising deductibles and through premium sharing.

Now, with the pandemic, employers are struggling just to stay in business, and health insurance has truly become a financial burden, he says. In addition, states will be unable to balance their budgets and will try to reduce their Medicaid obligations.

“Before COVID-19 hit, healthcare spending was supposed to grow by 5% a year, but that won’t happen for some time into the future,” Pearl said. “The COVID economic crisis is likely to continue for quite some time, forcing physicians to either accept much lower payments or find better ways to provide care.”

Like Berwick, Pearl believes healthcare will have to move to value-based payments. “Instead of producing more services, doctors will have to preserve resources, which is value-based healthcare,” he said. The primary form of value-based reimbursement, Pearl thinks, will be capitation, in which physicians agree to quality and service guarantees.

Even steadfast opponents of many of Biden’s reforms foresee value-based payments taking off. “Certainly, there are ways to improve the current healthcare system, such as moving to value-based care,” said Orrico at the neurosurgeons’ group.

In short, a wide swath of observers agree that doctors are facing major changes in the payment and delivery of healthcare, regardless of whether Biden is elected and succeeds with his health agenda.

Notice that no one has mentioned tort reform in healthcare. Why Not???????

The Increasing Infection Rate and Tips for Running Your Practice or Your Business in a Coronavirus/Pandemic Crisis

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Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, expressed recently that 200,000 Americans could die even “if we do things perfectly.” However, the Society of Critical Care Medicine has projected that more than 960,000 people in the United States may require ventilators during the course of this pandemic. A study from the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Center in the UK gathered data from a sample of those on advanced respiratory support as treatment for COVID-19. Sixty-six percent of those patients died. If these numbers are correct, then we may see over 600,000 deaths in the United States by the time this pandemic is over, and those numbers may increase if we are unable to produce enough ventilators for our response. Each day the numbers get worse.

We need a national strategy

Local government officials across the nation are implementing curfews and extreme social distancing measures. However, in these same states, we continue to see people congregating on beaches, at parks and in other public areas. The federal government’s inability to take decisive action will lead to a wave of death that in many ways will be much worse than the disaster seen on 9/11. Federal officials have plucked the low-hanging fruit of mitigation — and now it’s time to reach deeper and enact a national quarantine.

Part of that strategy is a plan for our practices as healthcare givers and other small and medium business owners and managers. 

I found an interesting article written by Debra A. Shute included in a Medscape email. As I was reviewing the article and editing it for my use I found that during these difficult times, when businesses are being cut back or shut down that many of these suggestions can be applied to all of us in our times of financial and healthcare needs. 

We all have the same requirements as small or medium sized businesses. We want to survive, protect our businesses and our employees, assist our clients, so that when the pandemic is over, we can get back to what we do best, running our business, whatever that might be.

I was also amazed this morning when I went in to the office to take a look at what additional PPEs that I had to give to the local hospitals and clinics. I already loaded up a full SUV of gloves, surgical gowns and masks. Anyway, I noticed an office, a vein clinic, still open with at least 14 cars in their office parking lot. Is this office a necessity? I think not and what are they thinking driving from an area of increasing COVID-19 infection to our “neck of the woods” where so far, we have a low incidence of COVID-19 infection. More importantly our area has a larger population of older patients. Think of Italy and their mortality due mostly to the fact that they have the second oldest population in the world.

What is this physician thinking? Evidently the greed factor plays a role here and not the safety of her patients, her staff and yes, even herself as a physician. I am amazed and disheartened to see this idiocy in such a serious crisis.

Considerations to consider in this time of a pandemic:

  1. Do you or your practice need to continue to keep your practice doors open to see patients? Many states are mandating shutting all nonessential businesses including physician and nurse practitioner offices unless essential emergent care is needed. The same questions can be applied to most businesses if you think your business is essential and the state government hasn’t shut down with threats of jail time and fines.
  2. What patients are you going to see in this time of crisis and what are the challenges. i.e. eighty or older patients with no suspicious symptoms for the COVID-19 virus.
  3. The safety of three parts of your practice- a. your patients, b. your staff and c. you the treating practitioner.

If you need to continue to run your practice what tips can we provide? Debra Shulte, a freelance writer, summarized it in her article: 7 Tips for Running Your Practice in the Coronavirus Crisis, which appeared on the Medscape Web post. The rapidly increasing numbers of COVID-19 cases in the US raises the possibility that some physician and nurse practitioner offices will need to decide or be forced to close temporarily, as occurred in London last month as well as many areas in the U.S. Just recently, Maryland’s Governor Hogan sent out through the Health Department new regulations closing offices. So, now many practices across the country have to adjust to the way they operate, amid daily changes in this pandemic. The question is-what should you do to adapt to this new way of operating your practice?

  1. Create a Task, Practitioner and Staff Force or Core Team to Manage Change

“The readiness of medical practices to address the myriad challenges posed by this crisis has so far been a mixed bag”, said Owen Dahl, MBA, a Texas-based medical management consultant. Leadership is going to have to access what’s happening in the community, what’s happening with staff members who may or may not have the disease and may or may not have to self-quarantine.” Dahl said.

The physicians, the administrator, CEO, or managing partner should be involved in decision making as the global crisis unfolds, added Laurie Morgan, MBA, a California-based practice management consultant. And depending on the size of the practice, it may be useful to delegate specific components of this work to various department managers or other individuals in the group.

The Team should assess:

  1. Recommendations and/ or mandates from local, state, and federal governments
  2. Guidance from specialty and state medical societies
  3. How to triage patients over the phone, i.e. what questions to ask? Can they participate in Virtual visits and do they and your office have the hardware and software technology? Or can or should they be referred to an alternate site of care (culture sites).
  4. Where to send patients, if necessary, for testing?
  5. The practice’s inventory of personal protective equipment (PPE)
  6. Review of and possible revision of current infection control policies
  7. Possible collaborations within the community including hospitals, clinics and Health Departments, etc.
  8. Reimbursement policies for suspected COVID-19 triage, testing, and follow-up treatment- in office or virtually. Interestingly enough there is a new ICD-10 code for COVID-19 for coding visits and treatment.
  9. Whether some employees’ work (e.g. billing, coding) can be done remotely
  10. Options for paying personnel in the case of a temporary shutdown
  11. What’s covered and excluded by the group’s business interruption insurance
  12. Consider Postponing Nonessential Appointments

What’s more, it is critical for practices to form a strategy that does not involve bringing patients into the office, said Javeed Siddiqui, MD, MPH, an infectious disease physician, epidemiologist, and chief medical officer of TeleMed2U. “One thing we really have to recognize in this pandemic is that we don’t want people going and sitting in our waiting room. We don’t want people coming, and not only exposing other patients, but also further exposing staff. Forward triaging is going to be essential in this type of pandemic.”

One medical group, with multiple locations in Massachusetts, for example, announced to patients recently that it will postpone appointments for some routine and elective procedures, as we have done in my practice, as determined by the group’s physicians and clinical staff.

“Taking this step will help limit the number of people passing through our facilities, which will help slow the spread of illness (as recommended by the CDC),” noted in an email blast to patients.

  1. Overcommunication to Patients

With a situation as dynamic and unprecedented as this, constant and clear communication with patients is crucial. “said Morgan. “In order to be effective and get the word out, you have to be overcommunicating.”

Today’s practices have ways to communicate to keep people informed, including email, text messaging, social media patient portals, and even local television and radio.

One email or text message to the patient population can help direct them to the appropriate streams of information. Helping direct patients to updated information is critical.

In contrast, having the front desk field multitudes of calls from concerned patients ties up precious resources, according to Siddiqui. “Right now, practices are absolutely inundated, patients are waiting on hold, and that creates a great deal of frustration,” he said. Work out how to manage the crisis calls!

“We really need to take a page from every other industry in the United States, and that is secure SMS, email communication, and telehealth,” Siddiqui said. “Healthcare generally tends to be a laggard in this because so many people think, ‘Well, you can’t do that in healthcare,’ as opposed to thinking, ‘How can we do that in healthcare?”

  1. Take Advantage of Telemedicine

Fortunately, technology to interact with patients remotely is almost ubiquitous. Even for practices with little experience in this arena, various vendors exist that can get secure, HIPAA-compliant technologies up and running quickly. Many of the practice management electronic medical records systems already have the capacity for telemedicine including patient portals.

Various payers have issued guidance regarding reimbursement for telemedicine specific to COVID-19, and on March 6, Congress passed a law regarding Medicare coverage and payment for virtual services during a government-declared state of emergency. Some of the rules about HIPAA compliance in telemedicine have been eased for this emergency.

But even with well-established telemedicine modalities in place, it’s crunch time for applying it to COVID-19. “You need to find a way to have telemedicine available and use it, because depending on how this goes, that’s going to be clearly the safest, best way to care for a huge number of people,” said Darryl Elmouchi, MD, MBA, chief medical officer of Spectrum Health System and president of Spectrum Health Medical Group n Michigan.

 “What we recognize now, both with our past experience with telehealth for many years and specifically with this coronavirus testing we’ve done, is that it’s incredibly useful both for the clinicians and the patients,” Elmouchi said.

One possibility to consider is the tactic used by Spectrum, a large integrated healthcare system. The company mobilized its existing telemedicine program to offer free virtual screenings for anybody in Michigan showing possible symptoms of COVID-19. “We wanted to keep people out of our clinics, emergency rooms, and urgent care centers if they didn’t need to be there, and help allay fears,” he said.

Elmouchi said his company faced the problems that other physicians would also have to deal with. “It was a ton of work with a dedicated team that focused on this. The hardest part was probably trying to determine how we can staff it,” he said.

With their dedicated virtual team still seeing regularly scheduled virtual patients, the system had to reassign its traditional teams, such as urgent care, and primary care clinicians, to the virtual screening effort. “Then we had to figure out how we could operationalize it. It was a lot of work,” Elmouchi said.

Telemedicine capabilities are not just limited to screening patients, but can also be used to stay in touch with patients who may be quarantined and provide follow-up care, he noted.

Luckily in my practice we have used forms of telemedicine for many years either email or texts are the patient’s favorite mode of communication and virtual video chat only if necessary due the fact that my practice is a surgical practice. However, in these critical times I only want to see those needing urgent attention. If they report suspicious symptoms then we need to consider where to refer them. 

Therefore-

  • Identify COVID-19 Testing sites

Access to tests remains a problem in the U.S., but is improving by the week. Just consider the most recent announcement that they now have a test that can give results in 15 minutes. For practices that can attain the tests themselves, not in my practice, it will still require some creativity to administer them with as little risk as possible. In South Korea, for example, and increasingly in the U.S, healthcare organizations are instructing patients waiting to be tested to stay in their cars and have a practitioner wearing the proper PPE go out to patients to test them there. Alternatively, some practices may opt to have PPE-wearing staff members bring PPE to patients in their cars and then escort them to a designated testing area in the building-through the back door if noninfected patients are still being seen. I don’t recommend this last option because of the shortage of PPE equipment unless the patient is such a high risk and has multiple co-morbidities and needs a in depth exam. Here I suggest an in car rapid culture/test and if the need warrants to refer to the medical center better setup to manage the patient.

“Once in the office, you still need to isolate virus patients in any way you can,” Dahl said. “In fact, you may want a negative-pressure environment if possible, with the air being sucked out rather than circulating,” he said, adding that a large restroom with a ventilation system could be repurposed as a makeshift exam room. Here I am adamant! If you are going to see sick viral patients your practice should have negative pressure rooms. This protects the staff, other patients and you the practitioners.

Community testing sites are another possibility, my favorite option, given proper coordination with other healthcare organizations and community officials. Siddiqui has been working with several communities in which individual clinics and hospitals are unable to handle testing on their own, and have instead collaborated to create community-testing sites in tents on local athletic fields.

“One of our communities is looking at using the local college parking lot to do drive-through testing there,” he said. “We really need to embrace collaboration much more than we’ve ever done.”

 This is in fact what we have set up in our small town, using the local community college parking lots, etc.

Collaboration also requires sharing supplies and PPE, noted Dahl. “Don’t hoard them because of the shortage. Look at your inventory and make sure you can help whomever you may be sending patients to. “And if your office is falling short, Dahl advises checking with offices in your community that may be closing, such as dentists or plastic surgeons, for supplies you can purchase or simply have. I did this in my office, donating an SUV full of surgical gowns, facemasks and boxes of gloves to the hospital to deliver to whom needs them most.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued some guidance to healthcare providers about shortages of surgical masks and gowns, including advice about reusable cloth alternatives to gowns.

In addition, some hospitals have asked clinicians to keep their masks and provide guidance on how to conserve supplies. Our medical facility set up a Task Force to analyze, assess and allocate supplies calling on physicians and dentists, etc.

  • Preparing to Potentially Shut Down

A temporary closure may be inevitable for some practices. “Maybe the physician owners will not feel like they have a choice,” said Morgan. “They feel like they want to stay open for as long as they can; but if it’s not safe for patients or not safe for employees, maybe they’ll feel it’s better if they check out for a bit.” And remember if you are sick or one of your partners is sick or a member of your staff the stress becomes multiplied and, potential errors occur and everyone suffers!

Handling the financial ramifications of closure is a top priority as well, and will require a full understanding of what is and isn’t covered by the practice’s business interruption insurance. Practices that don’t have a line of credit should reach out to banks and the Small Business Administration immediately, according to Dahl and of course me. Practices that have lines of credit already may want to ask for an increase. Although the 2 trillion-dollar COVID-19 rescue bill may assist healthcare facilities. Meet and work with your account to review your financial liabilities, losses and needs for the future!

My other suggestion and that of many experts is to Apply for an SBA loan (CARES Act loan) to acquire working capital.

  • See: U.S. Small Business Administration, Disaster Loan Assistance
    Due to current traffic, non-peak hours are optimal 7pm – 7am EST.

Loan Application Checklist

Forecasting Cash Inflows for 13 Weeks

  • You may not have all of the information; however, don’t let that keep you from conducting this exercise. Use your best estimates, evaluate your forecast real-time (daily), and adjust the forecast as you go.
  • It may be easiest to start with the prior year’s weekly revenue and adjust accordingly. 
  • When determining cash inflows, consider any ongoing operations, accounts receivable, retained earnings, owner loans, and/or financial support from lenders (such as lines of credit or SBA above).
  • Decide how you will manage late fees/ waivers from your patients, customers and clients.

Forecasting Cash Obligations for 13 Weeks- Leverage your Networks. 

  • Watch and prepare for outside influences including landlords, local, state, and   federal actions
  • Determine where obligations may need to be reduced
  • Negotiate with Vendors and seek extensions* 
    – If this seems daunting, start with those you spend the most money. 
  • Negotiate with Credit Card Companies
    – Can you reduce your minimum payment or increase your line of credit?
  • Negotiate rent with Landlords 
    – Consider evaluating any lease agreements that include Force Majeure clauses (freeing both parties from liability or obligation when an extraordinary event or circumstance beyond the control of the parties) and work with your legal counsel to evaluate options and/or circumstances that may invoke this provision.
    – If you own the building, contact your lender to evaluate term extensions, etc.
  • Develop Staffing Plan with the Assistance of Legal Counsel
    – What can you afford based on your forecast? 
    – Do you need to reduce hours, reduce staff through lay-offs or furloughs? 
    – Consider job sharing options (1 staff member M, W, 2nd staff member works T, Th)

Protecting employees’ income is challenging as well. For employees who are furloughed, consider allowing them to use their sick leave and vacation time during the shutdown-and possibly let staff “borrow” not yet accrued paid time off. I went through this discussion with my staff and ended the discussion with the assurance that if we cut back hours or let people go their jobs were secure when this was all over and that I guaranteed them financial support for rent and food, etc. for however long the shutdown lasts. Our practice sets aside a savings account for emergencies.

        Considerations for Furlough/Layoff
– If you are to keep staff, identify specific job responsibilities. 
– If your staffing plan includes remote employment, which I will discuss in the next section, you may need to determine how to utilize your staff in a remote capacity. For example, can they work on updating your practice’s website and/or before & after galleries, build out social media marketing calendars, mine your practice management system, etc. More discussion will be found in the next section where I discuss working from home.

Marketing
– Determine ROI on current efforts. What’s working/what’s not/what’s the plan moving forward?

However, there’s a risk with certain jobs in a medical practice that tend to have extremely high turnover, so physicians and administrators may be reluctant to pay people too much because they don’t know for sure those employees will come back to those jobs,” Morgan said. “On the other hand, if you have had a stable team for a very long time and feel confident that those employees are going to stay, then you may make a different decision.” Therefore, if you need to cut back staff temporarily, when things stabilize you will have able and willing staff and not need to find new employees who will need to be trained, etc.

  1. Seize Work-From- Home Opportunities

“Even if the practice isn’t seeing patients, there may be opportunities for some employees, such as billers, coders and schedulers, to continue to work from home.” Morgan noted. Particularly if a practice is behind on it’s billing, a closure or slowdown is an ideal time to catch up. This measure will keep at least some people working-perhaps including some individuals who can be cross-trained to do other tasks-and maintain some cashflow when the practice needs it most.

Other remote-friendly jobs that often fall by the wayside when practices are busy include marketing tasks such as setting up or updating Google business pages, Healthgrades’s profiles, and so on, noted Morgan.  And make sure your staff has the software and hardware to support Work-from Home strategies.

“Another thing that can be even more important, and is often overlooked, is making sure health plan directories have correct information about your practice,” she added. “These are pesky, often tedious tasks that may require repeated contact with health plans to fix things-perfect to do when the office is not busy or closed.”

For administrators and billers, if the practice is able to keep paying these employees while partially or fully closed, it can also be an excellent time to do the sort of analysis that takes a lot of focused attention and is hard to do when busy. Some examples: a detailed comparison of payer performance, analysis of referral patterns, or a review of coding accuracy. Morgan suggested. 

We had an excellent opportunity to have our staff analyze our practice and plan our future move to a new facility and start packing, etc. Make use of your employees and the opportunities that you have been putting off due to your busy practice!

As with many, HIPAA is a leading concern, though it needn’t be, according to Morgan and the notification of the relaxation of some HIPAA regulations to allow various forms of communication with our patients.

Finally, as the crisis begins to abate, practices and businesses must keep working in teams to evaluate and structure an orderly return to business as usual, gleaning best practices from colleagues whenever possible. Strategize how to re-boot your practice or any of the other businesses. Consider what the world will look like when the crisis is over and plan how to rebuild and reschedule, etc.

“I would tell practices this is not a time when anyone is competing with anyone.” Said Elmouchi. The more collaboration between practices and health systems that have larger resources the better.”

I would add that the physicians and other practitioners as well as the other businesses who were forced to close need to support your staff though these difficult times and acknowledge their importance and your gratitude for their hard work and sacrifices during this crisis. Save some time AFTER the pandemic is over and there is no possibility of health risk to have lunch or dinner or just time to celebrate surviving.

As I mentioned any small or medium business can use this set of tips to survive in this tempestuous time. As the restaurants are doing, create a pickup system, or use your employees to create a delivery system to keep as many of your employees on the job. You can also evaluate your marketing and do some strategic planning. It is the time to use your staff to plan the future together and

Engage in Team building so that when the pandemic is over you will create a more effective, efficient system to deliver what ever you goal or goals are to your patients, clients or customer want and need. Be creative and this is the time to consider process improvement. 

Use the time wisely. Over communicate with your patients, clients and customers and more important your staff including document your plans and use a decision tree for staff and referral businesses including possible Web site announcements.

Also, realizing the there are many that may need federal aid/loans, if you decide that you may need assistance apply now!! And don’t let all this stress you or your staff out! Work together with your staff and your patients and network through this pandemic crisis and for the future.

