Category: Provider Payments

Potpourri of Health Policy Issues in June.

My cup runneth over with potential issues to explore.

June has been a busy month both locally and nationally insofar as things I like to write about. The shame-on-me is that I have not carved out enough time to do so!  In part I am still picking up the pieces after my early spring travels. Exploring how to unpack and deal with the new Medicare prescription drug data base also took a lot of time.  The truth is that I am a slow writer handicapped by a default and probably over-wordy professorial style.  I haven’t even been able to update the Institute’s Facebook and Twitter pages!  What follows is a list of things that occured during the month that I wanted to write about and hope to do so in more detail later.  These are not necessarily in chronological order or of importance.

The Supremes Rock & Rule!
We were presented with two back-to-back major decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court. The first, King v. Burwell, allows federal subsidies of health insurance premiums for low income individuals and their families to continue even if their insurance was purchased in states that chose to allow the federal government to operate their health insurance exchanges.  The lawsuit brought by Obama/Obamacare-haters to limit premium support to insured individuals in states like Kentucky that chose to operate their own exchanges would have essentially gutted the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and tossed millions back into the uninsured category. For the time being, Obamacare stands intact for at least the next year and a half, despite promises by opponents to throw up additional challenges. All our legislators should be working together to deal with a major remaining deficiency of the ACA.  The Act has been very successful in decreasing the number of uninsured people, but it makes little headway against the exploding costs of unnecessary, marginally effective, or for that matter even necessary medical care.  Continuing to forbid the federal government to negotiate over the prices of drugs is a case in point. Subsidies were deemed necessary for a reason! Continue reading “Potpourri of Health Policy Issues in June.”

Sunshine Act’s Open Payment System To Physicians and Teaching Hospitals Launches Nearly On Schedule With Only Partial Data.

I once helped teach medical statistics. Much dark humor and many aphorisms were to be heard. For example: “If you torture the data long enough, it will tell you what you want to hear.” Another, “Garbage in — Garbage out,” is a shorthand way of stressing the importance of data integrity and reliability. If the data is not well defined, collected, accessible, or verifiable then any subsequent conclusions are correspondingly suspect. In the age of “big-data” and transparency of medical information, this latter concept of data reliability should be guarding the door of accountability. I suggest that the standards being applied so far by CMS to data collection would not be acceptable to editors of scientific journals and yet publication is going forward. Here is what CMS is saying about its Open Payment System:

Continue reading “Sunshine Act’s Open Payment System To Physicians and Teaching Hospitals Launches Nearly On Schedule With Only Partial Data.”

Rocky Rollout of Sunshine Act— The Open Payments Program for Physicians.

Another Accountable Care Act initiative with website problems!

For many years now, many public policy concerns have been expressed about the huge amounts of money that pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers give directly to physicians and academic medical centers. An old drug detail-man in Kentucky once told me his company gave Cadillacs to the highest prescribers of his drugs. I doubt that things are that blatant anymore, but so much money flows into individual and departmental pockets that it is difficult to assemble members for expert panels of the FDA, CDC, or other policymaking organizations who are not receiving money from drug and device makers. Full disclosure was supposed to solve the problem, but that does not work. The Open Payments initiative is part of a larger movement for greater transparency and accountability. I plan to write more about this, including my own experience over the years interacting with Pig Pharma and Big Devices.

Continue reading “Rocky Rollout of Sunshine Act— The Open Payments Program for Physicians.”

Medicare Payments to Oncologists in Kentucky.

Since my initial exploration of Medicare’s Physician Payment Database, I have not done much with it. The expectation that the information would be of great interest to many has been validated, and the utility and shortcomings of the data better understood. The potential is great that these data can be used to improve the quality, affordability, and availability of medical care. As might have been predicted however, a great deal of attention has been focused on identifying medical malfeasance and fraud.

I have always been of the opinion that examination of outliers in big data sets like this one is extremely valuable in health policy research. This is especially true in American medicine where there is such great variation both in the frequency in which various medical services are provided, and the amount of money charged. Looking at outliers does not automatically assume that something inappropriate is going on. A place or provider where a large number of things are being done may be a center of recognized excellence. On the other hand, and as we have seen in this series of articles, such “hotspots” of activity may represent inappropriate, abusive, or even illegal medical practice. I believe that large utilization data sets like this one beg us to ask questions about how to use our healthcare resources fairly, efficiently, and most of all effectively. A strategy I recommend is to start by looking more closely at the top 10 and the bottom 10 on any such list. Is that entry there for the best of reasons to be emulated, or for reasons of less value to be corrected? When you are done with the top ten, go on to the next, and so on. Continue reading “Medicare Payments to Oncologists in Kentucky.”