Biden’s costly failure to stop Medicare privatization experiment in Ohio: Maximilian Brockwell and James Tyler Moore

Published: Feb. 16, 2022, 5:38 a.m.

https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2022/02/bidens-costly-failure-to-stop-medicare-privatization-experiment-in-ohio-maximilian-brockwell-and-james-tyler-moore.html

Maximilian Brockwell and James Tyler Moore are first-year medical students at Northeast Ohio Medical University. Both serve on the leadership board for the local chapter of Students for a National Health Program.

ROOTSTOWN, Ohio — On Jan. 19, President Joe Biden spoke to a press conference touting the accomplishments of his first year in office, praising his administration’s COVID-19 response and approach toward health care policy. Conveniently, he failed to mention one glaring issue that will affect more than 2.4 million aging and vulnerable Ohioans — he has spent an entire year squandering the opportunity to protect them from a dangerous Donald Trump-era plan to privatize Medicare.

The pilot program, which began to roll out in 2021, introduces private companies known as “direct contracting entities” (DCEs) as middlemen between the Medicare program and health care providers. This experimental model currently spans 38 states, including Ohio. On paper, the rationale is to reduce cost by spreading financial responsibility between the government and third parties. However, under the false guise of risk-sharing, private groups can siphon massive amounts of cash away from seniors to line their own pockets.

Watchdog organizations are raising alarms about the myriad ways DCEs can take advantage of the system. DCEs would negotiate with hospitals and physician groups, and if successful, will automatically switch patients to this new insurance plan without informed consent. While there is an option to opt out after the fact, the opaque process will add to an already confusing maze of hurdles seniors must navigate to access necessary medical care. It may also lead to many patients being forced to find new physicians if they don’t want to participate.

The amount of funds distributed to a DCE is determined by the “risk scores” of their patients, a value estimating a person’s cost of care. This naturally incentivizes a trick called “upcoding,” which is a process where providers are pressured to use diagnoses with higher risk scores and thus higher levels of reimbursement. The companies then keep the difference between their allowance from Medicare and the true cost of treatment. Financial analysis has shown that just a 0.1-point increase in risk scores across the Medicare population would lead to overpayments nationwide in the range of $15 billion, including $3.5 billion in profits for the middlemen.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, more than half of DCEs already approved to participate are owned by private investors, including hedge funds with little experience in health care. Their goal is simple: increase profit margins. Efficiency will be an afterthought in this overcomplicated system, and the autonomy of Medicare patients across the country will be caught in the crosshairs.

All of this is happening under the watch of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the federal body that oversees Medicare under the direction of the executive branch, independent of congressional oversight. The buck stops with Joe Biden, and so far, he has failed to act to prevent this private takeover of Medicare coverage.

In his Jan. 19 remarks, Biden boasted that, “We cut health insurance premiums for millions of American families,” yet Medicare premiums and deductibles are both set to increase by nearly 15% in 2022. It is hard to see how allowing the program to be taken over by Wall Street investors could have any alleviating effect on its potentially massive cost to the country or to individual beneficiaries.

Thousands of concerned health care professionals have joined together to halt this program through petitions and letter writing. There is still time for citizens’ voices to be heard, and for Biden to act, while the program is still in its infancy. Before Ohio taxpayers’ money is wasted and their right to choose their own Medicare coverage has been stripped, Biden should walk the walk of health care reform by doing the right thing and protecting Medicare recipients, not the legacy of Trump, or the profits of the middlemen.

Updated Information: SNaHP Summit 2020

We are excited to welcome you to the 2020 SNaHP Summit on Saturday, February 15 at the the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical School in Aurora, Colo. (near Denver). Our theme, “Making it to the Mountaintop,” means that SNaHP is moving full speed ahead into this next decade.

Online registration has closed, but on-site registration will be available Saturday, February 15 starting at 8:00 a.m.

Keynote

Our keynote this year is PNHP President-Elect Dr. Susan Rogers

Agenda

You can find the SNaHP Summit agenda HERE with the speaker’s list HERE. Note that in order to save paper, we will not be providing paper copies at the Summit. Instead, you will be able to scan the QR codes with your phone at the registration desk.