Red and Blue America see eye-to-eye on one issue: the nation’s health care system needs fixing and What is Missing in Medicare for All and What is Stressing Us All?

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USA TODAY’s Jayne O’Donnell noted that Health care is one of the most divisive issues of the 2020 presidential campaign, with candidates disparaging insurers and polarizing labels creating deep divisions even among Democrats. But remove the buzzwords from the policies, and voters who will decide the election aren’t so far apart in their own positions, new research shows. But remember what I have been questioning for the last at least 6 months- with all the concern why hasn’t neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have done anything when they had control, i.e. had the majorities in the House or the Senate? And will Mike Bloomberg come to the Democrats’ recur and solve everyones’ problems?

Regardless of party affiliation, nearly everyone wants to see the nation’s health care system improved, and a majority want big changes. That includes people for whom the system is working well, and those who may be political opposites. 

That’s the big picture finding of a new Public Agenda/USA TODAY/Ipsos survey of Americans’ attitudes on health care. The survey is part of the Hidden Common Ground 2020 Initiative, which seeks to explore areas of agreement on major issues facing the nation.

The nationally representative survey of 1,020 adult Americans 18 years and older was conducted December 19-26, 2019. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points. 

The survey removed politically charged language such as “Medicare for All” and “Obamacare” and simply explained the basics of health care approaches in an effort to capture voters’ true opinions. 

“There’s the making of a public conversation about this and it does not need to be around ideology,” said Will Friedman, president of Public Agenda, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research and public engagement organization. “People just aren’t so set on what they want.”

The sharpest divides were on the size of government and taxes. 

In general, Democrats were more comfortable with a larger role for the federal government, such as the single-payer government insurance program also called Medicare for All, or a public option.

Instead of saying “public option” though, pollsters asked respondents how strongly they agreed with the concept of a new federal health insurance program that gives people a new choice beyond the current private insurance market.

Any adult could buy into the program on a sliding scale, they were told, and 48% were in favor. A survey released last week by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation found similar support, with the same percentage of Americans favoring such an option.

When described in general terms, 46% of respondents said they would support market-based plans and 45% could back Medicare for All-type plans.  

Five goals were rated by more than 90% of those surveyedas very or somewhat important: making health care more affordable for ordinary Americans; lowering the cost of prescription drugs; making sure people with preexisting medical conditions can get affordable health insurance; covering long-term care for the elderly and disabled; and making sure all communities have access to enough doctors and hospitals.

So why the gridlock?

“There are these sort of flashpoints with politicized terminology that send people to their partisan corners,” said former Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas, a Republican who is on the board of the bipartisan, nonprofit United States of Care. “If we avoid them, we’re going to be more successful.”

John Greifzu, a survey respondent and school janitor in Fulton, Illinois, used to be a Democrat and “almost middle of the road.” Now, after being a single father of three children until his recent marriage, health insurance costs have made him distrust his party.

His wife is “paying an arm and a leg” — up to a third of a paycheck — for “bottom of the barrel” insurance that comes with a $2,000 deductible through her retail job. And even on the Medicaid plans that cover his children, there are things that aren’t covered, he said.

Greifzu watched his insurance costs rise as it became offered to the unemployed. 

“I work hard for what I’ve got,” said Greifzu. “I’m not going to give up more money for people who don’t do anything.” 

Emily Barson, United States of Care’s executive director, said the survey “validates our worldview … that people agree more than the current political rhetoric would have you believe.” 

It also shows success at the state level is particularly promising, Barson added.

Before the midterm congressional elections, some Republican members of Congress avoided unscripted town halls with voters as concerns rose about the fate of the Affordable Care Act and protections for people with preexisting conditions. In states, Douglas said governors and state officials can’t avoid voters — or each other. 

State officials need to get elected too, but “more importantly, we (states) have to balance our budgets every year,” said Douglas, now a political science professor at Middlebury College.

Friedman noted, however, that voters made it clear in their responses that they don’t want policymakers to leave health care issues to the states. When queried on the specifics, respondents said they didn’t want moving from state to state to make health care any more complicated.  

“In terms of the overarching solution, the public would like to see it solved nationally,” he said. 

Larry Levitt, senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, said most of all it’s clear voters want something done about the prices they pay. 

“Americans across the political spectrum desperately want relief from health care costs,” Levitt said, “and at some point they’re going to hold political leaders to account for not delivering.”

Obamacare, Medicare and more 

The findings from the Public Agenda/USA TODAY/Ipsos poll are part of an election-year project by USA TODAY and Public Agenda. The Hidden Common Ground initiative explores areas of agreement on major issues facing the nation.

The survey of 1,020 adult Americans 18 years and older was taken December 19-26, 2019. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 5.7 percentage points for Democrats, plus or minus 6.2 percentage points for Republicans and plus or minus 5.7 percentage points for independents. 

The Hidden Common Ground project is supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The Kettering Foundation serves as a research partner to the Hidden Common Ground initiative.

Cost of health care, lack of data security stress us out. It’s time to claim our rights.

USA TODAY opinion contributor, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn reported that Americans are stressed out about health care.

Whether it concerns costs, access to treatment or ability to navigate the system, the American Psychological Association, in its 2019 Stress in America survey, found that 69% of people in the United States say health care is a major source of stress in their life.

We’re also stressed about privacy and data security. We live with a patchwork quilt of laws but no overarching protection that allows us to control our personal information.

As Americans, we need to demand our health citizenship. What does this mean? That people claim health care and data privacy as civil rights.

Polls show that most Americans, from top income earners to people living with much less, believe that it’s unfair for wealthier people to have access to better health care.

In an election year where there seems to be little consensus, two issues on which most American voters agree is the need to lower prescription drugs costs and to protect patients with preexisting conditions. These are priorities that cross party lines in 2020.

What’s driving this cross-party consensus? It’s the reality of patients spending increasingly higher amounts of household income on high-deductible health plans, medical services and prescription drugs. Forcing patients to have more financial “skin in the game” has led millions of Americans to forgo care altogether or to self-ration care by not getting recommended tests and not filling prescriptions.

The second driver for the declaration of health citizenship is the urgent need to protect our personal health information.

In 1996, when the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act was enacted, the introduction of the iPhone was 11 years away. The internet was dial up to AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy. And per-capita spending on health care averaged $3,759 (in 2018, it was $11,172).

Health care in 2020 is digitally based, with most physicians and hospitals in America using electronic health records and providers conducting care online via web-based services. Health care is quickly moving to the home, to our cars and even inside our bodies with implants. Wearable technology, remote health monitoring and mobile apps increasingly support our self-care and shared-care with clinicians.

Our health data is vulnerable

Those interactions create new data points. So do daily interactions with our phones and retail purchases. That information, when mashed up with our health care data, can be used to predict our health status, identify emergent conditions like a heart attack or stroke, and customize medications for patients.

But the data generated by our daily lives, outside of HIPAA-covered entities such as doctors, hospitals and pharmacies, is not for the most part covered by existing laws. We are exposed to third-party brokers who monetize our data without telling us how it’s used and without sharing the revenue they make from our personal information.

Universal care is basic right

What would a new era of health citizenship look like? Every American would be covered by a health plan — however we fashion it.

Universal health care, American-style, could come in many forms, including through proposals under debate during the election cycle. All residents in our peer nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development enjoy some form of health care plan. Most of these countries spend less on health care per person and realize better health outcomes.

One reason is that those nations spend more per person on social factors that help determine a person’s health.

Education, for example, is a major predictor of people’s health. Sir Angus Deaton and Anne Case’s research into the “deaths of despair” in America identified lack of education as a risk factor. Lawmakers need to “bake” health into food and agriculture, transportation, housing and education policies to improve the health of all Americans regardless of income or education levels.

We also need to help people understand the growing role of data in everyday life. Virtually everyone leaves digital dust in the use of mobile phones, credit cards and online transactions. Our peers in Europe enjoy the privacy protection afforded by the General Data Protection Regulation, which defends the “right to be forgotten.” In the United States, we lack laws that sufficiently protect our personal data.

Voting is part of health citizenship, too. The Stress in America survey cited the 2020 presidential election as a major source of Americans’ stress. Let’s make the act of voting a part of our pursuit of good health’

Medicare for All is really missing the point’: Experts say program needs work

Ken Alltucker of USA TODAY, reported that when Robert Davis’ prescription medication money ran out weeks ago, he began rationing a life-sustaining $292,000-per-year drug he takes to treat his cystic fibrosis.

Tuesday, the suburban Houston man and father of two got a lifeline in the mail: a free 30-day supply of a newer, even more expensive triple-combination drug with an annual cost of $311,000.

The drug will bring him relief over the next month, but he’s uncertain what will happen next. Although the 50-year-old has Medicare prescription drug coverage, he can’t afford copays for it or other drugs he must take to stay healthy as he battles the life-shortening lung disorder. 

Davis is among millions of Americans with chronic disease who struggle to pay medical bills even with robust Medicare benefits. More than one in three Medicare recipients with a serious illness say they spend all of their savings to pay for health care. And nearly one in four have been pressured by bill collectors, according to a study supported by the Commonwealth Fund.

As Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and others tout “Medicare for All” to change the nation’s expensive and inequitable health care system, some advocates warn the Medicare program is far from perfect for the elderly and disabled enrolled in it. 

The word “Medicare” was mentioned 17 times during Wednesday night’s debate in the context of a national health plan or a public option people could purchase. However, there’s been little to no discussion among the candidates in debates about the actual status of the health program that covers about 60 million Americans.Ad

One in two Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents want to hear more about how candidates’ plans would affect seniors on Medicare, making it the top health-related concern they’d like candidates to discuss, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll released Wednesday. 

“We fear the debate about ‘Medicare for All’ is really missing the point,” says Judith Stein, director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy. “What most people don’t know is the current Medicare program has a lot of problems with it. We need to improve Medicare before it becomes a vehicle for a broad group of people.”

Medicare for All faces broad political challenges. About 53% support a national Medicare for All plan, but that support drops below 50% with more details about paying taxes to support a single-payer system, according to the Kaiser poll.

Nearly two in three moderate voters in Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are skeptical of a plan to use Medicare as a vehicle for comprehensive health coverage, another Kaiser and Cook Political Report poll released this month shows. A group funded by pharmaceutical companies, health insurers and hospitals has lobbied against Medicare for All, and a survey released by HealthSavings Administrators reported participating employers oppose the plan.

This month, Warren released more details about her health plan, calling for a public option within the first 100 days of her presidency. She said it was not a retreat from Medicare for All, even as a Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Poll showed her support in Iowa dropped to 16%.

Stephen Zuckerman is a health economist and co-director of the Urban Institute Health Policy Center. He says the Medicare for All proposals expand coverage beyond what Medicare beneficiaries get.

“If you hear about Medicare for All, you might think it’s the current Medicare program for all people,” Zuckerman said. “But that’s not what the Medicare for All proposals are presenting. They are looking at plans that are far more generous, in terms of the benefits they cover and to some extent the cost sharing.”

The fundamental promise of Medicare for All builds on a public program that works well for adults over 65 and people who are unable to work because of disability. Although Medicare rates high in satisfaction among most who have it, a portion of people who need frequent, expensive care struggle financially.

The Commonwealth Fund-supported survey of 742 Medicare beneficiaries reported 53% of those with “serious illness” had a problem paying a medical bill. The study defined serious illness as one requiring two or more hospital stays and three or more doctor visits over three years.

Among these seriously ill patients, the most common financial hardship involved medication. Nearly one in three people reported a serious problem paying for prescriptions. People had problems paying hospital, ambulance and emergency room bills, according to the survey.

Eric Schneider, a Commonwealth Fund senior vice president for policy and research, says the survey’s findings show seriously ill Medicare recipients face “significant financial exposure.

“The expectation is that people would be relatively well-covered under Medicare,” Schneider says. “We’re seeing it has gaps and holes, particularly considering the level of poverty many elderly still live in.”

‘More illness, more sickness’

Davis, the Houston-area man, has rationed expensive but critical modulator drugs, which seek to improve lung function by targeting defects caused by genetic mutations. 

When he ran out of the drug Symdeko last November, he coughed up blood, had digestive problems and was hospitalized for a week. This month, he took half the amount he was prescribed, hoping he’d have enough pills to last through the year.  

“It alters my breathing a lot,” Davis says. “I’m more congested. I start slowing down, more illness, more sickness.”

Davis has Medicare prescription coverage, but he couldn’t afford Symdeko’s $1,200 monthly copay. He needs to pay an additional $600 each month for a less expensive drug, pulmozyme, which breaks down and clears mucus from his lungs. The medication he takes is critical to keep his lungs functioning and to limit infections. 

A private foundation offers copay assistance up to $15,000 each year, a threshold Davis reached this month. Like a year ago, as rent, food and utility bills took most of his disability income, the math didn’t work. He could no longer afford drugs when the foundation’s annual help ran out.

A 30-day supply of the newer drug, Trikafta, was provided by the drug’s manufacturer free of charge. Davis worries he will run into the same problem when he’s again forced to cover a copay he can’t afford.

His Medicare coverage is sufficient for doctor visits and hospital stays, but he says drug costs for cystic fibrosis patients are “out of control.” 

“Research is expensive – I understand that,” Davis says. “They are making lifesaving drugs that very few cystic fibrosis patients can afford and that a lot of insurance plans will balk at.”

Vertex Pharmaceuticals, the company that makes Symdeko and Trikafta, says the drugs’ list prices are appropriate.

“Our CF medicines are the first and only medicines to treat the underlying cause of this devastating disease and the price of our medicines reflect the significant value they bring to patients,” the company says in a statement. 

Vertex provides financial assistance to patients such as Davis who need the company’s medications. 

“Our highest priority is making sure patients who need our medicines can get them,” the company says. “Every patient situation is different, and our (patient-assistance) team works individually with patients who are enrolled in the program to evaluate their specific situations and determine what assistance options are available.” 

‘Public Medicare plan is withering’

Advocates such as Stein want presidential candidates to address Medicare’s coverage gaps and other challenges mill

ions of beneficiaries face.

The Commonwealth Fund survey did not report whether participants had traditional Medicare plans or Medicare Advantage plans, which are administered by private insurance companies such as Aetna or UnitedHealthcare. The report did not ask participants whether they had supplemental insurance, which covers out-of-pocket medical expenses not capped by Medicare. 

People on Medicare typically have robust coverage for hospital stays and doctor charges. But even with “Part D” prescription drug coverage, Davis and others who must take expensive drugs are responsible for copays.

“What is happening is the public Medicare program is withering,” Stein says. “The private, more expensive, less valuable Medicare Advantage program is being pumped up.”

More than one-third of Americans choose private Medicare plans, which entice consumers through add-on services such as vision and dental coverage and perks such as gym memberships. A survey commissioned by the Better Medicare Alliance, which is backed by the private insurance industry, reported 94% of people in private Medicare plans are satisfied with their coverage.

Private Medicare plans restrict the network of available doctors, hospitals and specialists people can see. Traditional Medicare plans allow people to see any doctor or hospital that takes Medicare.

Stein says tailored networks can be problematic for seniors who travel out of state and encounter a medical emergency.

She says private plans frequently change doctors and hospital networks from year to year. Such frequent network changes can surprise Medicare recipients and force them to switch doctors.

“There’s too much confusion, too little standardization,” Stein says. “The inability, when you are really ill or injured, to get the care where you want it and from whom you want it, I think that is completely lost in the discussion.”

This month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order “protecting and improving” Medicare, but some worry it could push more consumers into private plans and lead to more expensive medical bills. Among other things, the order calls for Medicare to pay rates closer to those paid by private insurers. Medicare typically pays doctors less than what private commercial plans pay.

The federal rules based on the executive order haven’t been finalized, so it’s unclear how it might be implemented. 

The executive order “doesn’t seem all that well thought out,” Zuckerman says. Raising Medicare’s payment rates to be on par with private insurance would make the program more expensive and potentially financially vulnerable, he says.

“Public opinion wants to see that program preserved,” Zuckerman says. “At a minimum, I don’t think anyone wants to see Medicare contract.”

US health care system causing ‘moral injury’ among doctors, nurses

Megan Henney of FOX Business noted that the emphasis on speed and money — rather than patient care — in emergency medicine is leading to mass exasperation and burnout among clinicians across the country.

According to a new report published by Kaiser Health News, a model of emergency care is forcing doctors to practice “fast and loose medicine,” including excessive testing that leaves patients burdened with hefty medical bills; prioritizing speed at the cost of quality care and overcrowding in hospitals, among other issues.

“The health system is not set up to help patients,” Dr. Nick Sawyer, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of California-Davis, told Kaiser Health. “It’s set up to make money.”

In October, a 312-page report published by the National Academy of Medicine, a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., found that up to half of all clinicians have reported “substantial” feelings of burnout, including exhaustion, high depersonalization and a low sense of personal accomplishment.

Physician burnout can result in increased risk to patients, malpractice claims, clinician absenteeism, high employee turnover and overall reduced productivity. In addition to posing a threat to the safety of patients and physicians, burnout carries a hefty economic cost: A previous study published in June by the Annals of Internal Medicine estimated that physician burnout costs the U.S. economy roughly $4.6 billion per year, or $7,600 per physician per year.

Physicians suffering from burnout are at least twice as likely to report that they’ve made a major medical error in the last three months, compared to their colleagues, and they’re also more likely to be involved in a malpractice litigation suit, the report found. Each year, about 2,400 physicians leave the workforce — and the No. 1 factor is burnout.

The authors of the report, who spent 18 months studying research on burnout, found that between 35 and 54 percent of nurses and doctors experience burnout. Among medical students and residents, the percentage is as high as 60 percent.

“There is a serious problem of burnout among health care professionals in this country, with consequences for both clinicians and patients, health care organizations and society,” the report said.

But the issue in emergency medicine goes beyond burnout. A 2018 report published by Drs. Wendy Dean and Simon Talbot found that physicians are facing a “profound and unrecognized threat” to their well-being: moral injury.

The term “moral injury” was first used to describe soldiers’ response to war and is frequently diagnosed as post-traumatic stress. It represents “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.”

At the crux of moral injury in physicians is their inability to consistently meet patient’s needs, a symptom of a health-care environment that’s increasingly focused on maximizing profit that leaves clinicians trapped between navigating an ethical path or “making a profit from people at their sickest and most vulnerable.”

“The moral injury of health care is not the offense of killing another human in the context of war,” Dean and Talbot wrote. “It is being unable to provide high-quality care and healing in the context of health care.”

In the one year since they published their paper, Dean and Talbot sparked an international conversation among health care professionals about the moral foundations of medicine, receiving a flood of responses.

“All of us who work in health care share, at least in the abstract, a single mission: to promote health and take care of the ill and injured. That’s what we’re trained to do,” they wrote. “But the business of health care — the gigantic system of administrative machinery in which health care is delivered, documented, and reimbursed — keeps us from pursuing that mission without anguish or conflict.”

And as I am watching the New Hampshire Primary results I am amazed that Bernie is heading the Dems, as they are saying, based on his push for Medicare for All. Just a flawed proposal and evidently there are many that believe this Socialist. I am truly worried.

My Millennial Doctor Peers Think They’re Walking Into a Crisis Regarding Health Care, Doctors Need to Understand Health Care and Buttagieg’s Health Care Plan, Corona Virus and Kobe.

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Dr. Daniel E. Choi announced that ”Hey man, just wanted you to be one of the first to know that I put in my 90-day resignation notice at the hospital. Planning to pursue exec MBA…”

I did a double take at this shocking text from an orthopedic surgery colleague who was also a close friend. What? He was quitting?

We had just slaved through 5 years of orthopedic surgery residency, 1 year of fellowship, and just passed our oral boards. We were now supposed to be living the dream. All of that delayed gratification: throwing away our 20s holed up in the library, taking call endlessly on weekends and holidays. We did it for the ultimate privilege of being attending surgeons for our patients one day.

I called him right away and he confirmed my suspicions about why he quit. As an employed physician in a hospital system, he felt that he was sadly just becoming a cog in the machine, a “provider” generating relative value units. Administrators who had never done a day of residency or even stepped foot in his clinic wanted to provide “guidance” on how he should practice medicine. Overall, he felt that medicine was a sinking ship on which doctors were losing autonomy quickly and that this was a path leading straight to burnout.

I felt I had to let the Twitterverse know.

This tweet went viral and it was clear that I was on to something. I had struck a nerve with many of my physician colleagues. Surprisingly, many physicians empathized with my friend and didn’t blame him for looking elsewhere in finding a fulfilling career. Some physicians even thought he was doing the right thing.

I was getting really curious. I followed up with a Twitter poll: “Physicians, are you actively making plans for early retirement or considering how to possibly exit medicine in the near future?” Sixty-five percent of physicians who replied were considering an early exit from medicine.

This poll result was consistent with my own observation that early retirement online physician groups are burgeoning. Physician Side Gigs on Facebook, which seeks to help “physicians interested in pursuing opportunities outside of traditional clinical medicine…as a way to supplement or even replace their clinical income,” has over 50,000 members. Another Facebook group, Physicians on FIRE, aims to help physicians reach “Financial Independence. Retire Early” and has over 4000 members.

It is difficult to determine whether these physicians seeking early retirement are just wishfully complaining or actually planning an exit strategy. Many physicians answering the Twitter poll clarified that they loved treating and helping their patients but that the system had just become too difficult to deal with. Did this many physicians really want to leave the practice of medicine? What does that mean for our impending physician shortage? Why do so many of us feel the urge to get out?

Many discussions with disenchanted physicians ensued after that poll. In these discussions, I have found several common reasons that have pushed my colleagues to leave medicine.

Devaluation of Physicians on All Fronts

Devaluation appears to be happening on many fronts, according to my discussions with doctors online. There is the use of the term “provider” to replace “physician,” which more of us are finding offensive.

Mid-level providers who are cheaper for health systems to hire are replacing physicians. Reimbursements from commercial payers are declining. Health policy “experts” unfairly blame rising healthcare costs on physicians and have pushed legislators to find ways to lower physician compensation further. There are fewer physician meeting spaces in hospitals, such as doctors’ lounges or physician dining rooms, which used to serve as important spaces for physicians to commiserate and collaborate.

Overall, I sense great disappointment and anger among physicians about what many perceive to be increasing disregard for the tremendous amount of sacrifice physicians have made to complete their training. Physicians increasingly regret all of that time away from family or dropping their personal interests and hobbies during medical school and residency.Most shocking to me, however, is that physicians who speak out about such devaluation are often labeled “greedy doctors” by health policy “experts,” the press, and even fellow physicians (usually in the later stages of their career).

Loss of Autonomy and Independent Physician Opportunities

Personally, I’ve always wanted to be my own boss and I knew fairly early on in training that I wanted to enter private practice. I thought private practice would allow me to insulate myself from many of the forces that pushed my orthopedic surgery colleague to quit.

Mine is not the popular path, however, as the number of millennial physicians who are entering private practice has rapidly declined over the past decade. According to Medscape’s Residents Salary & Debt Report 2019, 22% of residents say they anticipate becoming either a practice owner or partner. According to a survey by the Physicians Foundation and Merritt Hawkins, only 31.4% of physicians identified as independent practice owners or partners in 2018. In 2012, independent physicians made up 48.5% of all doctors.

The survey even revealed that 58% of doctors do not think that hospital employment is a positive trend and concluded that “many physicians are dubious about the employed practice model even though they have chosen to participate in it, perhaps fearing that employment by hospitals will lead to a loss of clinical and administrative autonomy.”

I used to wonder why more of my millennial physician colleagues did not choose private practice as a career path and why so many were choosing hospital-based employment. A line I saw on Twitter sums it up: “Private practice is no longer about profitability. It’s about financial sustainability.” With greater consolidation within healthcare, independent doctors have lost much of their leverage when trying to negotiate fair rates with commercial payers.

In addition, the costs of purchasing an electronic health record and running a staff to deal with authorization and billing issues have made private practice extremely difficult. If more private practice opportunities existed, I am sure that my millennial colleagues would absolutely take them to maintain their independence. However, such independent practice opportunities continue to diminish, and millennial physicians may be pressured to take the only available positions: hospital employment with possible restrictions on autonomy.

Is Your Career Worth Your Own Life?

On average, one doctor a day in the United States ends his or her own life. Physicians commit suicide at a rate twice that of the general population, and over 1 million patients will lose their doctors to suicide every year. Pamela Wible, MD, who studied 1363 physician suicides, points out that “assembly-line medicine kills doctors” and that “pressure from insurance companies and government mandates further crush the souls of these talented people who just want to help their patients.”

Just a couple of months ago, my fellowship director forwarded me an email about a young orthopedic surgeon who had committed suicide, Thomas Fishler. He was known to be a brilliant surgeon whom colleagues and patients loved, and is survived by his young daughter. My fellowship director included in his email, “I know you have an awareness of the risks that those in our profession often face.”

Many physicians are crying for help and nobody is listening. Some sadly feel that the only way out is to end their lives.

Physician suicide is heartbreaking and screams crisis. What is driving brilliant doctors to the edge? I believe it’s further evidence of compounding external pressures that are making the practice of medicine increasingly intolerable. Many physicians are crying for help and nobody is listening. Some sadly feel that the only way out is to end their lives.

I get chills as I push the thought quickly out of my mind: Am I being subjected to this risk? All physicians have their tough days but I have never been anywhere close to being suicidal. But seriously—is it really worth it if I am at even a small risk of becoming that miserable?

Is There an Impending Crisis?

The average millennial physician completes training, looks around, and sees his or her profession in complete shambles. Burnout is rampant. Doctors are committing suicide daily. Many seem to be miserable over their lack of autonomy and loss of standing. The physician starts to take a hard look at the career they are about to embark on and begins to have serious doubts. Then the physician remembers that student loan debt. The average medical student loan debt in 2018, according to AAMC , was $198,000. There’s really no way out at this point; even if your job is going to make you miserable, you are going to push through because you’re on the hook.

And this is where I start to get seriously worried. We will have an entire generation of graduating physicians who will be subjected to forces that have never been present in medicine before. And these forces are actively causing distress and misery among some of my colleagues.

I know that my millennial colleagues have tremendous resilience and grit, as every generation of physicians has in the past. But how long will they put their heads down and fight against these ominous forces before they decide that they’ve had enough and jump ship just like my orthopedic colleague did?

Hope in Advocacy to Avert Crisis

Don’t get me wrong—practicing medicine is still the greatest privilege, and I know that every one of my millennial physician colleagues loves their patients dearly. I am honored that my patients entrust me to take away their pain and suffering in the operating room. I’ve studied and trained for 14 years to become an attending orthopedic spine surgeon; I’m not giving up this privilege that easily. And neither are most millennial physicians.

Millennials may be viewed as entitled, but many of us see that as “ comfort in advocating for themselves and questioning the status quo.” I believe that millennial physicians will not quietly accept the current state of affairs.

I see many impassioned millennial physician advocates becoming active in organizations like the Medical Society of the State of New York or the American Medical Association. These organizations already do excellent advocacy work, and I predict that millennial physicians will become a powerful force within such organizations to protect their profession. Through a unified voice, organized medicine is truly our strongest hope in enacting systemic changes that can prevent further physician demoralization and burnout.

We’re not giving up just yet. The crisis can be averted. Our patients and profession depend on it.

America’s healthiest and unhealthiest states

Cortney Moore noted that when it comes down to the popular saying that “health is wealth,” the states that have high revenue streams and median household incomes also have populations that are wellness-focused. Particularly, the states with the healthiest people are concentrated in the northern half of the U.S. and West Coast, according to America’s Health Rankings annual report conducted by the United Health Foundation.

The United Health Foundation analyzed the 50 states on five core categories, including model behaviors, community and environmental factors, public policies for health care and preventative care, clinical care and the overall health outcomes that result from the previous four.

America’s Health Rankings used a composite index of over 30 metrics to create its annual snapshot of statewide healthy populations, which ultimately helped the organization determine the healthiest to the unhealthiest.

Moreover, the report cited the World Health Organization’s definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity,” in addition to individual genetic predispositions to disease.

The healthiest state is Vermont, which has moved up from 20th place in 1990 to first place in 2019, according to America’s Health Rankings data. In the past 15 years, the state has decreased its air pollution by 47 percent – with fine particles per cubic meter going down from 9.7 to 5.1 micrograms. Additionally, Vermont’s disparity in health status decreased from 49 percent to 17.4 percent in the past year. Other strengths the report noted include low incidences of chlamydia, violent crime and the percentage of uninsured residents.

For the 2019 fiscal year, with the exception to the month of December (which data has yet to be released for at the time of publication), the state of Vermont made over $955 million in revenue from general funds, according to the Agency of Administration. More than $113 million came from health care taxes and assessments that were collected between January 2019 and November 2019.

The median household income in Vermont is $60,076, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, which is close to the national median of $61,937. Moreover, average employee health care premium contributions for a family in the state is said to be $4,996, according to independent researchers at the Commonwealth Fund.

When it comes down to those who have government-funded health insurance plans, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services do not have up-to-date figures since it is collected on a quinquennial basis. However, the agency found that Vermont reported a little over $5.7 million in 2015 for health care expenditures, as noted in an infographic by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Outside the Green Mountain State, the other states that rounded out America’s Health Rankings top 10 are Massachusetts, Hawaii, Connecticut, Utah, New Hampshire, Minnesota, New Jersey, Washington and Colorado.

The unhealthiest state is Mississippi, which has maintained close to 50th place from 1990 to 2019, according to America’s Health Rankings data. Since 1993, low birthweight in Mississippi increased from 9.6 percent to 21 percent of live births. In the past five years, premature death increased by seven percent from 10,354 to 11,043 years lost to people who died before age 75. Premature mortality has increased on a national scale in addition to diabetes and obesity. Other challenges the report noted include a high cardiovascular death rate and percentage of children in poverty.

For the fiscal year of 2019, the state of Mississippi made $166 million in revenue collections, according to the Mississippi Legislative Budget Office, which surpassed the state’s estimate by $30.5 million.

The median household income in Mississippi is $43,567, according to data from the U.S. Census, which is $18,370 less than the national median. Average employee health care premium contributions for a family in the state is $5,133, according to the Commonwealth Fund, which is only $137 more than the premiums employees in Vermont are paying. But, when coupled with Mississippi’s lower median income, the cost of health coverage is substantial.

Mississippi also surpassed Vermont in spending on government-funded health insurance plans. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that Mississippi reported over $21.5 million in 2015 for health care expenditures.

The other states that rounded out America’s Health Rankings bottom 10 were primarily in the South, including, South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana. Indiana was the only Midwestern state to land on the lower one-fifth of the unhealthiest states list.

On a national scale, American health is a mixed bag. Since 2012, smoking among adults has decreased from 24 percent to 16.1 percent, however, obesity among adults increased to 30.9 percent from 11 percent while diabetes among adults increased to 15 percent from 9.5 percent.

In the past three years, drug-related deaths have increased by 37 percent from 14 to 19.2 deaths per 100,000 people. When compared to America’s Health Rankings data from 2007, that is a 104 percent increase.

Environmental conditions have improved as air pollution decreased by 36 percent since 2003 and violent crime decreased by 50 percent since 1993. In the past four years, frequent mental distress increased from 11 percent to 13 percent, which has resulted in an increase of mental health providers, according to the report.

Infant mortality has decreased by 43 percent from 10.2 to 5.8 deaths per 1,000 live births in the past 29 years. However, low birth weight has increased by four percent from eight to 8.3 percent in the past three years, which also happens to be a 19 percent increase from 1993.

The average American spends more than $11,000 per year on health care and accounted for 17.7 percent of the U.S. GDP, according to estimates from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. With spending projected to grow at an average rate of 5.5 percent per year, the U.S. will reach nearly $6 trillion in health care spending by 2027.

Buttigieg’s health care plan would save money while Warren and Sanders plans would cost trillions, analysis finds

Associate Editor Adriana Belmont reported that Health care has been a contentious topic among the Democratic presidential candidates: Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) support Medicare for All while Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D-IN) and former Vice President Joe Biden offer alternatives to universal health care.

A new analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) took a look at the different plans and found that while each proposal would reduce the number of uninsured Americans, the least costly would be Buttigieg’s plan.

“Mayor Buttigieg’s plan would reduce deficits by $450 billion,” according to CFRB, adding that the policy would also “increase gross spending by $2.85 trillion, reduce costs by $1.2 trillion, and raise $2.1 trillion through direct and additional offsets.”

Through Buttigieg’s Medicare for All Who Want It plan, everyone would automatically be involved in universal health care coverage for those who are eligible. The policy would also expand premium subsidies for low-income individuals, cap out-of-pocket costs for seniors on Medicare, and limit what health care providers change for out-of-network care at double what Medicare pays for the same service. At the same time, those who still want to stay on private insurance can do so.

“This is how public alternatives work,” Buttigieg said. “They create a public alternative that the private sector is then forced to compete with.

CRFB estimated that the Indiana mayor’s plan would reduce the number of uninsured by between 20 to 30 million “by improving affordability and implementing auto-enrollment as well as retroactively enrolling and charging premiums to those who lack coverage.” 

‘Building on Obamacare’

Joe Biden’s health care plan, described as “building on Obamacare,” has an estimated gross cost of $2.25 trillion and would add $800 billion to deficits over 10 years. The CRFB also found that “it would reduce costs by $450 billion” and “raise $1 trillion through direct and additional offsets.”

Biden’s plan would reduce the number of uninsured by 15 to 20 million Americans and reduce national health expenditures by 1%. 

Some of his biggest revenue drivers in his plan include coverage expansion revenue feedback, which would create a public option, and end deductibility of prescription drug advertising. Additionally, his capital gains tax and “tax at death” would generate $550 billion.

‘Federal health expenditures would increase somewhat more’

Sen. Sanders, one of the original proponents of Medicare for All, has a plan that’s projected to add $13.4 trillion to deficits over a decade at a gross cost of $30.6 trillion. It would also raise $12.5 trillion in revenue through direct offsets and raise another $3 trillion through additional offsets.

His proposals to eliminate medical debt would cost $100 billion and would raise $1.7 trillion by reducing the costs of prescription drugs. To generate more money for the plan, Sanders would establish a 4% income surtax (projected to raise $4 trillion) and 7.5% employer payroll tax (estimated $4 trillion added). One significant cost in his plan, though, is offering universal long-term care — which would cost $29 trillion. 

“The reality is that Medicare for All will save American families thousands of dollars a year because they will no longer be paying premiums, deductibles and co-payments to greedy private health insurance companies,” Warren Gunnels, senior advisor for the Sanders campaign, told Yahoo Finance in a statement.

“If every major country on earth can guarantee health care to all and achieve better health outcomes, while spending substantially less per capita than we do, it is absurd for anyone to suggest that the United States of America cannot do the same.”

Overall, between 2021 to 2030, the CFRB estimated that Sanders’ plan would increase national health expenditures by 6%, “meaning that federal health expenditures would increase somewhat more than non-federal health spending would fall.”

‘Magical math’ or ‘the biggest middle class tax cut ever’?

Sen. Warren’s plan closely resembles Sanders’ in terms of cost. She stated her plan would cost $20.5 trillion in federal spending over a decade. CFRB found that the plan “would add $6.1 trillion to deficits over ten years under our central estimate.”

Experts disagree over the cost of Warren’s numbers, with one calling it “magical math” and another referring to Warren’s plan as “the biggest middle class tax cut ever.”

According to CRFB, the plan would increase gross spending by $31.75 trillion, reduce costs by $4.7 trillion, raise $14.2 trillion in revenue through direct offsets, and raise another $6.75 trillion through additional offsets. Her health care plan is estimated to increase costs by about 3%, but “the magnitude of these increases would decline over time.”

A major way to fund the plan would be through tax reform. By essentially eliminating tax breaks with private health insurers and requiring employers to contribute to her Medicare for All, she’s projected to generate an estimated $14.2 trillion. Other means of generating revenue for her plan include her wealth tax and a tax on bonds, stocks, and derivatives.

Both the Warren and Sanders plans would reduce the number of uninsured Americans by 30 to 35 million and “nearly eliminate” average premiums and out-of-pocket costs.

Patients can’t afford for doctors to misunderstand the healthcare business

Caroline Yao reported that When I was in medical school, my teachers started a lot of their stories with the same phrase:

“Back in my day, I still helped patients who couldn’t pay.”

“Back in my day, we didn’t have 100 checklists.”

“Back in my day, I didn’t need permission from insurance companies to do my job.”

“Back in my day, a yelp review couldn’t ruin my reputation.”

It happened so often that I wondered if I had shown up to the medical profession 30 years too late. Had I signed up for a sham fairytale?

I had thought doctors were autonomous, benevolent masters with kind voices and encyclopedic knowledge. After entering the field, I’ve found most young doctors struggle to balance convention versus empowerment, and doing good versus doing well. Doctors are the ugly stepchild of healthcare reform; too privileged to warrant help, but too powerless to do our jobs better.

I performed more than 2,500 surgeries during my residency training, and I am embarrassed to say that I do not know what a single one of my patients paid for their operations.

I later learned at the public hospital, surgeons were reimbursed $35 for each emergency appendectomy performed. Where did all that money go? Why didn’t the doctors question the system, or try to regain some control?

The provider will see you now

Somewhere along the way, my title as a doctor has been reduced to “provider,” and my worth dictated by administrators, insurance companies—and the government. The Hippocratic Oath I earnestly recited upon starting medical school is challenged everyday by a system of perverse incentives, where hospitals are paid more for treating the sick than keeping the patient well.

In 2013, 87% of graduating doctors felt uncomfortable with their knowledge of the business of medicine; 81% felt they lacked an understanding of healthcare legislation.

Is the answer that doctors should participate more in determining patient fees and reimbursement schedules? History shows that when doctors controlled payments more directly, graduated systems based on ability to pay were subtle but more ubiquitous. In the era of Aristotle, wealthy physicians did not accept payment, while poorer ones requested them. When 9th-century physician and scholoar Ishaq bin Ali al-Ruhawi wrote the first book of medical ethics, he described physicians as business owners who provided free services during times of patronage from caliphs and sultans. Throughout medieval Europe and during the Ottaman Empire, doctors treated the poor with the help of subsidies from royal courts and churches. Notable physicians such as Sir William Osler, legendary French surgeon and anatomist Guillaume Dupuytren, and physician and founder of Dickinson College, Benjamin Rush also charged rich and poor patients based on a self-made sliding scale.

Today, governments, universities, religious groups, and philanthropists are essentially modern-day barons who fund healthcare for the indigent through public hospitals, grants, and charitable work.

In the US, some physicians are granted partial and full student debt forgiveness from the government for working in underserved or rural communities. However, the majority of physicians who volunteer at free clinics, teaching hospitals, charities, or medical missions often do so only because their practice is flexible or lucrative enough to allow them both time away from paying jobs and the financial means to offer free services.

While physicians in private practice have autonomy over who they treat and how much they charge, physicians who work in hospital systems are more and more removed from managing the whole patient.