Map

A map of the school can be found HERE. We will be in the Ed2 North building, with meals being served in the “bridge.” We will have a light breakfast and boxed lunch available for attendees. And coffee. All the coffee.

Dress code

Come as you are. If you feel comfortable in jeans, do that. If you feel comfortable in dress slacks, do that. 

Article for non-POC meet up

We will host separate breakout sessions for POC and non-POC SNaHPers. If you plan on attending the non-POC meet-up, please read this article in advance to be fully prepared for discussion.

Out-of-town students

Students who are flying in may want to share a ride with other students. Please take a look at our ride-share spreadsheet to connect with other students and coordinate ride-sharing.


The scholarship window is now closed. There will be no assigned student housing this year. Instead, scholarship recipients will be given a housing stipend, which they can use at any location of their choice. The stipend will reflect general lodging prices in Aurora. Students can group up and coordinate to split housing costs using THIS spreadsheet. If you are having trouble finding a housing buddy, please reach out to organizer@pnhp.org and we can assist you.

Medical School: An invitation for activism towards single-payer

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“If you care about a health care system that serves the needs of everyone, not just the privileged or the wealthy, there is room for you in this movement.”

-Josh Faucher, SNaHP member

I’ve been a part of SNaHP since the beginning, watching our annual gathering grow from a few dozen people in a small conference room in 2012, to the massive turnout we had this spring with representatives from around the country.

Each year, I’m impressed with the reality that many of our most enthusiastic and active members are students early in their medical school journeys, many of whom haven’t had much contact with patients yet. When I first began medical school, it was easy to get caught up in the praise and aggrandizement that was heaped upon us – the constant congratulations for joining a profession as well-respected and impactful as medicine. It is true that physicians can have a profound impact on the lives of our patients, curing terrible diseases and lessening the suffering caused by chronic ailments. In looking at the nature of the health care system as a whole, however, I have seen clear examples of how access is rationed based on a patient’s financial resources, and how seeking health care can leave patients vulnerable to harm that affects their livelihoods and economic security.

As a new resident, when I look back on medical school, there were many things that left me less confident in my ability to avoid doing harm as a physician.

Take, for instance, the guest speaker we had during my second year of medical school, a young woman in her 20s (let’s call her Sarah) who recounted her battle with acute lymphocytic leukemia, a cancer that strikes suddenly and can be fatal in a matter of hours. Sarah described to us the physical challenges she faced while receiving chemotherapy, and the fantastic care she had received from her physicians. As I listened to her story, I wondered whether, as a young person who had just entered the workforce, she had the financial resources to pay for her care. At the end of her presentation, I asked her, and it turned out that cancer devastated more than just her body.

Sarah’s illness prevented her from working and when she eventually lost her job, she lost her insurance, too. The hospital bills that followed quickly depleted her savings until she was forced to go on Medicaid. She described this as an extremely difficult experience that caused her considerable shame. For some reason, to this patient and others who told us stories of illness, the consistent assumption seemed to be that future doctors didn’t need to hear about, or wouldn’t be interested in, the financial problems caused by our health care system.

I strongly believe that no one should experience shame or financial ruin just because they get sick. I think many of my classmates would agree, but if patients aren’t given a chance to share that side of their experience, we can’t expect their physicians to become aware of the problem solely through intuition.

There was also the middle-aged man – I’ll call him Bill – who I met during one of my clinical rotations. Bill had a chronic mental illness and an unstable, intermittent employment status, but nevertheless was surviving on his own in the community. He presented to the clinic with shortness of breath after a temporary construction job had been halted because of the discovery that he and his co-workers had been exposed to asbestos. It took multiple visits for us to explain to him that asbestos causes disease many years after exposure, and that, instead, he was experiencing symptoms related to longstanding COPD. Worker’s comp, of course, would not pay to manage this chronic preexisting disease, and Bill experienced considerable distress until we were able to enroll him in Medicare because of his new disability. With a universal, comprehensive insurance system his disease might have been detected earlier, or smoking cessation therapy could have been emphasized when he was young. Instead, he’ll live with COPD for the rest of his life, and will probably die from it.