In 1983, 76% of doctors owned their own practice versus only 47% in 2016. Young physicians today are fundamentally unaware of the business side of medicine, and that’s bad news for everyone. As is the fact that medical students and residents are consistently and idealistically mentored to ignore the costs of materials and treatments we recommend.

We are taught to deliver care based on strict scientific evidence: the “gold standard” of care. Said gold standard, however, does not account for price, diminishing returns, convenience, or pain. The treatment that works best for a lab rat in a cage does not always translate to the most appropriate care for a person who has far more complex needs.

The cost of your health

A more pragmatic physician understands that patients who are underinsured, uninsured, or improperly educated will often forgo procedures, clinic visits, and medications when those interventions are too expensive or inconvenient.

Cost-conscious surgeons know that using instruments to tie stitches instead of hand-tying stitches can often result in a 10-fold cost savings without sacrificing quality.

I did not know how prohibitively expensive everyday surgical consumables cost until I went on humanitarian missions abroad and worked with surgical teams that could not afford these luxuries. I learned that hemostatic fabric we used like disposable napkins in the US cost $40 for a post-it sized square. A five-inch silicone band-aid costs $20. Bioengineered skin substitutes cost $10,000 for a palm-sized sheet.

My lack of price-awareness is fairly common. Many doctors have stopped accounting for the cost portion of a cost-benefit analysis.

And where doctors have leaned away from understanding cost, others have stepped in. Hospital administrators, governments, and insurance companies now manage the costs of healthcare. Correspondingly, physician compensation is estimated to be under 10% of total US national healthcare spending today. Overhead, administration, ancillary staff, malpractice insurance, and pharmaceuticals account for the majority of costs. For an appendectomy and associated care in 2018, the Medicare allowable compensation for a surgeon’s work is $394; meanwhile, healthcare watchdog organizations quote $13,000 as the fair price for hospitals to charge a patient and US hospitals bill an average of $31,000.

Most surgeons working in large hospitals are unaware of these numbers. They are therefore unable to tell patients how much they will be billed for a given operation. A surgeon in the 1830s in the company of the likes of Dr. Dupuytren would know these numbers.

Patients are often dismayed or surprised that their doctor cannot earnestly explain the cost-benefits of different treatments. A 2013 survey by the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 87% of graduating doctors felt uncomfortable with their knowledge of the business of medicine and 81% felt they lacked an understanding of healthcare legislation.  As surgeons, we have slowly let ourselves become exclusively technicians. Just like Aristotle and Plato said.

By turning our noses up at the business of medicine, we have lost ownership over our patients, and the agency to advocate for them. As Osler said, “The good physician treats the disease. The great physician treats the patient who has the disease.”

We as physicians and surgeons need to recover our identity and learn the business skills that our teachers have forgotten, but our forefathers stood up for.

As China’s Coronavirus Cases Rise, U.S. Agencies Map Out Domestic Containment Plans

Richard Harris reported that China has reported a large surge of cases of the novel coronavirus — upping its count from under 3,000 to over 4,500 as of Tuesday morning. More than 100 deaths have been reported. It is spreading rapidly in many provinces, and sporadic cases have now been reported in 18 other locations outside of China, including Australia, France and Canada.

In the United States, the case count remains at five — all people who had recently returned from Wuhan, China. And at a news conference Tuesday, top U.S. health officials reiterated that the disease — while serious — is not currently a threat to ordinary Americans.

“At this point, Americans should not worry for their own safety,” said Alex Azar, health and human services secretary, at the press briefing Tuesday.

While risk to most Americans remains low, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, noted that “risk is dependent on exposure” and that health care workers or others who know they have been in contact with a person exposed to the virus should take precautions.

The federal government continues to adjust its approach to preventing the disease from taking hold in the U.S. On Monday night, the CDC and the State Department announced that a travel advisory recommending that Americans avoid travel to China when at all possible.

Airport screening is also being expanded from five airports to 20, with the goal of screening all passengers returning from China and letting people know what they should do if they fall ill after they get home.

The CDC is conducting contact investigations of people known to have been in contact with the five patients with confirmed infections, monitoring them for symptoms and testing them if concerning symptoms emerge.

Officials at the CDC are eager to get into China in order to help scientists there answer key questions — such as whether the virus can spread from people who don’t show any symptoms of illness. Azar said at the news conference that he had been pressing his counterpart in China for permission to send investigators.

That plea has been answered, at least to a certain extent. On Tuesday, the World Health Organization announced that it had the green light to send outside experts to China. It was not immediately clear whether that will include scientists from the CDC.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, explained that federal agencies are taking a three-pronged approach to respond to the novel coronavirus: developing and improving diagnostic tests, investigating experimental antiviral drugs, and working to develop a vaccine.

He said if it turns out that the virus can spread from someone who is not showing any symptoms, there would be some changes in the public health response. Similar coronaviruses from past outbreaks — severe acute respiratory syndrome and Middle East respiratory syndrome — did not spread in the absence of symptoms, but that doesn’t mean the new one will behave the same way. Viruses such as measles and influenza can be spread from people who aren’t showing signs of disease.

“Even if there is some asymptomatic transmission, in all the history of respiratory-borne viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks,” Fauci said. “The driver of outbreaks has always been a symptomatic person.”

And lastly condolences go out to the Bryant family and the other members of the helicopter crash in southern California. Kobe will be sure missed but loss of kids really upsets a father like me the most!

Physicians Get Weed Killer; Administrators Get Miracle-Gro And neither is helping, Obamacare Funding Suggestions, Andrew Lang, Year in Review and Google Searches

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Last week Suneel Dhand reported that compared to a couple of years ago, very little has changed in the hospital medical community. 

In fact, I’m sure the divergence of the curves has only grown bigger, as more and more administrators are added to the ranks of healthcare. Look at what happened in Chicago where one of the fairly large hospitals fired 15 of their physicians and replaced them with 15 nurse practitioners last year, and in Texas 27 pediatricians at a chain of clinics in the Dallas area lost their jobs and were replaced by nurse practitioners. 

Quite often in life, the answers to some of the biggest questions we have, are staring us right in the face and incredibly simple. Healthcare can never be fixed unless we radically simplify everything and strip away the unnecessary complexities in our fragmented system. The divergence of the above lines, however, actually represents so much more than just an obnoxious visual. It actually symbolizes what happens when any organization, system, or even country, becomes top-heavy and loses sight of what is happening at the front lines. And in the end, it eventually collapses under its own weight.

When this happens in America, we cannot predict, but consider this: The amount we spend on healthcare would be the 4th largest economy in the world if it stood alone (at $3.5 trillion, only China and Japan have a higher total GDP). With an aging population, increasing chronic comorbidities, and expensive new treatments, if costs are not reined in, healthcare expenditure could account for a third of the entire GDP in about 25 years. A figure that will quite simply destroy the American economy.

It would be one thing if all the administration and bureaucracy was actually resulting in an improved and more efficient healthcare system. But look around you folks. Acute physician shortages now plague every state. Millions of people find it impossible to find a primary care doctor. Certain specialties are now booking out appointments months in advance. ERs and hospitals are overflowing. And in the end, patients are still facing soaring out of pocket expenses.

The last 20 years have witnessed the consolidation and corporatization of the entire U.S. healthcare system. Sold initially as a way to reign in costs, I am yet to see any evidence that it’s done anything other than dramatically increase costs (please feel free to forward me any financial analysis if I’m wrong). And why should that be a surprise to anyone?

I’ll leave you to stare once again at the above graph for a minute or two, and take in a comment that a distinguished physician colleague of mine recently made: “It’s like the physicians have been given weed killer and the administrators have been given Miracle-Gro.”

Affordable Care Act funding in question after health insurance taxes repealed

The Cadillac Tax, Health Insurance Tax and Medical Device Tax were recently repealed, raising questions over how the Affordable Care Act will be funded in the future. Yahoo Finance’s Anjalee Khemlani joins Adam Shapiro, Julie Hyman and Dan Howley during On the Move to break it all down.

Andrew Yang Has The Most Conservative Health Care Plan In The Democratic Primary

Daniel Marans of the Huff Post pointed out that Entrepreneur Andrew Yang has had unexpected staying power in the Democratic presidential primary thanks in part to the enthusiasm for his plan to provide every American with a basic income of $1,000 a month.

But the boldness of his signature idea only serves to underscore the unambitiousness of the health care plan he released earlier this month.

In fact, Yang’s health plan, which he bills as an iteration of the left’s preferred “Medicare for All” policy, is more conservative than proposals introduced by the candidates typically identified as moderate. 

Former Vice President Joe Biden, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota all at least call for the creation of a public health insurance option that would be available to every American. (Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts favor Medicare for All, which would move all Americans on to one government-run insurance plan ― though the two senators disagree on the timeline for implementing the idea.)

In terms of expanding health insurance coverage, Yang says on his website merely that he would “explore” allowing the employees of companies that already provide health insurance the chance to buy into Medicare. 

“We need to give more choice to employers and employees in a way that removes barriers for businesses to grow,” Yang writes.

Under Yang’s plan, people employed by businesses that do not provide insurance, or who are self-employed, would continue to purchase coverage on the exchanges created by former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

The decision not to focus on expanding coverage distinguishes Yang dramatically from his competitors. And in the foreword to his plan, he explains that that is a deliberate choice, since enacting single-payer health care is “not a realistic strategy.”

“We are spending too much time fighting over the differences between Medicare for All, ‘Medicare for All Who Want It,’ and ACA expansion when we should be focusing on the biggest problems that are driving up costs and taking lives,” he writes. “We need to be laser focused on how to bring the costs of coverage down by solving the root problems plaguing the American healthcare system.”

When asked about how Yang plans to expand health insurance coverage ― 27 million Americans remain entirely uninsured and millions more have insurance that is so threadbare they do not use it ― Yang’s campaign referred HuffPost to his website. 

Yang would increase health care access through reforms designed to reduce the health care system’s underlying costs, according to his campaign. On his website, he divides those reforms into six categories: bringing down the cost of prescription drugs through bulk negotiation; investing in waste-saving health care technologies; realigning medical providers’ “incentives” away from waste and abuse; increasing investment in preventive and end-of-life health care; making the provision of health care more “comprehensive”; and reducing the influence of lobbyists on the political system.

Yang implies that his rivals have sacrificed cost control in the name of expanding coverage. But when it comes to the specifics, Yang’s competitors have already gotten behind many of the ideas he is proposing ― and sometimes take them a step further. 

For example, Buttigieg has a provision in his health care plan that would prohibit “surprise billing” ― the practice of providing unwitting patients with a large bill after a medical procedure when a doctor who performed it is not in the hospital’s insurance network. Yang does not mention the practice in his health care plan.

One provision of Yang’s plan that genuinely sets him apart is his plan to encourage the replacement of the fee-for-service billing model for doctors with salaries. The latter model is supposed to cut back on duplicative practices and foster more holistic care. Other elements of his plan, such as “incentivizing” gym memberships, healthy eating and bike commuting as a form of preventive health care, have drawn eye rolls from leftists who regard the ideas as paternalistic.

First and foremost, though, many progressives are likely to find fault with Yang’s plan, because they consider his use of the term “Medicare for All” misleading. 

For months on the campaign trail, Yang claimed that he supported Medicare for All, though not the provision of Sanders’ bill ― and its companion in the House ― requiring people with private insurance to enroll in an expanded Medicare program. 

He even aired a television ad casting his commitment to the policy as a reflection of his experience as the father of a special needs child.

Yang says on his campaign website that he is still firmly committed to the “spirit” of Medicare for All. But now that he has introduced a plan of his own, that claim is harder to defend.

Yet the Yang campaign is plowing full-steam ahead with its appropriation of the term in a new 30-second ad, “Caring.”

“If my husband, Andrew Yang, is president, he’ll fight for Medicare for All with mental health coverage,” Yang’s wife, Evelyn, says in the ad. 

Fate of Obamacare uncertain amid tax repeals, lawsuits and Medicare-for-all push consider that Democrats seize on anti-Obamacare ruling to steamroll GOP in 2020

Alice Miranda Ollstein and James Arkin reported that a court ruling last week putting the Affordable Care Act further in jeopardy may provide the opening Democrats have been waiting for to regain the upper hand on health care against Republicans in 2020.

At the most recent Democratic presidential debate, candidates largely avoided discussing the lawsuit or Republicans’ years-long efforts to dismantle Obamacare, and instead continued their intra-party battle over Medicare for All.

But Senate Democrats, Democratic candidates and outside groups backing them immediately jumped on the news of the federal appeals court ruling — blasting out ads and statements reminding voters of Republicans’ votes to repeal the 2010 health care law, support the lawsuit and confirm the judges who may bring about Obamacare’s demise.

“I think it’s an opportunity to reset with the New Year to remind people that there’s a very real threat to tens of millions of Americans,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said in an interview. “We Democrats are always striving to improve the system, but, at a minimum, the American people expect us to protect what they already have.”

In 2018, Democrats won the House majority and several governorships largely on a message of protecting Obamacare and its popular protections for preexisting conditions. This year continued the trend, with Kentucky’s staunchly anti-Obamacare governor, Matt Bevin, losing to Democratic now-Gov. Andy Beshear.

The landscape in 2020 may be more challenging for Democrats than it was in 2018, when Republicans had more recently voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Republicans also say they now have more ammunition to push back on Democrats’ arguments with the party’s divisions over single-payer health care, which would replace Obamacare, shaping the presidential race.

Moreover, the appeals court’s ruling — which in all likelihood punted any final disposition on the case until after the 2020 elections — eliminates what some Republicans saw as a nightmare scenario: If the court had embraced a lower court ruling striking down the law in its entirety, it would have put the issue before the Supreme Court during the heat of the election, putting tens of millions of Americans’ health insurance at risk.

Still, Democrats believe they can win the political battle over health care, especially in Senate races. At least a half-dozen GOP senators are up for reelection, and Democrats need to net three seats to win back control of the chamber if they also win back the presidency. Democratic strategists and candidates are eager to run a health care playbook that mirrors that of the party’s House takeover in 2018, and say Republicans are uniquely vulnerable after admitting this year that they have no real plan for dealing with the potential fallout of courts striking down Obamacare.

Within a day of the ruling, the pro-Obamacare advocacy group Protect Our Care cut a national TV and digital ad featuring images of Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), warning that if the lawsuit succeeds, “135 million Americans with preexisting conditions will be stripped of protections, 20 million Americans will lose coverage and costs will go up for millions more.”

Other state-based progressive groups told POLITICO they’re readying their own ads going after individual Senate Republicans over the 5th Circuit’s ruling.

Protect Our Care director Brad Woodhouse predicts that it’s just a preview of the wave of attention the issue will get in the months ahead, as Democratic candidates and outside groups alike hammer the GOP on the threat their lawsuit poses to Obamacare.

“If there is one issue in American politics that is going to flip the Senate from Republican to Democratic in 2020, it’s this issue,” he said. “Our message is simple: President [Donald] Trump and Republicans are in court right now, suing to take away the ACA, take away your health care. And if Cory Gardner or Thom Tillis or any of them don’t think that’s an indefensible position, they should ask the 40-plus House Republicans who lost their seats in 2018.”

More than a dozen Republican state attorneys general, backed by the Trump administration, have been arguing in federal court for more than a year that Congress rendered the entire Affordable Care Act untenable when they voted as part of the 2017 tax bill to drop the penalty for not buying insurance down to zero. A district judge in Texas sided with them last year in a sweeping ruling declaring all of Obamacare unconstitutional.

Last week, an appeals court agreed that the elimination of the penalty made the individual mandate unconstitutional, but sent the case back down to the district court to decide whether any of the law could be separated out and preserved. The move all but guarantees the case won’t reach the Supreme Court until after the election, but it maintains the cloud of uncertainty hanging over the health law that experts say drives up the cost of insurance.

Though no one is in danger of losing their health coverage imminently, Democratic challengers in nearly every Senate battleground race, including Arizona, North Carolina, Maine and Iowa, jumped on the court ruling as an opportunity to attack Republicans on health care.

“Democrats have been in the fight to ensure that people across this country have access to affordable health care,” said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, the chair of the DSCC. “This opinion does not help the Republicans.”

Sara Gideon, Democrats’ preferred candidate in Maine to take on Collins, called the lawsuit a “direct threat to the protections countless Mainers and Americans depend on. She has been reminding voters that Collins’ vote on the 2017 tax reform law triggered the ACA lawsuit in the first place, and she voted to confirm one of the 5th Circuit judges that recently sided with the Trump administration’s arguments against the law.

Unlike the vast majority of her GOP colleagues in the upper chamber, Collins has spoken up against the lawsuit. She has written multiple times to Attorney General Bill Bar, urging him to defend the ACA in court. Collins told POLITICO the day after the ruling that it was “significant” that the 5th Circuit judges were clearly “very uneasy with the thought of striking down the entire law” and instead sent the case back down to the lower court for reconsideration. Collins’ campaign spokesman both emphasized that she believes the government should defend the law and criticized Democrats for defending the unpopular individual mandate.

Tillis, the vulnerable North Carolina senator, said the lawsuit gave Republicans “breathing room” to find a viable replacement for Obamacare and attempted to flip the attack on Democrats by tying them to their presidential contenders.

“I think the fact that they all raised their hands and said we need Medicare for All is also raising their hands and saying the Affordable Care Act has failed,” Tillis said.

Though most of the 2020 presidential candidates have come out against Medicare for All, and more Democratic voters favor a choice between private insurance and a public option, the single-payer debate has given Republicans a potent line of attack that they’re turning to more than ever in the wake of the court’s ruling.

“Obamacare failed to lower health care costs for millions of Americans, and now Democrats want a complete government takeover of our health care system,” said Jesse Hunt, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “They spent all of 2019 defending their socialist plan to eliminate employer-based health care coverage, and those problems will not subside anytime soon.”

The effectiveness of the GOP attacks will depend largely on the Democratic nominee for president — if it is someone who backs Medicare for All, it will be much more difficult for Senate candidates who don’t support the policy to separate themselves from it. But Democratic activists say they’re confident the GOP’s actions in court will sway voters more than their claims about Medicare for All.

“We can prepare for and counter those attacks by reminding voters that [Republicans are] fighting actively to take health care away,” said Kelly Dietrich, the founder and CEO of the National Democratic Training Committee, which coached more than 17,000 candidates for federal and state office in 2019. “Republicans’ ability to use fear as a tool to win elections should never be underestimated. But the antidote is to fight back just as hard.”

Year in Review: Lots of talk, not a lot of action in healthcare politics

Rachel Cohrs noted that lawmakers and regulators talked big on tackling high drug prices and surprise medical bills in 2019, but agreement on the bipartisan policies remained elusive. Some healthcare policy could be attached to a potential budget deal in December, but it is still unclear whether lawmakers will resolve funding disputes by the end of the year.

Despite major bipartisan legislative packages spearheaded by senior Senate Republican leaders, disputes over details and intense lobbying efforts have so far stalled progress in Congress. Drug makers are fighting a provision in the Senate Finance Committee’s drug pricing bill that would require them to pay back Medicare for drug price hikes faster than inflation, and providers and insurers are warring over how out-of-network medical bills should be handled.

Competing approaches to address surprise medical billing came to a head in December when a bipartisan, bicameral compromise proposal on addressing surprise medical bills emerged, but a key Senate Democrat involved in the negotiations had not signed on as of press time. Despite provider-friendly tweaks, providers still oppose the legislation and it is unclear whether House and Senate leadership have an appetite to include it in must-pass legislation.

Health reform 3.0: Early in the year, Senate health committee Chair Lamar Alexander and ranking Democrat Patty Murray released a wide-ranging plan to lower costs that addresses surprise medical bills; contract reform provisions; cost transparency; and boosting generic competition for Rx drugs. The year ended with a bipartisan, bicameral bill emerging, but at deadline it lacked Murray’s endorsement.

Reducing drug prices: Addressing drug prices was the other issue that dominated the policy landscape. Competing plans emerged, and the House passed a bill in mid-December on a party-line vote.

Grinding to a halt: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, which soured the prospects of a grand bargain between Trump and Pelosi on drug pricing and complicated the timeline for passing major healthcare policy.

Drug pricing was also a top priority for the Trump administration, but several marquee policy ideas have been stopped by the courts, abandoned, or are forthcoming. The White House decided to retract a prominent initiative that would have required insurers to pass manufacturer rebates directly to patients at the pharmacy counter, and a rule that would have compelled drug makers to include list prices in television advertisements is tied up in court. House Democrats passed a partisan government drug price negotiation bill, but it almost certainly will not become law.

The administration could at any time release a regulation outlining a process to allow states to import prescription drugs from Canada or move forward with a demonstration that would tie payments for physician-administered drugs in Medicare to international drug prices, but it has not yet acted on either proposal.

The 10 most-searched questions on health Reported by Sandee LaMotte of CNN

There were more questions that had people Googling in 2019.

The full list of the most-searched health questions in the United States this year also included questions about the flu, kidney stones and human papillomavirus or HPV:

  1. How to lower blood pressure
  2. What is keto?
  3. How to get rid of hiccups
  4. How long does the flu last?
  5. What causes hiccups?
  6. What causes kidney stones?
  7. What is HPV?
  8. How to lower cholesterol
  9. How many calories should I eat a day?
  10. How long does alcohol stay in your system?

NYU started to answer one of the big questions in the design of a fair healthcare system when they decided to declare their medical school tuition free. If all medical schools were tuition free the graduating doctors wouldn’t have the huge debt and they could have the opportunities to chose primary care and provide care to underserved rural and poorer communities. 

One step at a time and maybe next year Congress can really improve the health care system of our U.S.A.

And to all you interested readers out there Happy New Year! Maybe those in control will start the process of improving the delivery of affordable health care to all and not worry about their future political aspirations. What a change that would be!

Health care spending hit $3.6 trillion in 2018 due to ACA tax, The GDP and Again My Worry Concerning Rural Hospitals

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bus559National spending on health care is rising, fueled in part by the reinstatement of an Affordable Care Act tax on insurers, according to a new federal report.

Total national health expenditures last year increased by 4.6 percent to $3.6 trillion last year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said. The U.S. spent about $11.172 per person, and national health care spending accounted for about 17.7 percent of the total U.S. economy last year, compared with 17.9 percent in 2017. It was roughly the same as in 2016.

By household, health care spending, which includes out-of-pocket spending, contributions to private health insurance premiums and contributions to Medicare through payroll taxes and premiums, also grew by 4.4 percent.

Private businesses, meanwhile, shelled out $726.8 billion on health care, a 6.2 percent increase from the year-ago period. Most of that goes toward employers’ contributions for insurance premiums. At 20 percent, it absorbed the second-largest shares of health care spending, preceded only by the federal government and households.

Overall, spending by Medicare, Medicaid, and private health insurance grew faster because of the health insurance tax; an annual fee on all health insurers intended to help fund the estimated $1 trillion cost of the ACA. Congress suspended the tax in 2017 and 2019. It was expected to raise $14.3 billion in 2018, according to the Internal Revenue Service.

“It was responsible for a significant portion of the rise we saw,” Micah Hartman, the report’s lead author, told The Wall Street Journal.

As baby boomers age, the pace of health care spending is only expected to grow. Health care’s share of the economy is projected to climb to 19.4 percent by 2027 from 17.9 percent in 2017, according to a previous CMS study cited by the Journal.

The number of uninsured Americans rose by 1 million for the second year in a row to 30.7 million in 2018. The rate of people without health insurance held steady under 10 percent.

The report could draw the ire of Democrats, who have criticized the Trump administration for its attacks on the ACA. The future of the Obama-era health law is in limbo as a panel of three federal appeals court judges weighs whether it’s unconstitutional after Republicans stripped it of the individual mandate in 2017.

Rare Dip in Healthcare’s Share of GDP in 2018

CMS report shows growth in spending on physician services fell slightly

Joyce Frieden, the News Editor of the MedPage points out that overall U.S.healthcare spending increased by 4.6% in 2018 — higher than the 4.2% growth in 2017, but still representing a slight drop in healthcare’s percentage of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said Thursday.

The increase left the U.S. with health spending of $3.6 trillion in 2018, or $11,172 per person. Some of the spending increase was attributed to growth in private health insurance and Medicare spending due to collection of the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance tax — postponed from 2017 — which raised $14.3 billion in 2018, said Micah Hartman, a statistician in CMS’s Office of the Actuary, during a press briefing hosted by Health Affairs. (The figure for the tax revenue came from the Internal Revenue Service, not CMS.) Other growth drivers included faster growth in healthcare prices. Because the overall economy’s 5.4% growth in 2018 outpaced healthcare spending, the percentage of GDP spent on healthcare dropped slightly, from 17.9% in 2017 to 17.7% in 2018, Hartman said.

Paul Hughes-Cromwick, MA, co-director of Sustainable Health Spending Strategies at Altarum, a healthcare consulting firm here, said in an email that he found the decrease in percentage of GDP “encouraging,” but added that “we can safely predict that this will return to near 18% in 2019 with mildly accelerating health spending and weakening GDP growth.” And “despite all the talk and support for social determinants of health (SDOH) across the political spectrum, government public health activities only grew at 2.4%, the second slowest in the past 7 years (though it is expected that much SDOH activity lies outside formal public health spending).”

Jamie Hall, a research fellow in quantitative analysis at the Heritage Foundation here, said in a phone interview that the decrease in the percentage of GDP “is the first time that’s happened since before Obamacare. So it’s a good sign that some of the Trump administration policies that are oriented toward containing costs are having an effect” — things like short-term, limited-duration insurance policies and efforts to lower the cost of prescription drugs. “We’re sort of more at equilibrium and it’s somewhat more of a stable system at this point,” he said.

Growth in Spending on Physicians Declines

Spending on physician care and other clinical services increased by 4.1% in 2018, down from 4.7% the year before. This was due in part to slower growth in private health insurance, Medicaid, and “residual use and intensity” — the number and intensity of clinician visits — and was not offset by faster growth in healthcare prices, said Aaron Catlin, deputy director in the Office of the Actuary.

Healthcare prices are accelerating from an all-time low measured in 2015, Hughes-Cromwick noted. “If health care price growth returns to a historical pattern, i.e., significantly higher than economy-wide inflation, healthcare spending will definitely accelerate,” consistent with CMS’s long-run projections, he said.

The percentage of uninsured Americans grew by one million people, from 29.7 million to 30.7 million, according to CMS; that was on top of a previous one-million-person increase from 28.7 million in 2016. “We can’t track individuals, so we can’t say where those people came from and the status of their coverage before and after becoming uninsured … but we do show decreases in private health insurance and reductions in other directly purchased insurance,” said Catlin.

This increase in the uninsured “is a huge issue,” said Dan Mendelson, founder and former CEO of Avalere, a healthcare consulting firm here, in a phone interview. “The numbers are on an upward march and it will be a major electoral issue going into 2020.”

But Hall said the uninsured numbers were “quite misleading.” “Of the folks officially considered uninsured, the overwhelming majority of these folks have access to some type of coverage but have chosen not to enroll,” he said. “It’s important that folks not equate a lack of insurance with lack of access to coverage or lack of access to care.”

Private Insurance Enrollment Down

Private health insurance enrollment declined by 1.6 million people, with the drop coming primarily from those enrolled in private plans outside the ACA’s health insurance marketplaces, said Anne Martin, an economist in the Office of the Actuary. The number of enrollees who purchased employer-sponsored health insurance also fell slightly, from 175.6 million to 175.2 million. Medicare enrollment, on the other hand, grew from 57.2 million in 2017 to 58.7 million in 2018, while Medicaid enrollment also rose slightly during the same time period, from 72.1 million to 72.8 million.

Despite the enrollment drop, spending on private health insurance grew by 5.8%, to $1.2 trillion, up from 4.9% the prior year, Martin continued. “The most significant factor in insurance spending was the increase in the net cost of health insurance, which was influenced by the health insurance tax.”

Retail prescription drug spending rose by 2.5% in 2018, to $335 billion, up from a 1.4% increase in 2017. “This faster rate of growth was driven by non-price factors, such as the use and mix of drugs consumed, which more than offset a decline of 1% in prices for retail prescription drugs,” the agency said in a press release. This spending category does not take into account spending on physician-administered drugs or drugs administered in the hospital.

Home Healthcare Spending Up

“The fact that drug spending at the pharmacy is attenuating is a big deal, and it appears to be a combination of the mix of drugs being used,” Mendelson said. “It shows that consumers are using drugs more efficiently, which is good news. I think that change of behavior has been happening for quite some time; it’s durable and it’s a positive effect.”

However, he added, “The other thing is that healthcare costs are still rising much more rapidly than wages, and what it shows is that while costs have attenuated, the fact that they’re still rising faster than wages is squeezing consumers significantly … The fact we’re seeing macro[-level] progress doesn’t help the patient who is facing a $5,000 deductible and trying to figure out how to pay for their healthcare.”

In terms of personal healthcare spending, some of the largest increases were in-home healthcare (up 5.2%), durable medical equipment (up 4.7%), and dental services (up 4.6%). Spending on hospital care in 2018 rose 4.5% to $1.2 trillion, down slightly from a 4.7% increase the year before. The slower growth was attributed to a decrease in out-of-pocket hospital spending growth, decreased residual use and intensity, a slowing in inpatient days in hospitals, and a drop in the growth of hospital spending by the Defense Department.

Overall, 33% of healthcare expenditures in 2018 went for hospital care, 20% went for physician care and other clinician services, 13% to other services, 9% to retail prescription drugs, 8% to government administration and net cost of health insurance, and 5% to nursing care and continuing care retirement communities, according to the agency.

Sally Pipes: Sanders, Warren wants ‘Medicare-for-all’ like Canada – But Canadian health care is awful

Sally Pipes of the Fox News reported that the Democratic presidential candidates Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren want you to believe Canada’s health care system is a dream come true. And they want to make the dream even better with their “Medicare-for-all” plans. Don’t believe them.

In truth, Canada’s system of socialized medicine is actually a nightmare. It has left hospitals overcrowded, understaffed and unable to treat some patients. Americans would face the same dismal reality if Canadian-style “Medicare-for-all” takes root here.

Canada’s health care system is the model for the “Medicare-for-all” plan that both Sanders, I-Vt., and Warren, D-Mass., embrace.

North of the border, all residents have taxpayer-funded, comprehensive health coverage. In theory, they can walk into any hospital or doctor’s office and get the care they need, without a co-pay or deductible.

Sanders and Warren would one-up Canada by providing all Americans with free prescription drugs, free long-term care, free dental care, free vision care, and free care for people with hearing problems.

Who could possibly object to all that free care?

Well, politicians in Canada object. They say even their country can’t do what Sanders and Warren want because all this free care would cost too much and cause other problems.

But for Sanders and Warren, money is no object. They can just raise taxes as higher and higher and higher. And the huge tax increases needed to fund “Medicare-for-all” would hit us all – there aren’t enough millionaires and billionaires to foot the bill.

It’s true that everyone in Canada has health coverage. But that coverage doesn’t always secure care. According to the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think tank, patients waited a median of nearly 20 weeks to receive specialist treatment after referral by a general practitioner in 2018. That’s more than double the wait patients faced 25 years ago.

In Nova Scotia, patients faced a median total wait time of 34 weeks. More than 6 percent of the province’s population was waiting for treatment in 2018.

Waiting for care is perhaps better than not being able to seek it at all. The hospital emergency department in Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia recently announced that it would simply close on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There aren’t enough doctors available to staff the facility.

Canadians can’t escape waits like these unless they leave the country and payout of pocket for health care abroad. Private health insurance is illegal in Canada.

Private clinics in Canada are not allowed to charge patients for “medically necessary” services that the country’s single-payer plan covers. And the government has deemed just about every conceivable service “medically necessary.”

For the past decade, Dr. Brian Day, an orthopedic surgeon who runs the private Cambie Surgery Centre in British Columbia, has tried to offer Canadians a way out of the waits by expanding patient access to private clinics. He’s been battling his home province in court for a decade to essentially grant patients the ability to pay providers directly for speedier care.

During closing arguments in Day’s trial before the British Columbia Supreme Court at the end of November, Dr. Roland Orfaly of the British Columbia Anesthesiologists’ Society testified that over 300 patients in the province died waiting for surgery from 2015 to 2016 because of a shortage of anesthesiologists. And that was in just one of the province’s five regional health authorities!

Shortages of crucial medical personnel and equipment are common throughout Canada. The country has fewer than three doctors for every 1,000 residents. That puts it 26th among 28 countries with universal health coverage schemes. If current trends continue, the country will be short 60,000 full-time nurses in just three years.

In 2018, Canada had less than 16 CT scanners for every million people. The United States, by comparison, had nearly 45 per million.

These shortages, combined with long waits, can lead to incredible suffering.

In 2017, one British Columbia woman who was struggling to breathe sought treatment in an overcrowded emergency room. She was given a shot of morphine and sent home. She died two days later.

That same year, a Halifax, Nova Scotia, man dying of pancreatic cancer was left in a cold hallway for six hours when doctors couldn’t find him a bed. Yes, people must sometimes be treated on hallway floors because of severe overcrowding.

In fact, some Canadian hospital emergency rooms look like they belong in poverty-stricken Third World countries.
WBUR Radio, Boston’s NPR station, documented these terrible conditions in a story about a hospital in Nova Scotia earlier this month.

Americans who find the promise of free health care difficult to resist would do well to take a hard look north.

Sure, “Medicare-for-all” as pitched by Sanders and Warren sounds good. But the reality is far from what these two far-left candidates are promising. Like a drug that helps you in one way but causes even more serious problems, “Medicare-for-all” has dangerous side effects that can be hazardous to your health.

Rural hospital acquisitions may reduce patient services

I have already discussed the outcome of Medicare for All on physicians and especially rural hospitals. Beware, especially when we hear of what is happening already! Last week it was reported that one of the hospital systems in Chicago fired 15 physicians and hired NP’s/nurse practitioners to take over their patient care responsibilities.

Also, Carolyn Crist of Reuters noted that although hospitals can improve financially when they join larger health systems, the merger might also reduce access to services for patients in rural areas, according to a new study.

After an affiliation, rural hospitals are more likely to lose onsite imaging and obstetric and primary care services, researchers report in a special issue of the journal Health Affairs devoted to rural health issues in the United States.

“The major concern when you think about health and healthcare in rural America is access,” said lead study author Claire O’Hanlon of the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California.

More than 100 rural hospitals in the U.S. have closed since 2010, the study authors write.

“Hospitals in rural areas are struggling to stay open for a lot of different reasons, but many are looking to health-system affiliation as a way to keep the doors open,” she told Reuters Health by email. “But when you give up local control of your hospital to a health system, a lot of things can change that may or may not be good for the hospital or its patients.”

Using annual surveys by the American Hospital Association, O’Hanlon and colleagues compared 306 rural hospitals that affiliated during 2008-2017 with 994 nonaffiliated rural hospitals on 12 measures, including quality, service utilization, and financial performance. The study team also looked at the emergency department and nonemergency visits, long-term debt, operating margins, patient experience scores, and hospital readmissions.

They found that rural hospitals that affiliated had a significant reduction in outpatient non-emergency visits, onsite diagnostic imaging technologies such as MRI machines, and availability of obstetric and primary care services. For instance, obstetric services dropped by 7-14% annually in the five years following affiliation.

“Does this mean that patients are getting prenatal care in their community at a different location, traveling to receive prenatal care at another location of the same health system, or forgoing this care entirely?” O’Hanlon said. “Trying to figure out the extent to which the observed changes in the services available onsite at rural hospitals reflect real changes in patient access is an important next step.”

At the same time, the affiliated hospitals also experienced an increase in operating margins, from an average baseline of -1.6%, typical increases were 1.6 to 3.6 percentage points, the authors note. The better financial performance appeared to be driven largely by decreased operating costs.

Overall, patient experience scores, long-term debt ratios, hospital readmissions, and emergency department visits were similar for affiliating and non-affiliating hospitals.

“Research on these mergers has been mixed, with some suggestions they are beneficial for the community (access to capital, more specialty services, keep the hospital open) and other evidence that there are costs (employment reductions, loss of local control, increase in prices),” said Mark Holmes of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who wasn’t involved in the study.

“Mergers can have a large impact on a community, so understanding the effect on the resultant access, cost and quality of locally available services is important,” he told Reuters Health by email.

A limitation of the study is that the surveys capture affiliation broadly and don’t specifically describe the arrangements, the study authors’ note. Future studies should investigate the different types of affiliations, such as a full acquisition versus a clinically integrated hospital network, which may show different outcomes, said Rachel Mosher Henke of IBM Watson Health in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who also wasn’t involved in the study.

For instance, certain types of rural hospital affiliations may be better for the community than a full hospital closure, she said.

“However, it’s important to evaluate the potential for negative consequences for the community in terms of reduced service offerings,” she told Reuters Health by email. “New payment models such as all-payer global payments that allow rural hospitals to continue to operate independently with consistent cash flow may be an alternative to affiliation to consider.” But it may not fix the impossible especially if the system pays all at Medicare or Medicaid rates?

Next is to discuss the basis of single-payer healthcare systems and look who is back trying to hold his lead in the Democratic-run for President a guy who can’t even remember where he is, dates, or where he is going, Joe Biden!!!

 

Again, Democrats Spar at Debate Over Health Care, How to Beat Trump and Could Medicare for All Really Go Horribly Wrong?