Then there’s me. I was born with a serious heart defect that required surgery when I was a toddler, and again when I was 13 years old. Despite facing health challenges during my own life, I consider myself privileged. I’m privileged to have had a better outcome than many others in the same situation; I’m privileged to have never missed one of the annual cardiologist visits that will determine when I need to have my next operation; and I’m privileged because I happened to have the best hospital in the country in-network on my insurance while attending medical school.

Nevertheless, despite having insurance, I have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars in deductibles and copayments out-of-pocket every year to monitor a health condition I have through no fault of my own. If I was like millions of working Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck, unable to save money let alone pay thousands of dollars for medical bills, I might have to skip yearly checkups to take care of other necessities first. If I were truly poor and on Medicaid, I might have to travel long distances or wait many weeks to find a physician who would take me for an appointment. In either case, I might not get the care I need until I deteriorate to a point that would cause me permanent harm.

The Affordable Care Act has not done nearly enough to address the barriers to health care that exist due to our broken insurance system. Under Obamacare, the United States remains the only industrialized capitalist democracy on the planet that does not provide universal health care access to its entire population. Indeed, even if it works as well as it possibly can, Obamacare will leave over 30 million people uninsured and without access to basic care. Those benefiting from the law are forced into a relationship with private insurers, the same companies that previously denied people for preexisting conditions and cut policies when people got sick until those practices were outlawed by Congress.

Now, the insurance companies have a different approach to maximizing their revenue: they lure buyers on the exchange with low premiums, and then slam them with high deductibles. An annual deductible of thousands of dollars before insurance kicks in can quickly empty a family’s savings account, and does little to protect them from health care costs.

As a member of SNaHP and PNHP, I advocate for an alternative along with other medical students and physician: an improved version of Medicare that would apply to the entire population; a universal, single-payer, publicly financed and administered insurance system. By its very nature, such a system would apply to the entire citizenry from birth to death, and would reduce or eliminate out-of-pocket costs for medical care. It could be progressively financed while providing universal, equitable access. Unlike the hodgepodge of secretive private companies providing insurance right now, Medicare-for-all would be transparently financed and publicly accountable through the democratic process. With the entire population invested in the program, the adequacy of reimbursement for medical expenses would be a top priority.

Most importantly, a Medicare-for-all program would reduce our out-of-proportion spending on health care while at the same time expanding coverage and access to everyone. It would greatly reduce the need for providers to maintain complicated administrative structures for billing multiple insurers, and would act as a strong negotiator to prevent unfair profiteering by pharmaceutical and device manufacturers. An analysis by the Lewin Group in 2012 estimated that a single-payer system would have saved my state of Minnesota $4.1 billion in 2014, while economists estimate that single-payer on a national scale would save an estimated $592 billion annually (1). Think of the boost our economy would receive if people were no longer going bankrupt because of medical expenses. Medicare for all would also free the private sector from the burden of providing health insurance as an employee benefit, reducing wage stagnation and making our industries more competitive on the global market.

The need for single-payer health insurance is complex, but the concept itself is simple. The vast majority of my classmates are becoming young physicians with the goal of relieving suffering and providing patients the opportunity to live their lives to the fullest. As economic inequality comes to the forefront as a national issue, medical students are increasingly realizing that the current health insurance system frequently promotes that inequality rather than alleviating it, and just like me they are coming to recognize single-payer health insurance as a necessary, if not sufficient, step to make the provision of health care a tool for social justice.

Our movement has grown larger every year, and the reach of our message has never been broader. If our expanding membership continues to spread awareness about the problems of our health care system and the solutions offered by single-payer health care, our goal will soon be realized and I’ll be able to consider my involvement to be a success.

If you care about a health care system that serves the needs of everyone, not just the privileged or the wealthy, there is room for you in this movement.

1. Cost and Economic Impact Analysis of a Single-Payer Plan in Minnesota; http://growthandjustice.org/images/uploads/LEWIN.Final_Report_FINAL_DRAFT.pdf
josh_faucherJosh Faucher will graduate from Mayo Medical School on May 21st and is pursuing a career in emergency medicine. He co-founded the Mayo Medical School chapter of SNaHP, helped SNaHP grow as a student offshoot of PNHP with national scope, and currently serves as a student member on the PNHP Board of Directors. You can email him at josh.faucher@gmail.com