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deal549[5953]Was there anything different about last week’s Democratic debate? Bill Barrow, Will Weissert and Jill Colvin reported that the Democratic presidential candidates clashed in a debate over the future of health care in America, racial inequality and their ability to build a winning coalition to take on President Donald Trump next year.
The Wednesday night faceoff came after hours of testimony in the impeachment inquiry of Trump and at a critical juncture in the Democratic race to run against him in 2020. With less than three months before the first voting contests, big questions hang over the front-runners, time is running out for lower tier candidates to make their move and new Democrats are launching improbable last-minute bids for the nomination.
But amid the turbulence, the White House hopefuls often found themselves fighting on well-trodden terrain, particularly over whether the party should embrace a sweeping “Medicare for All” program or make more modest changes to the current health care system.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the field’s most progressive voices, staunchly defended Medicare for All, which would eliminate private insurance coverage in favor of a government-run system.
“The American people understand that the current health care system is not only cruel — it is dysfunctional,” Sanders said.
Former Vice President Joe Biden countered that many people are happy with private insurance through their jobs, while Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, complained about other candidates seeking to take “the divisive step” of ordering people onto universal health care, “whether they like it or not.”
Democrats successfully campaigned on health care last year, winning control of the House on a message that Republicans were slashing existing benefits. But moderates worry that Medicare for All is more complicated and may not pay the same political dividend. That’s especially true after Democrats won elections earlier this month in Kentucky and Virginia without embracing the program.
“We must get our fired-up Democratic base with us,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. “But let’s also get those independents and moderate Republicans who cannot stomach (Trump) anymore.”
The fifth Democratic debate unfolded in Atlanta, a city that played a central role in the civil rights movement, and the party’s diversity, including two African American candidates, was on display. But there was disagreement on how best to appeal to minority voters, who are vital to winning the Democratic nomination and will be crucial in the general election.
Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey said the party has sometimes come up short in its outreach to black Americans.
“For too long, I think, candidates have taken for granted constituencies that have been a backbone of the Democratic Party,” Harris said. “You show up in a black church and want to get the vote but just haven’t been there before.”
Booker declared, “Black voters are pissed off, and they’re worried.”
In the moderators’ chairs were four women, including Rachel Maddow, MSNBC’s liberal darling, and Ashley Parker, a White House reporter for The Washington Post. It was only the third time a primary debate has been hosted by an all-female panel.
Buttigieg — who was a natural target given his recent rise in the polls to join Biden, Warren and Sanders among the crowded field’s front-runners — was asked early about how being mayor of a city of 100,000 residents qualified him for the White House.
“I know that from the perspective of Washington, what goes on in my city might look small,” Buttigieg said. “But frankly, where we live, the infighting on Capitol Hill is what looks small.”
Klobuchar argued that she has more experience enacting legislation and suggested that women in politics are held to a higher standard.
“Otherwise we could play a game called ‘Name your favorite woman president,’ which we can’t do because it has all been men,” she said.
Another memorable exchange occurred when Biden — who didn’t face any real attacks from his rivals — was asked about curbing violence against women and responded awkwardly.
“We have to just change the culture,” he said. “And keep punching at it. And punching at it. And punching at it.”
Harris scrapped with another low polling candidate: Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who has criticized prominent Democrats, including 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton.
“I think that it’s unfortunate that we have someone on the stage who is attempting to be the Democratic nominee for the president of the United States who during the Obama administration spent four years full time on Fox News criticizing President Obama,” Harris said.
“I’m not going to put party interests first,” Gabbard responded.
But the discussion kept finding its way back to Medicare for All, which has dominated the primary — especially for Warren. She released plans to raise $20-plus trillion in new government revenue for universal health care. But she also said implementation of the program may take three years — drawing criticism both from moderates like Biden and Buttigieg, who think she’s trying to distance herself from an unpopular idea, and Sanders supporters, who see the Massachusetts senator’s commitment to Medicare for All wavering.
Sanders made a point of saying Wednesday that he’d send Medicare for All legislation to Congress during the first week of his administration.
Booker faced especially intense pressure Wednesday since he’s yet to meet the Democratic National Committee’s polling requirements for the December debate in California. He spent several minutes arguing with Warren about the need to more appropriately tax the wealthy, but also called for “building wealth” among people of color and other marginalized communities.
“We’ve got to start empowering people,” Booker said.
Businessman Andrew Yang was asked what he would say to Russian President Vladimir Putin if he got the chance — and joked about that leader’s cordial relationship with Trump.
“First of all, I’d say I’m sorry I beat your guy,” Yang said with a grin, drawing howls of laughter from the audience.
Is Warren retreating on Medicare-for-all?
Almost one week before the fifth Democratic presidential debate, Elizabeth Warren released the latest plan in her slew of policy proposals: An outline detailing how, if elected, she would gradually shift the U.S. toward a single-payer health care system.
“I have put out a plan to fully finance Medicare for All when it’s up and running without raising taxes on the middle class by one penny,” the Massachusetts senator wrote in a post introducing the plan. “But how do we get there? Every serious proposal for Medicare for All contemplates a significant transition period.”
It was a marked shift from her previous calls to quickly bring the country toward Medicare-for-all and, notably, included similar tenets laid out in the health care proposals of more moderate candidates, like former Vice President Joe Biden and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
In the transition plan, Warren said she would take several steps in her first 100 days in office to expand insurance coverage, like pushing to pass a bill that would allow all Americans to either buy into a government-run program if they wanted, or keep their private insurance. It would extend free coverage to about half of the country, including children and poor families. She would also lower the eligibility age for Medicare to 50 and let young people buy into a “true Medicare-for-all” option.
“Combining the parts into a whole reveals a bit of a mess,” wrote David Dayen of The American Prospect, a progressive magazine. “After putting forward a comprehensive cost control and financing bill, Warren split that apart and asked people to accept two bruising fights to get to her purported end goal. It’s reasonable for people to see that as a bait and switch.”
Rivals portrayed the move as a retreat from one of her most high-profile positions on an issue that voters repeatedly rank as one of the most important. A campaign spokesperson for Biden called the senator’s health stance “problematic,” while Buttigieg’s spokeswoman Lis Smith criticized the latest measure as a “transparently political attempt to paper over a very serious policy problem.”
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has wholeheartedly pledged to fight for a single-payer health system, took a swipe at Warren when accepting an endorsement on Friday from the largest nurses’ union in the country.
“Some people say we should delay that fight for a few more years — I don’t think so,” he said, according to The Washington Post. “We are ready to take them on right now, and we’re going to take them on Day One.”
The similarities come as Warren, who experienced a somewhat momentous surge in the polls, has begun to falter. In early October, her national polling climbed to 28 percent, according to a Fox News poll, but since then, her numbers have steadily declined. In the latest Iowa poll, Buttigieg pulled ahead of Warren by a staggering nine percentage points, indicating the 37-year-old could be a serious contender.
The timing of the seeming loss of campaign momentum appears to be tied to the release of her sweeping Medicare-for-all proposal at the beginning of November. Warren said it could be paid for with a series of taxes, largely via new levies on Wall Street and the ultra-wealthy (and, she’s repeatedly stressed, none on the middle class).
According to a recent poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Cook Political Report, while universal coverage is popular with a majority of Democratic voters, almost two-thirds of voters in key swing states said a national health plan in which all Americans receive their health coverage through a single-payer system was not a good idea.
It also precludes the start of the next debate in Georgia, during which Warren will very likely face fierce criticism and scrutiny over her $20 trillion Medicare-for-all plan and remember the cost is really closer to$52-$72 trillion>
Still, Warren told reporters over the weekend that “my commitment to Medicare for All is all the way,” according to The Associated Press.
And Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the Washington Democrat who introduced the House version of the Medicare-for-all bill, called the plan a “smart approach to take on Big Pharma & private-for-profit insurance companies.”
Medicare for All’s thorniest issue is how much to pay doctors and hospitals. Any new system could become a convoluted mess if it goes wrong.
Earlier this month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren unveiled her $20.5 trillion package to finance Medicare for All, a system that would provide comprehensive health insurance to every American and virtually erase private insurance.
If its details are made reality, it would be nothing short of a sweeping transformation of the way Americans receive and pay for their medical care.
The proposal attempts to address one of the thorniest problems that any candidate pushing for a single-payer system in the US faces: how much to pay doctors and hospitals.
Dismantling the current payment structure and replacing it with another would likely require some tough trade-offs, experts say, creating winners and losers when the dust settles.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently unveiled details of her Medicare for All health plan, a system that would provide comprehensive health coverage to every American and virtually erase private insurance.
If its details are made reality, it would be a sweeping transformation in the way Americans get and pay for their medical care. Its the only financing model for universal coverage that a Democratic presidential candidate has rolled out in the primary so far.
It attempts to address one of the thorniest problems any candidate pushing for a single-payer system in the US faces: how much to pay the country’s doctors and hospitals. Pay them too little, and you risk wreaking havoc on their bottom line — and possibly forcing a wave of hospital closures as some critics have warned. Pay them too much, and it becomes much more expensive to finance care for everybody.
“The challenge is that when you expand Medicare to new populations, they’re going to use more healthcare,” Katherine Baicker, a health policy expert who serves as the dean of the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, told Business Insider. “But that means there is going to be a substantial increase in demand for healthcare at the same time that you’re potentially cutting payments to providers.”
Warren has proposed big cuts in payments to many hospitals and doctors in her $20.5 trillion package to bring universal healthcare to the United States. Single-payer advocates argue that eliminating private insurance would lower administrative burdens on doctors and hospitals, freeing them up to treat more insured patients.
Several outside analyses of Medicare for All proposals suggest it can lead to considerable savings through negotiation of lower prices and reduced administrative spending.
The cuts in Warren’s plan are steep, because private insurers currently pay around twice as much as Medicare does for hospital care, according to research from the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. Warren’s reform blueprint sets them in line with the Medicare program. Doctors would be paid at the Medicare level while hospitals would be reimbursed at 110% of Medicare’s rate.
‘A recipe for shortages’
As a result, those rates would lower doctor pay by around 6.5%, according to an estimate from economists who analyzed the Warren plan. For hospitals, who are used to bigger payments from private insurers, the payments under Warren’s plan would be roughly enough to cover the cost of care, the economists said.
Baicker says the healthcare system may not be prepared to meet the rapid rise in demand, especially if payments fall at the same time.
“You’re going to see people wanting more services at the same time you pay providers less, and that’s a recipe for shortages unless something else changes,” she said.
That echoes a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released in May. It found that setting payments in line with Medicare would “substantially” lower the average amount of money providers currently receive. “Such a reduction in provider payment rates would probably reduce the amount of care supplied and could also reduce the quality of care,” the CBO report said.
Business Insider reached out to the five largest hospital systems to ask the possible effects of lowering payment rates to Medicare levels and whether they would be prepared to weather the transition.
Only one responded: the 92-hospital Trinity Health System based in Michigan.
“Trinity Health supports policies that advance access to affordable health care coverage for all, payment models that improve health outcomes and accelerate transformation, and initiatives that enhance community health and well-being,” spokeswoman Eve Pidgeon told Business Insider.
Pidgeon said that Trinity Health welcomes the dialogue around “critical questions” of financing and access to coverage, and would “analyze Medicare for All proposals as more details emerge.”
The healthcare industry generally opposes Medicare for All
“Trinity Health has a rich tradition of honoring the voices of the communities we serve, and we will continue to dialogue around policy proposals designed to improve affordability, quality and access for all,” Pidgeon said.
The healthcare industry generally opposes Medicare for All, arguing that it would lead to hospital closures and hurt the overall quality of care for Americans.
The American Hospital Association is staunchly against it. In a statement to Business Insider, executive vice president Tom Nickels called it “a one-size -fits-all approach” that “could disrupt coverage for more than 180 million Americans who are already covered through employer plans.”
“The AHA believes there is a better alternative to help all Americans access health coverage – one built on improving our existing system rather than ripping it apart and starting from scratch,” Nickels said.
Meanwhile, the American Medical Association, the nation’s largest physician organization, came out against the single-payer system, though its membership nearly voted to overturn its opposition in June, Vox reported. The group since pulled out of an industry coalition fighting the proposal.
While many big hospitals could face payment cuts, others could benefit, particularly those that mainly serve people with low incomes or who don’t have insurance.
“If you’re a facility serving a lot of Medicaid and uninsured patients today, you might come out ahead here,” Matthew Fiedler, a health policy expert at the Brookings Institution, told Politico. “But the dominant hospitals in a lot of markets that are able to command extremely high private rates today will take a big hit. I don’t think we’d see hospitals closing, but the question is: What would they do to bring down spending?”
Chris Pope, a healthcare payment expert and senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, said fewer dollars would ultimately mean a cutback in services hospitals would be able to offer. “The less you pay, the less you’re going to get in return.”
“What would likely happen is if you give a fixed lump sum of money, they would start dialing back on access to care,” Pope told Business Insider. “You’re just not going to be able to have a scan done when you need one done.”
The impact on hospitals and doctors
I have pointed these next few points before but thought that it would be worth mentioning again. The surging cost of hospital bills has fanned consumer outrage in recent years as people struggle to afford needed care and helped elevate support for some type of government insurance plan, whether its the more incremental route allowing people to simply buy into a public insurance option or Medicare for All.
In a preview of battles to come, Congress has struggled to pass legislation addressing exorbitant and confusing hospital bills, an issue with widespread public support and bipartisan interest that the White House backed as well, the Washington Post reported in September. Its movement grinded to a halt amid an onslaught of outside spending from doctor and insurer groups.
Dr. Stephen Klasko, chief executive of the Jefferson Health hospital system in Pennsylvania, said the political debate has oversimplified the difficult decisions that would need to be taken in moving to Medicare for All.
“They haven’t been willing to talk about what you would really have to do to bring a dollar and a quarter down to a dollar,” Klasko said, referring to candidates like Warren and Sanders who back universal health coverage.
The hospital executive said that while the nation’s healthcare system is “inefficient” and “fragmented,” slashing overhead wouldn’t necessarily improve the quality of care.
“This myth that there’s these trillions of dollars of administrative costs that are out there in the ether, that’s not true. Every dollar you take away is somebody’s dollar,” Klasko said.
He added that pricing reform on the scale that Warren proposes “is doable,” though there’s likely a caveat.
“It will change how consumers interact with the healthcare system and they won’t get everything they want,” he said.
I’m not sure that Medicare for All will be the Democratic party’s continual push as the debates continue and they realize that moderation to develop a health care system will be the only way to challenge a run against President Trump. I wonder when the rest of the Democratic potential candidates realize that besides the gaffs that former Vice President Biden makes, that improving the Affordable Care Act is the only strategy that may work.
Now I want to wish all a Happy Thanksgiving and hope that we all will appreciate all that we all have and as Mister Rogers said we all need to be Kind, and be Kind and also be Kind. Enjoy you Turkey Day!

Elizabeth Warren’s Number-Crunchers Out of Sync With Her on Some Big Plans and Is Soaking Rich the Answer. And How Did It Work Out for the French?

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73495095_2337220289740950_8378943902677204992_nAs a physician and an economist, I am amazed at the lack of knowledge of both medicine and finance by Ms. Warren and her Team as well as the rest of the Democrats running for President as they tout Medicare for All and give up on Affordable Health Care/ Obamacare. Sahil Kapur and Katia Dmitrieva pointed out that Elizabeth Warren is careful to cite economic experts to back up the costs of her multi-trillion-dollar policy plans. But even those experts disagree among themselves about how or whether those plans will work.

University of California Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman advised Warren on her wealth tax and say she could raise $2.75 trillion over a decade by imposing a 2% tax on wealth worth $50 million or more, going up to 3% for a wealth of more than $1 billion.

But Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics who Warren’s campaign asked to review her separate Medicare-for-All funding plan, which includes an additional 3% tax on wealth over $1 billion among other levies, is skeptical it would bring in that much money.

On health care, Zandi has projected that Warren could raise the $20.5 trillion she estimates it will cost to give everyone free health-care without any new middle-class taxes, even though he disagrees with her vision. Saez and Zucman support her policy in general but their funding approach does raise taxes on the middle class.

The disagreements among those who helped shape and gauge her policies highlight the challenges for Warren as she tries to convince voters that she can generate enough revenue to provide free health care, free public college, universal childcare, forgive a portion of student loans and mitigate climate change, among other ambitious policies.

Saez said in an email that Warren’s health care numbers are “reasonable” — with a caveat.

“Scoring is not hard science, and much will depend on the quality of enforcement. Her numbers assume that enforcement will be excellent,” he said. “We believe this is possible but it will require a big and successful push (a big policy change in and by itself).”

Zandi said the Warren wealth tax will be difficult to enforce, with billionaires likely to use multiple loopholes to avoid it. Several European countries experienced this issue when implementing their own tax programs. Warren has said she would empower the Internal Revenue Service to enforce collection, a promise made by many presidential candidates over the years.

“When considering all of Warren’s policy proposals, which includes a number of different tax increases on the wealthy, tax avoidance may be higher than she is assuming. But this doesn’t mean Medicare-for-All or any of other plans won’t be paid for,” Zandi said in an email.

Warren’s plan to pay for her Medicare-for-All proposal, which she released this month under pressure from rivals, increases her wealth tax and is predicated on avoiding any tax increases on the middle class in the hope of avoiding the political blowback such a move would likely bring.

Under Medicare for All, 98% of the money companies now pay for employees’ health care would be shifted to the government instead.

But Saez and Zucman, who priced out Warren’s tax plan, have floated a different way to pay for Medicare-for-All — a progressive tax that may hit some in the middle class, but would compensate by requiring companies to put the money they would have provided to their employees’ health care into higher paychecks.

Saez said Warren’s employer tax “is a tax on the middle class as economists pretty much all believe that such taxes are effectively borne by workers.” But he said workers are already bearing that cost. “Hence, if you count existing premiums as a pre-existing tax, the Warren plan effectively does not ‘increase’ taxes on the middle class.”

A campaign aide said that Zandi was only scoring her health care plan, while Saez and Zucman were advising her on the wealth tax. Warren tweeted Wednesday, “I knew Mark Zandi was skeptical, so I had him check the numbers on my plan to pay for #MedicareForAll. He confirmed they add up.”

Senator Bernie Sanders, who wrote the Medicare-for-All bill that Warren campaigns on, has released his own suggestions for how to fund it. His ideas include a more aggressive wealth tax than Warren’s and a 4% payroll tax which would hit many Americans though overall they would pay lower costs because of health care savings. He has acknowledged the middle-class would pay more in taxes.

Overall, Zandi backs up Warren’s health care math. He said in the email that Warren can finance her plan without raising taxes on the middle class, even though he doesn’t agree with the policy. And even if the rich don’t pay their fair share, she could find those funds elsewhere.

“Warren’s Medicare for All plan isn’t the only way to provide health insurance to all Americans, rein in growing health care costs and improve health care outcomes,” Zandi wrote in a CNN op-ed that was published on Wednesday. “A more tractable approach in my view is to allow those who like their private health insurance to keep it and to build on Obamacare by giving everyone else an option to get Medicare.”

Mark Cuban: Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare-for-all will take years to achieve

Frank Connor pointed out that Elizabeth Warren unveiled a massive overhaul of the U.S. health care system in her single-payer Medicare-for-all plan. However, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban believes the proposal will take years to accomplish.

“Getting from where we are, to getting there is not something you can accomplish in 4, 8, 12, or even 20 years,” Cuban told FOX Business’, Maria Bartiromo.

Cuban does, however, believe that health care is a right for everyone and that there is a need for people with lower incomes to have access to healthcare. This, he suggested, may indicate an opportunity for a “hybrid plan.”

“Maybe we can expand Medicaid and Medicare and still have a good capitalist system for health care in the middle,” Cuban said.

Business, he argued, cannot operate when there are communities where there is “disruption and social unrest” and so these areas need a basis of health care.

One of the problems with the health care industry, according to Cuban, is a misalignment of incentives between payers and providers.

“The goal of, hopefully, a health care system is to make people healthy,” he said. “And so you don’t get that, you know, when payers, the insurance companies, and the providers work together.”

Cuban described this as a “malicious circle,” suggesting that the parties involved charge each other more in order to make more money.

“None of their metrics have to do with making people healthier,” he said.

The billionaire businessman does not believe the rise of high deductible insurance programs will lead to the growth of a consumer market in health care or lead to customers shopping for health care pricing. He argued high deductible programs are problematic because they make up such a high percentage of their actual income making it more difficult for them to get care.

Additionally, he noted that people don’t shop for care, they make these decisions based on who they trust.

He also believes that artificial intelligence will help the industry.

“As you get more into artificial intelligence and be able to use data more smartly, then you’re going to see a lot of benefits, particularly in radiology,” he said.

France Tried Soaking the Rich. It Didn’t Go Well.

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What about the idea that Elizabeth Warren pushes that the rich should be taxed to the fullest? Noah Smith noted that in recent years, several prominent economists have brought attention to the problem of growing inequality. These scholars include Thomas Piketty, author of the best-selling book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” and Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, who in a new book chronicle the rise in American wealth inequality. All three embrace the same solution:  much higher taxes. Piketty has declared that billionaires should be taxed out of existence, and he called for a global wealth tax, while Saez and Zucman helped Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren design her proposal for a U.S. wealth tax. Piketty and Saez have also suggested taxing top incomes at a rate of more than 80%.

Other economists have struggled to evaluate dramatic proposals like this. Studies on the effects of taxation when rates are moderate might not be a good guide to what happens when rates are very high. Economic theories tend to make a host of simplifying assumptions that might break down under a very high-tax regime. Historical experience is of some help because the U.S. had very high top income taxes in the 1950s, but economic conditions could be very different now.

One way to predict the possible effects of the taxes is to look at a country that tried something similar: France, where Piketty, Saez, and Zucman all hail from.

During the past few decades, as income inequality rose in most rich countries, it stayed relatively constant in France. The biggest reason is government redistribution in the form of taxes and social-welfare spending. France leads its rich-country peers, including the legendarily egalitarian Scandinavian countries, on both measures:

France, therefore, shows that inequality, at least to some degree, is a choice. Taxes and spending really can make a big difference.

But there’s probably a limit to how much even France can do in this regard. The country has experimented with both wealth taxes and very high top income taxes, with disappointing results.

France had a wealth tax from 1982 to 1986 and again from 1988 to 2017. The top rate was between 1.5% and 1.8%, with the total tax rate on fortunes larger than 13 million euros ($14.3 million) hovering at about 1.4%. This is much less than the 6% top rate proposed by Warren (not to mention the 8% proposed by her fellow candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders), but it’s close to the 2% rate Warren would impose on fortunes larger than $50 million.

The wealth tax might have generated social solidarity, but as a practical matter, it was a disappointment. The revenue it raised was rather paltry; only a few billion euros at its peak, or about 1% of France’s total revenue from all taxes. At least 10,000 wealthy people left the country to avoid paying the tax; most moved to neighbor Belgium, which has a large French-speaking population. When these individuals left, France lost not only their wealth tax revenue but their income taxes and other taxes as well. French economist Eric Pichet estimates that this ended up costing the French government almost twice as much revenue as the total yielded by the wealth tax. When President Emmanuel Macron ended the wealth tax in 2017, it was viewed mostly as a symbolic move.

Another French experiment was the so-called supertax, a 75% levy on incomes of more than 1 million euros. Introduced by socialist President François Hollande in 2012, the supertax added to the exodus of wealthy individuals, most notably actor Gerard Depardieu and Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton. Star soccer players threatened to go on strike, and there was fear that France would become a wasteland for entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, the supertax raised much less money than even the wealth tax had — only 160 million euros in 2014. The unpopular tax was repealed two years after its adoption.

France’s experiments with taxing the wealthy at very high rates didn’t raise much money and didn’t prove politically sustainable. The flight of wealthy individuals from the country probably helped reduce inequality on paper, but it’s not clear that their departure left France better off.

It’s possible that similar tax experiments in the U.S. might be more successful than in France. The U.S. economy is much larger than France’s; although a French business owner who moves to Belgium can still do business and move about freely within the European Union, an American mogul who moves to Canada might find access to one of the world’s largest markets restricted. That might allow the U.S. to raise more money from high taxes than France ever could.

But it’s also worth noting that France’s wealth tax and supertax ultimately weren’t that important. Despite repealing the supertax, France managed to increase government revenue and to reduce inequality. The end of the wealth tax will probably be a similar story. France simply didn’t need these flamboyant taxes on the rich to have very high levels of taxation and social spending. That means the U.S. probably doesn’t need them either. Tax increases across the board — on top incomes, capital gains, estates, pass-through businesses, corporations, and so on — might not excite populist firebrands, but they’re probably a more effective strategy for fighting inequality.

‘Save public hospitals’, French health workers urge Macron

Gabriel Bourovitch, Clare Byrne and Aurelle Carabiin looked at the French healthcare system and noted that thousands of French hospital workers demonstrated Thursday over years of cutbacks they say have harmed care in a country with a health system once the envy of the world. Also, remember what I pointed out as Medicare for All pays all doctors and hospital Medicare rates- about 50-60 cents on the dollar. You think when Medicare for All reimburses physicians and hospitals that doctors can pay their staff, their medical education bills, malpractice bills as well as run the hospitals? I think not!

Public hospitals in France have been forced to cut 9.0 billion euros ($9.9 billion) off their debts since 2005, leading to the scrapping of hundreds of beds and dozens of operating theatres while stagnant salaries have fuelled a flight to the private sector.

Calling on President Emmanuel Macron to “save public hospitals”, thousands of hospital doctors, nurses, students, and administrative staff held protests in Paris and a dozen other cities on Thursday.

The protests began in March when emergency room staff, who complain of elderly patients being left for hours on trolleys in corridors while waiting for a bed, began strike action.

Over 260 emergency rooms nationwide are still affected by work stoppages.

On Thursday, staff from other hospital departments joined in the protests.

In Paris, organizers said that some 10,000 demonstrators marched through the city waving placards with a message such as: “Exhausted caregivers = endangered patients”, “Public hospitals in a life-threatening emergency” and “The hospital is suffocating, let’s save it.”

In the southwestern city of Toulouse, 3,000 staff took to the streets, around 400 in Brest and Quimper in the northwest, and a few hundred each in other cities such as Nantes, Lyon, Bordeaux, Lille, and Marseille.

Jean-Michel Carayol, a hospital technician who demonstrated in the Mediterranean port city of Marseille, said the staff were “at the end of their tether and exhausted”.

Monique Aubin, a 61-year-old nurse who also joined the protest, complained of a “lack of materials, even medication” and of being swamped in paperwork which left her little time for patients.

In 2000, the World Health Organization ranked France’s health system the best of 191 countries.

But a study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation published in The Lancet medical journal in 2017 placed it in 15th place for quality of care.

The country is still one of Europe’s biggest spenders when it comes to healthcare.

In 2016, France spent 12 percent of its GDP on health, well above the western European average of 10 percent, and was also the country where the patient’s share of the health bill was the lowest.

– New winter of discontent? –

The protests have created jitters in the government, which fears that hospital staff could band together with other disgruntled groups such as transport workers who are planning mass strike action in December over pension reforms.

Three health plans in the past two years have failed to appease the anger of beleaguered hospital staff.

In an attempt to head off another winter of discontent, a year after the start of the “yellow vest” revolt, Macron said Thursday the government would unveil plans next week for “substantial” hospital investments.

While arguing that his centrist government had inherited an ailing hospital system, he said he had “heard the anger and the indignation over working conditions” in hospitals.

The protesters are demanding 3.8 billion euros in emergency investment in public hospitals — twice the amount set aside in the draft 2020 budget currently before parliament.

On Thursday, the upper house of the parliament, the right-wing dominated Senate, threw out the draft social security bill at its first reading in protest over what some senators described as Macron’s “disdain” for the workers in the sector.

Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire has warned that hiking health spending will mean having to make cuts elsewhere.

France’s budget deficit is expected to breach an EU limit of 3.0 percent of GDP this year, reaching 3.1 percent.

I am amazed at how easy the voters can be swayed and convinced that everything will be free if “you vote for me!” I say be very wary of what you all wish for because you and the rest of may have to live with the results, as we are all sold a bill of false goods. Be very careful voters!!

 

Warren’s Health Care Plan Will Cost More Than She Says; Hillary’s take on the matters and what does Medicare cover and the VA “new” system!

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veteran529Tyler Cowen reported that Elizabeth Warren claims she can pay for her 10-year, $52 trillion health care plan without increasing taxes on the middle class. But both she and her critics are approaching the question wrong. What really matters is the opportunity cost of policy choices, in terms of foregone goods and services — not whether the money can be raised to pay for a chosen policy.

Consider this point in the context of Warren’s plan, which includes a complex series of health-care savings and higher taxes on the wealthy.

NOAH SMITH: Warren Tries to Make Medicare for All as Painless as Possible

One way of financing the plan is to pay doctors in hospitals lower fees (part of “saving” $2.3 trillion). There will then be fewer profitable hospitals, and fewer doctors working fewer hours because some of them might retire earlier than they otherwise would. Fewer hospitals mean they will likely increase their monopolistic tendencies, to the detriment of patients. A related plan to pay hospitals less is supposed to save another $600 billion.

The practical impact of these changes will be to deprive health-care consumers, including middle-class consumers, of goods and services. The larger point is that the real cost of any economic arrangement is not its nominal sticker price, but rather the consequences of who ends up not getting what.

Another part of the plan is to pay lower prices — 70% lower — for branded prescription drugs. That is supposed to save about $1.7 trillion, but again focus on which opportunities are lost. Lower drug prices will mean fewer new drugs are developed. There is good evidence that pharmaceuticals are among the most cost-effective ways of saving human lives, so the resulting higher mortality and illness might be especially severe.

Of course, many critics of the pharmaceutical industry downplay its role in the drug-discovery process. Regardless of the merits of those arguments, they do not show that a 70% cut in prices will leave supplies, or research and development, unchanged.

Another unstated cost of the Warren plan concerns current health-insurance customers: Many of them prefer their current private coverage to Medicare for All. Switching them into Medicare for All is an opportunity cost not covered by Warren’s $52 trillion estimates. Even if you believe that Medicare for All will be cheaper in monetary terms, tens of millions of Americans seem to prefer their current arrangements.

Warren also proposes higher taxes on corporations, capital gains, stock trades and the wealthy, as well as stronger tax enforcement — all of which is supposed to raise more than $10 trillion. Again, regardless of your position on those policies, they will diminish investment and (to some extent) consumption among the wealthy. You might not worry much about the consumption of the wealthy. But the decline in investment will lead to lower wages, less job creation, and fewer goods and services. These are all opportunity costs, for both the middle class and just about everyone else.

Supposedly $400 billion will be picked up from taxes on new immigrants, following the passage of a law legalizing millions now in the country illegally. I favor such legislation. Still, I don’t necessarily see this as a windfall. Yes, more immigrant labor will produce more goods and services. Tax revenue from this new productivity could be used in any number of ways, with universal health-care coverage just one option of many.

You might think that universal health insurance coverage is clearly the highest priority, but is it? America’s health-care sector is relatively costly and inefficient, and even major health-care legislation does not much improve health outcomes. What about investing in green energy or climate change alleviation? Private-sector job creation? Public health measures outside of the health-insurance system, such as fighting air pollution or lead? Checking California forest fires?

Even if you think health care is a human right, there are alternative policies that will benefit human health. They cannot all be carried out, at least not very well.

I don’t mean to pick on Warren. Virtually all politicians, of both parties, fall prey to similar fallacies when presenting the costs of their policies. Warren’s proposals, when all is said and done, are best viewed not as a way of paying for her program but as a series of admissions about just how expensive it would be. Whether or not you call those taxes, they are very real burdens — and many of them will end up falling on the middle class.

How Sen. Warren’s health care plan could impact 401(k)s

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s “Medicare for All” plan may impact your future nest egg. Some critics of the proposal note the presidential hopeful could potentially tax investors, which would make it more difficult to save for retirement. Edelman Financial Engines Founder Ric Edelman discusses with Yahoo Finance’s Zack Guzman, Sibile Marcellus, and ‘The Morning Brew’ Business Editor and Podcast Host, Kinsey Grant.

Hillary Clinton: Warren’s Medicare for All Plan Won’t Ever Get Enacted

Yuval Rosenberg noted that Hillary Clinton said Wednesday that she doesn’t believe Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare-for-All plan would ever become law and that there are better ways to raise revenues than Warren’s proposed wealth tax.

Asked at a New York Times conference whether she thinks the health-care plan released by Warren would ever get enacted, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee said: “No, I don’t. I don’t but the goal is the right goal.”

In her 2016 campaign, Clinton supported a public health insurance option and rejected calls from Bernie Sanders, her rival for the Democratic nomination, for a single-payer system. On Wednesday, Clinton said she still favors a public option to build on the Affordable Care Act, which lifted insurance coverage rates to 90%. “I believe the smarter approach is to build on what we have. A public option is something I’ve been in favor of for a very long time,” she said. “I don’t believe we should be in the midst of a big disruption while we are trying to get to 100 percent coverage and deal with costs and face some tough issues about competitiveness and other kinds of innovation in health care.”

Clinton also said she supports the health care debate Democrats are having and tried to contrast that with the Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. “Yeah, we’re having a debate on our side of the political ledger, but it’s a debate about the right issue, how do we get to health care coverage for everybody that we can afford?” Clinton said.

Warren responded on Thursday. “I’m saying, you don’t get what you don’t fight for,” she said, according to The Times. “You know, you’ve got to be willing to get out there and fight.”

On the issue of a wealth tax, another central element of Warren’s campaign, Clinton said she doesn’t understand how the proposal could work, suggesting it would be too disruptive. Clinton added that there are better ways to raise revenues, get the rich to pay more and combat inequality. “I just think there are better ways of doing it,” she said, adding that she would be in favor of raising the estate tax.

Also, Hillary Clinton called the wealth taxes proposed by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren “unworkable” and said they would be “incredibly disruptive” if enforced.

Warren health plan departs from US ‘social insurance’ idea

Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar reported that Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s plan to pay for “Medicare for All” without raising taxes on the middle class departs from how the U.S. has traditionally financed bedrock social insurance programs. That might impact its political viability now and in the future.

While echoing her party’s longstanding call for universal health care, the Massachusetts Democrat is proposing to raise most of the additional $20.5 trillion her campaign believes would be needed from taxes on businesses, wealthy people and investors.

That’s different from the “social insurance” — or shared responsibility — the approach taken by Democratic presidents like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Broad financing through payroll taxes collected from workers and their employers has fostered a sense of ownership of Social Security and Medicare among ordinary Americans. That helped derail several Republican-led privatization efforts. And signs declaring “Keep Government Out Of My Medicare” proliferated during protests against President Barack Obama’s health care legislation, which scaled back Medicare payments to hospitals.

The Warren campaign says the reason programs like Social Security and Medicare are popular is that benefits are broadly shared. A campaign statement said her plan would put money now spent on medical costs back in the pockets of middle-class families “substantially larger than the largest tax cut in American history.”

But Roosevelt was once famously quoted explaining that he settled on a payroll tax for Social Security to give Americans the feeling they had a “legal, moral and political right” to benefits, thereby guaranteeing “no damn politician” could take it down.

Medicare passed under Johnson, is paid for with a payroll tax for hospital services and a combination of seniors’ premiums and general tax revenues for outpatient care and prescriptions. Truman’s plan for universal health insurance did not pass, but it would have been supported by payroll taxes.

“If you look at the two core social insurance programs in the United States, they have always been financed as a partnership,” said William Arnone, CEO of the National Academy of Social Insurance, a nonpartisan organization that educates on how social insurance builds economic security.

On Warren’s plan, “the question is, will people still look at it as an earned right, or will they say that their health care is coming out of the generosity of the wealthy?” Arnone added. His group takes no position on Medicare for All.

“It’s not an accident that Social Security is on the chopping block a lot less frequently than so-called welfare programs,” said retirement expert Charles Blahous, a political conservative and a former public trustee overseeing Social Security and Medicare finances.

With Warren’s approach, “you are going to have this clash of interests between the people paying the bills and the beneficiaries,” Blahous added. His own estimates indicate Medicare for All would cost the government about $12 trillion more over 10 years than Warren projects.

The Warren campaign downplays the role of shared responsibility and instead points to promised benefits under Medicare for All.

“Every person in America will have full health coverage, get the doctors and the treatments they need, and no more going broke over medical bills,” the campaign said in a statement. “Backed up by leading experts, Elizabeth has shown how her plan will do this by having the richest 1% and giant corporations pay a little bit more and without raising taxes on the middle class by one penny.”

Under Warren’s plan, nearly $9 trillion would come from businesses, in lieu of what they’re already paying for employees’ health care. About $7 trillion would come from increased taxes on investors, wealthy people, and large corporations. An IRS crackdown on tax evasion would net about $2 trillion. The remainder would come from various sources, including dividends of a projected immigration overhaul and eliminating a Pentagon contingency fund used for anti-terrorism operations.

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ list of options to pay for Medicare for All includes a 4% income-based premium collected from most households.

John Rother, CEO of the National Coalition on Health Care umbrella group, said he can follow Warren’s argument about making the wealthy pay, but it still looks like a hard sell.

“What is different today is the tremendous gap between the well-off and middle-class people,” he said. “In a way, it makes sense as a step toward greater equality, but it is still a little tricky politically because you don’t have that same sense that ‘this is mine, I paid into it, and therefore no one is going to take it away.'” His group has taken no position on Medicare for All.

History records that various payment options were offered for Social Security in the 1930s and FDR favored a broad payroll tax. One competing idea involved a national sales tax.

An adviser’s memo in the Social Security archives distills Roosevelt’s thinking.

“We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits,” Roosevelt was quoted as saying.

“With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program,” he added. “Those taxes aren’t a matter of economics, they’re straight politics.”

Medicare-for-all could cause ‘enormous’ doctor shortage

Julia Limitone pointed out something I mentioned that I am concerned about in the Medicare for All plan outlined by Sen. Warren. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare-for-all plan is a disaster and would lead to an “enormous” doctor shortage, according to FOX News medical correspondent Dr. Marc Siegel.

If Warren’s plan came to pass, doctors would be working for the government, which in turn would decide their pay, Dr. Siegel told FOX Business’ Stuart Varney.

“The government doctors will be paid up to 40 percent less,” he said on Thursday. “Many will leave the profession,”

In countries with socialized medicine doctors earn about half of what primary care doctors make in America, he said.

“I’ve interviewed an Australian physician who’s from Canada, and she’s making about 30 to 40 dollars for a visit at the most,” he said.

But even more than that, a patient wouldn’t necessarily be able to get the care they need, Siegel said.

“I have to wait a month to figure out if someone has a problem up here,” he said.

What’s more, he said, it would hit hospitals hard. Hospitals rely on private insurance to pay for research, medical students and quality care, Dr. Siegel said. Under the plan, they’d get a flat fee from the government, and would not be able to differentiate between medical centers and great care and something that’s of lower quality, he explained.

“Hospitals are going to go belly up,” he warned.

Warren’s campaign said the single-payer plan would cost the country “just under” $52 trillion.

VA launches new health care options under MISSION Act

Because we are celebrating Veterans Day I thought that I would review some of the changes in the VA healthcare system. The VA system represents a health care system that is run by the government and look where that is going…….back to the private health care system. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) launched its new and improved Veterans Community Care Program on June 6, 2019, implementing portions of the VA Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks Act of 2018 (MISSION Act), which both ends the Veterans Choice Program and establishes a new Veterans Community Care Program.

The MISSION Act will strengthen the nationwide VA Health Care System by empowering Veterans with more health care options.

“The changes not only improve our ability to provide the health care Veterans need but also when and where they need it,” said VA Secretary Robert Wilkie. “It will also put Veterans at the center of their care and offer options, including expanded telehealth and urgent care, so they can find the balance in the system that is right for them.”

Under the new Veterans Community Care Program, Veterans can work with their VA health care provider or other VA staff to see if they are eligible to receive community care based on new criteria. Eligibility for community care does not require a Veteran to receive that care in the community; Veterans can still choose to have VA provide their care. Veterans may elect to receive care in the community if they meet any of the following six eligibility criteria:

  1. A Veteran needs a service not available at any VA medical facility.
  2. A Veteran lives in a U.S. state or territory without a full-service VA medical facility. Specifically, this would apply to Veterans living in Alaska, Hawaii, New Hampshire and the U.S. territories of Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
  3. A Veteran qualifies under the “grandfather” provisions related to distance eligibility under the Veterans Choice Program.
  4. VA cannot furnish care within certain designated access standards. The specific access standards are described below:
  • Drive time to a specific VA medical facility
  • Thirty-minute average drive time for primary care, mental health, and noninstitutional extended care services.
  • Sixty-minute average drive time for specialty care.

Note: Drive times are calculated using geomapping software.

  • Appointment wait time at a specific VA medical facility
  • Twenty days from the date of the request for primary care, mental health care, and noninstitutional extended care services, unless the Veteran agrees to a later date in consultation with his or her VA health care provider.
  • Twenty-eight days for specialty care from the date of request, unless the Veteran agrees to a later date in consultation with his or her VA health care provider.
  1. The Veteran and the referring clinician agree it is in the best medical interest of the Veteran to receive community care based on defined factors.
  2. VA has determined that a VA medical service line is not providing care in a manner that complies with VA’s standards for quality based on specific conditions.

In preparation for this landmark initiative, senior VA leaders will visit more than 30 VA hospitals across the country to provide in-person support for the rollout.

The VA MISSION Act:

  • Strengthens VA’s ability to recruit and retain clinicians.
  • Authorizes “Anywhere to Anywhere” telehealth across state lines.
  • Empowers Veterans with increased access to community care.
  • Establishes a new urgent care benefit that eligible Veterans can access through VA’s network of urgent care providers in the community.

VA serves approximately 9 million enrolled Veterans at 1,255 health care facilities around the country every year. We send our military representatives-soldiers, sailors and airmen and women to fight for us and now we are arguing about how to care for them when they are injured, whether physically or mentally. Imagine if we adopt another government-run health care system??

Thank you, all you Vets for all you have done for us to keep us and our beloved country free!

 

Warren’s $52T ‘Medicare-for-all’ plan revealed: Campaign still claims no middle-class tax hikes needed and SNL

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74798250_2323921837737462_2762717535395643392_nFinally, we got a view of the cost of Medicare for All plan for health care for all of us. It was so interesting that Saturday Night Live featured it on T.V. With the remarkably versatile Kate McKinnon at the helm, this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live” cold open took aim at Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s $52 trillion “Medicare-for-all” health care plan.

“I am in my natural habitat – a public school on a weekend,” McKinnon’s excitable Warren quipped at an Iowa town hall, complete with fist pumps, some “whoos” and the senator’s signature raspy voice.

She also took a moment to give former Rep. Beto O’Rourke a sendoff after he dropped out of the race last week.

“Let me know how my dust tastes,” she said.

After mentioning that she pays taxes in every state “out of principle,” she took questions from cast members playing ambivalent voters.

Asked why it took her so long to release her health care plan, McKinnon’s Warren answered, “When Bernie [Sanders] was talking ‘Medicare-for-all’, everybody was like, ‘Oh cool,’ and then they turned to me and said, ‘Fix it, Mom.’”

She added that her plan “compares favorably” to former Vice President Joe Biden’s “in that it exists.”

“No one asks how we’re going to pay for ‘Remember Obama,” she said, referring to Biden’s tendency to frequently cozy up to the former president.

She then answered a question about estimates of how much her plan would cost.

“We’re talking trillions,” she answered. “When the numbers are this big they’re just pretending.”

Warren has surged in polls recently as Biden has faded and is in the lead in a new Iowa poll.

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s long-awaited “Medicare-for-all” funding plan projects the government-run health care system would cost a staggering sum of “just under $52 trillion” over the next decade, with the campaign proposing a host of new tax increases to pay for it while still claiming the middle class would not face any additional burden.

“We don’t need to raise taxes on the middle class by one penny to finance Medicare for All,” Sen. Warren, D-Mass., said in her plan — a copy of which was obtained by Fox News in advance of its release Friday.

In a tweet posted after this report was first published, Warren reiterated that pledge while asserting she can return $11 trillion to American families.

Today, I’m releasing my plan to pay for ‪#MedicareForAll. Here’s the headline: My plan won’t raise taxes one penny on middle-class families. In fact, we’ll return about $11 TRILLION to the American people. That’s bigger than the biggest tax cut in our history. Here’s how:

Some of Warren’s rivals for the nomination are unlikely to buy that claim, after having repeatedly challenged her assertions that the middle class would not be hit by tax hikes and suggested she has not been upfront with voters.

Indeed, the Joe Biden campaign said the “unrealistic plan” would leave only two options: “even further increase taxes on the middle class or break her commitment to these promised benefits.”

“The mathematical gymnastics in this plan are all geared towards hiding a simple truth from voters: it’s impossible to pay for Medicare for All without middle-class tax increases,” Deputy Campaign Manager Kate Bedingfield said in a statement.

The Warren campaign’s detailed Medicare-for-all proposal, however, insists that the costs can be covered by a combination of existing federal and state spending on Medicare and other health care — as well as myriad taxes on employers, financial transactions, the ultra-wealthy and large corporations and some savings elsewhere. Those measures are meant to pay for a projected $20.5 trillion in new federal spending. Notably, they include what is essentially a payroll tax increase on employers, something economists generally say can hit workers in the form of reduced wages.

Like Medicare-for-all’s chief Senate champion, fellow candidate Bernie Sanders, the Warren campaign argues that many of these costs already are being spent in the existing health care system by governments, employers and individuals in the form of premiums, deductibles, and other expenses.

However, unlike Sanders’ plan, Warren’s projects no new tax burden for the middle class. The Warren campaign claims those $11 trillion in individual costs would drop to “practically zero,” while the plan maintains and boosts a funding pipeline from other sources. The plan also carries a total price tag of “just under $52 trillion” over the next 10 years, or slightly less than cost projections for the current system. That factors in current and additional spending; new spending alone would be in the $20 trillion range, compared with roughly $32 trillion for Sanders’ plan.

So how would she pay for it?

Among other proposals, Warren calls for bringing in nearly $9 trillion in new Medicare taxes on employers over the next 10 years, arguing this would essentially replace what they’re already paying for employee health insurance. Further, Warren’s campaign says if they are at risk of falling short of the revenue target, they could impose a “Supplemental Employer Medicare Contribution” for big companies with “extremely high executive compensation and stock buyback rates.”

Whether some of those costs, however, still could be passed on to middle-class employees – as economists argue payroll tax costs often are – remains to be seen. As the Tax Policy Center has noted, it is assumed the “employee bears the burden of both the employer and employee portions of payroll taxes.”

Bedingfield pointed to that component in alleging the plan “would place a new tax of nearly $9 trillion that will fall on American workers.”

Warren also proposes even more taxes on the ultra-rich, expanding on her previously announced signature wealth tax, to tax more of anyone’s net worth over $1 billion (estimated to raise another $1 trillion). Warren also calls for raising capital gains tax rates for the wealthy, taxing more foreign earnings and imposing a tax on financial transactions to generate $800 billion in revenue.

Aside from those and other taxes, the campaign claims they can scrounge up $2.3 trillion with better tax enforcement and policies, as well as additional funds by reining in defense spending.

“When fully implemented, my approach to Medicare for All would mark one of the greatest federal expansions of middle-class wealth in our history,” Warren said in her plan. “And if Medicare for All can be financed without any new taxes on the middle class, and instead by asking giant corporations, the wealthy, and the well-connected to pay their fair share, that’s exactly what we should do.”

Warren has been teasing this plan for weeks, especially after some of her rivals hammered her campaign on the financing issue during the last primary debate.

“Your signature, senator, is to have a plan for everything except this,” South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg memorably said during last month’s Democratic primary debate.

“No plan has been laid out to explain how a multitrillion-dollar hole in this Medicare-for-all plan that Senator Warren is putting forward is supposed to get filled in,” he charged.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., also slammed Warren during that debate, saying “at least Bernie’s being honest here in saying how he’s going to pay for this and that taxes will go up. And I’m sorry, Elizabeth, but you have not said that and I think we owe it to the American people to tell them where we’re going to send the invoice.”

Sanders has openly said taxes will increase “for virtually everybody” but argued the system will ultimately cost less than what workers currently pay for premiums and other expenses.

The Warren campaign’s insistence that the middle class will be spared any such costs is likely to face sustained skepticism in the Democratic primary field.

Buttigieg reprised his criticism this week, telling Fox News that his concern about Warren’s plan “is not just the multi-trillion-dollar hole, but also the fact that most Americans would prefer not to be told that they have to abandon their private plan.”

Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh also blasted Warren’s plan Friday as a “total disaster.”

“There are 52 trillion reasons why this plan is a total disaster,” Murtaugh told Fox News. “Best of luck to the fact-checkers who now have to clean up the mess.”

One Emory University health care expert recently told The Washington Post “there’s no question” a Medicare-for-all plan “hits the middle class” in some way. A new study released by the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget also noted it would be “impossible” to finance any such plan using only taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

Aside from the cost issues, Warren did appear to acknowledge this week that Medicare-for-all could result in substantial job losses, calling it “part of the cost issue” when confronted with an estimate that nearly 2 million jobs could be shed.

During that same interview with New Hampshire Public Radio, Warren vowed that she would “not sign any legislation into law for which costs for middle-class families do not go down.”

UPDATE 6-Democrat Warren: Medicare for All would not raise U.S. middle-class taxes ‘one penny’

As we just heard and Reuters published a report noted, Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren on Friday proposed a $20.5 trillion Medicare for All plan that she said would not require raising middle-class taxes “one penny,” answering critics who had attacked her for failing to explain how she would pay for the sweeping healthcare system overhaul.

Warren said her plan would save American households $11 trillion in out-of-pocket healthcare spending over the next decade while imposing significant new taxes on corporations and the wealthy to help finance it.

“Healthcare is a human right, and we need a system that reflects our values,” Warren wrote in a 20-page essay outlining her plan. “That system is Medicare for All.”

The proposal to remake the U.S. healthcare system will face scrutiny from Warren’s more moderate Democratic opponents, who have questioned Medicare for All’s practicality.

Warren’s proposal also calls for cuts in defense spending and passing immigration reform to increase tax revenue from newly legal Americans, two steps that would face an uphill battle in Congress. The $20.5 trillion in new spending over 10 years would increase the entire federal budget by a third.

Warren, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, is one of 17 Democrats vying for the party’s nomination to take on Republican President Donald Trump in the November 2020 election. She is near the front of the pack in opinion polls, having closed in on former Vice President Joe Biden, the early front-runner.

Medicare for All would replace private health insurance, including employer-sponsored plans, with full government-sponsored coverage, and individuals would no longer have to pay premiums, deductibles, co-pays or other out-of-pocket costs.

It would extend Medicare, the U.S. government’s health insurance program for people 65 years and older and the disabled, to cover all Americans, including the roughly 27.5 million – 8.5% of the population – who are currently uninsured.

Warren, a former law professor, has become known for a bevy of detailed policy proposals. But she had faced criticism for not detailing how she would pay for a Medicare for All plan she backs, which was introduced in the Senate by rival Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

At recent debates, Warren had refused to answer directly when asked whether she would be forced to raise middle-class taxes to cover the costs, even as Sanders acknowledged he would.

More moderate 2020 candidates such as Biden and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg have said Medicare for All would be too disruptive and favor a more incremental approach.

‘MATHEMATICAL GYMNASTICS’

On Friday, Biden’s campaign questioned Warren’s calculations, calling them “double talk” and “mathematical gymnastics” and asserting that middle-class taxes would rise despite her vow.

“It’s impossible to pay for Medicare for All without middle-class tax increases,” said Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager. “To accomplish this sleight of hand, her proposal dramatically understates its cost, overstates its savings, inflates the revenue, and pretends that an employer payroll tax increase is something else.”

Warren, speaking to reporters in Iowa on Friday, said she was “just not sure where he (Biden) is going,” adding that her proposal and its costs were authenticated by outside experts.

“Democrats are not going to win by repeating Republican talking points and by dusting off the points of view of the giant drug companies and the giant insurance companies,” Warren said.

House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi also questioned the feasibility of enacting Medicare for All, saying in an interview with Bloomberg on Friday that Democrats should focus on expanding the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.

Critics like Warren note that the current U.S. healthcare system – a patchwork of private insurance often provided by employers or obtained through Obamacare marketplaces and public programs covering the poor, elderly and disabled – is the most costly in the world despite leaving tens of millions uncovered.

Medicare for All legislation stands little chance of passing Congress, where Democrats control the House and Republicans control the Senate.

The plan relies on aggressive ways of lowering healthcare costs, including major cuts in prescription drug prices and significant reductions in administrative costs by eliminating private insurers.

“She makes some assumptions about how effectively healthcare costs could be contained that may not pan out,” said Larry Levitt, a health policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Employers would be asked to repurpose the money they currently spend on workers’ healthcare into Medicare contributions, while billionaires, high-earning investors, and corporations would face trillions of dollars in higher taxes.

In an effort to appease union leaders, some of whom have expressed skepticism about giving up hard-fought healthcare plans, Warren said employers that already offer benefits under a collective bargaining agreement could reduce their contributions if they pass the savings along to workers.

Warren released two letters supporting her calculations from several experts, including Simon Johnson, the former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund; Donald Berwick, who oversaw Medicare in the Obama administration; and Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

An online calculator launched by Warren’s campaign showed an average family of four with employer-provided insurance would save $12,378 per year.

Warren said with her Medicare for All plan in place, projected total healthcare costs in the United States over 10 years would be just under $52 trillion – slightly less than maintaining the current system.

Here’s How Warren Finds $20.5 Trillion To Pay For ‘Medicare For All’

Danielle Kurtslenben reported that Sen. Elizabeth Warren says paying for “Medicare for All” would require $20.5 trillion in new federal spending over a decade. That spending includes higher taxes on the wealthy but no new taxes on the middle class.

The Democratic presidential candidate released her plan to pay for Medicare for All on Friday after being dogged for months by questions of how she would finance such a sweeping overhaul of the health care system. That pressure has been intensified by the fact that Warren has made detailed proposals a central part of her brand as a candidate.

Medicare for All is a single-payer health care proposal introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders and co-sponsored by multiple candidates in the presidential race, including Warren. It would virtually eliminate private insurance, including employer-sponsored coverage.

It also represents a political risk, as multiple polls show that introducing a public option for health insurance coverage is more popular than a Medicare for All plan that almost entirely does away with private insurance.

Here’s a look at what Warren has laid out to provide single-payer health care, including proposals to cut costs, where new revenue would come from, where funds would not be taken from and what comes next.

How Warren wants to reduce spending

Warren bases her plan off of a recent analysis from the Urban Institute, which estimated that under current law, Americans would spend $52 trillion over the next decade on health care — that includes many types of spending, from employers, individuals and all levels of government.

In that analysis, the Urban Institute calculated that under a single-payer plan that looks a lot like Medicare for All, costs would total not $52 trillion but $59 trillion over a decade, which would require $34 trillion in new federal spending.

Warren’s plan estimates that total health costs could be held to $52 trillion and that $20.5 trillion in new federal spending would be necessary.

Like Urban, Warren’s plan assumes that Medicare for All would pay doctors what Medicare pays them right now. It would also pay hospitals 110 percent of what Medicare pays right now — slightly less than Urban’s 115 percent assumption.

This question — what to pay hospitals and doctors — is a big part of what determines how much Medicare for All would cost. That’s because Medicare pays doctors and hospitals much less than private insurance.

“This plan aggressively constrains the price of health care, paying doctors, hospitals and drug companies much less,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “There would be a lot of adjustment required from hospitals and doctors as their incomes go down.” ( And I will say more about this at the end of this blog post).

Just how seismic such a shift would be would depend in part on how fast the transition is, he added.

“I think how quickly she proposes to transition to this new system will be really important because it would be very disruptive to the health care system,” Levitt said. “You know, a quick transition would be hard and potentially result in shortages or increased wait times for health care.”

Sanders calls for a four-year transition to Medicare for All — a pace that Levitt characterized as “quite quick.” In a Friday blog post spelling out her proposal, Warren said she plans to unveil her transition plan “in the weeks ahead.”

A letter from economists supporting the plan, provided by Warren’s team, argued that these payment rates would work in part because doctors and hospitals would save substantially on administrative costs. Warren’s team also says there would be ways to ensure that vulnerable hospitals, like those in rural areas, would get paid more, so they could stay in business.

Her proposal also establishes savings by projecting that Medicare for All could substantially slow medical cost growth. Warren also stipulates that state and local governments would redirect the more than $6 trillion they currently spend on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to the federal government.

Where the money would not come from

One thing that’s notable about this plan is where the revenue doesn’t come from. Warren had promised at a recent debate that she would not sign a bill that raises health care costs for the middle class.

This plan goes further: Middle-class Americans would no longer pay health premiums or copays and would also not pay new taxes to replace those costs. They would, however, pay taxes on whatever additional take-home pay they would receive from this plan. That would add $1.4 trillion in revenue, her team estimates.

This is a departure from Bernie Sanders’ ideas about how to fund Medicare for All. One of his options is a 4% tax on families earning more than $29,000. At the Democrats’ October debate, he explained that taxes would go up for many Americans under his plan.

“At the end of the day, the overwhelming majority of people will save money on their health care bills. But I do think it is appropriate to acknowledge that taxes will go up,” he said. “They’re going to go up significantly for the wealthy. And for virtually everybody, the tax increase they pay will be substantially less — substantially less than what they were paying for premiums and out-of-pocket expenses.”

Where the $20.5 trillion comes from

Employers are one of the main sources of revenue in this proposal. Warren says she would raise nearly $9 trillion here, a figure that comes from the roughly $9 trillion private employers are projected to spend over the next decade on health insurance. The idea here is that instead of contributing to employees’ health insurance, employers would pay virtually all of that money to the government.

In addition, she will boost her proposed 3% wealth tax on people with over a billion dollars to 6% and also boost taxes on large corporations. Altogether, she believes, taxes on the rich and on corporations would raise an estimated $6 trillion. An additional $2.3 trillion would come from improving tax enforcement.

But there are lingering questions about how much revenue some of these taxes would bring in or how easy it would be to impose a wealth tax in particular.

“Something like half of the wealth of the wealthiest people in America is held in privately held corporations, privately held businesses,” said Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “And it’s really hard to value those assets for tax purposes.”

Warren also includes comprehensive immigration reform as part of her plan. Giving more people a path to citizenship would mean more taxpayers, which would mean more tax revenue.

Political ramifications

While Medicare for All is Sanders’ plan, his bill does not include set methods to pay for the plan. Rather, Sanders has included “options” to pay for his health care plan. In a recent interview with CNBC, he said “we’ll have that debate” over how exactly to finance the plan.

As the candidate with “a plan for that,” as one of her slogans goes, Warren has been asked repeatedly whether her health care overhaul plan would raise taxes on the middle class. Warren repeatedly said in response that she would not raise costs for the middle class.

This proposal gives Warren an answer for the next time she is asked how she would pay for Medicare for All, and it means she can say that she wouldn’t impose new taxes on middle-class Americans.

But it also gives her opponents potential new fodder for attacks. Former Vice President Joe Biden has already come out swinging, accusing Warren of fuzzy math. In addition, his team argues that that nearly $9 trillion that employers would pay the government would ultimately hurt workers.

“To accomplish this sleight of hand, her proposal dramatically understates its cost, overstates its savings, inflates the revenue, and pretends that an employer payroll tax increase is something else,” said Biden deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield in a statement released Friday.

In fact, another study by a number of economists estimates the true cost of almost $70 trillion over a decade. Wow, what a spending plan and what is our national debt now? About $21 trillion and now we are going to add more and more. When does it end? And remember all the doctors and hospitals, especially rural hospitals, will be paid based on the discounted rates of Medicare. How do doctors then pay for the education debts, their overhead expenses, and their malpractice insurance fees? Interesting! Who then will be taking care of our patients?

Again I ask, where is Obamacare when we need it and how do we pay for it in the future?