Does Medical Reporting Help or Hurt?

Courier-Journal reporter Darla Carter led off New Year’s Day with a front page article “Health news [is a] prescription for confusion.”  I agree with her.   Is coffee bad for you of not?  Should postmenopausal women take estrogens or not?  Should men get a routine PSA test for prostate cancer or not?  When and how often should I get a mammogram?  Should I get chest x-rays to screen for lung cancer or not?   Should my child get immunized or not?  Our daily media is full of headlines and stories that address medical scientific issues and their application to medical care.  Even if one is not paying attention, it is obvious that the recommendations appearing in these news articles and segments conflict with each other on a regular basis.

It is this article that stimulated me to get off my duff with this blog.  For years I have been pulling my hair out about the way medical information is presented to the public.  The volume of health and medical information presented to the lay and professional public daily is overwhelming.  I don’t know about you, but I can hardly stand to watch television any more because of all the drug ads.  The only thing that is worse are the campaign ads, but at least these are with us only part of each year.

We are assaulted by print, broadcast, and electronic media everywhere we go.  The nature of the information ranges widely.  It ranges from “news,”  advocacy sponsored material, through press releases supporting every possible position.  The content passes further down the social-value scale through entertainment, snake oil, and outright fraud.   The overwhelming volume of health-related material with which we are sandbagged is advertising: somebody is trying to induce us to buy something that will translate into income for them.  There is nothing wrong with information: more and better information is badly needed.  But we live in a time when food is sold like medicine, and medicine sold like soap powder.   Which hospital in my town really has an infection control problem?  What is the basis of a claim that a given product or service is the “best,” or even works at all for that matter?   Such information is hard to come by– if it is available to the public at all. Continue reading “Does Medical Reporting Help or Hurt?”

New Year’s Resolution: Relaunch of the Health Care Blog

When I began this site, I intended a companion blog in which I could comment on news and policy,  and to stimulate discussion among others.  It was my conceit that because of the broad range of medial professional activities I have enjoyed, that I might have something to contribute!  Without making excuses, this did not come to be!   In the spirit of a New Year’s Resolution but with a hope of greater persistence; and with the philosophy of not letting the “Best be the Enemy of the Good,”  I want to try my hand at a health blog.  I cannot predict how this will evolve, but to learn what can be done, I need to start.

My intention is to try to react each day to some health-related item in my local newspaper (to honor the my Kentucky home and the tagline of this site,) but I will also draw on items from the national media.

I invite any potential readers to join the discussion, present alternative viewpoints that I fail to mention, or to help me get all my facts right.   This blog uses the WordPress software that I confess I am still learning to master.  I do know that the blog will fill with spam and unrelated material unless I require you to register in order to comment.  I hope you will feel comfortable in doing so.   I promise that I will never share any information about you in any way.  Let me know if the site is not working the way it should. Use the “Contact Us”  link in KHPI.org homepage.

While I hope you will find that I have a sense of humor, I am worried about our health care system.  It deserves serious discussion.  Obscenity or abuse aimed at others will not be tolerated.  Offending posts will be deleted and their authors blocked from future participation.

Having said that, I do hope to have some fun doing this.  Although my intention is to present as many sides to a given issue as I am aware of, I do have opinions of my own.  I have never been very good about hiding either my opinions or my feelings.  In the spirit of full disclosure, my basic perspective is that our health care system exists entirely for the benefit of people who are ill, or who are at risk to become ill.  To serve this need is a privilege.

Enough procrastination for now!

Peter Hasselbacher
Jan 1, 2011

Health Care Reform: Vision or Hallucination?

Has anything in health care improved for the better for us patients… for anyone?

Over 10 years ago as we approached the new millennium I was finishing an intensive Health Policy Fellowship.  As a synthesis of all I had seen and learned from an insider’s perspective, I penned a vision of what I thought healthcare should look like in the next century.  It was more a statement of some twenty principles and directions rather than specifics. We are now a full decade into the 21st century so it seemed a good time to take a look at my old roadmap.   Perhaps it is a measure of my current pessimistic state of mind, but I am not immediately able to declare progress towards any of the goals I envisioned.  In fact, it seemed at first blush that despite all the money and best efforts of public and private interests, that most of the items on my wish list were getting worse.

What do you think?  Please prove me wrong.  Help me indentify something good that has happened to us as collective patients.  Is anyone better off?   If so, who?    Convince me that we are not irreversibly lost in a status quo of decreasing access to healthcare of uncontrollable cost, and of unknowable quality.

Peter Hasselbacher

Local Variation in Hospital Charges: 1995-96. An Experiment in Mandated Disclosure to the Public.

This observational study of local variation in hospital charges arose in the environment of one of the most comprehensive state attempts at health care reform.  In the early 1990s, at the same time the Clinton health care reform plan was being debated in Washington, the Commonwealth of Kentucky enacted into law a comprehensive reform plan that in many ways was modeled on the Clinton strategy.  Alas, we will never know what parts of this state experiment would have succeeded.  It was largely repealed two years after enactment due to withering opposition by the health care industry.  I have no way of knowing if the situation regarding hospital charges that I present on the KHPI site has changed from 1996.  My informed suspicion is that it has not.  To this day I still cannot understand my personal medical bills– and I used to be a health executive!

Certainly the same problems of quality and affordability are still with us. Indeed, for affordability, the problem is worse.  With respect to quality it is difficult to know whether there has been improvement or not because of the related barrier of non-transparency.  Certainly tremendous effort and much money have been put into attempting to measure quality, but I am not personally enthusiastic about the usefulness of the information received.  For all the money Medicare and the hospitals themselves put into measuring hospital quality, it could recently be concluded that only a handful of hospitals have a mortality rate for heart attack that is either better or worse than average!  I have to ask, why bother measuring at all if your method of study cannot find any difference?  Measure something else or measure it differently!  It is not true that all hospitals provide care of equal quality, and certainly not for the same cost.

Proposals to make health care information about cost and quality more public are still part of today’s ongoing public policy debate.  For that reason, I dusted off this old study.  I was an old laboratory scientist back then and this was one of my very first forays into health policy research.  I am the first to admit that it was, and is not cutting edge research, but I found it of great interest personally at the time and believe others will too.  I abandoned efforts to publish it back then because of objections from my University.  Even though such studies of institutional or regional variation make no initial value judgments, this kind of information is embarrassing to some hospitals.  I regret that I was not in a position to further test the limits of my academic freedom at the time.

Kentucky’s effort to provide more information to the public in 1995 did not work as planned.  It was too easy to ignore by providers, it may not have asked the right initial questions, and the public was not assisted in transforming the information into something they could use.  The same forces resisting change then still operate today.  As I write this, the outcome of “National Health Care Reform 2010” in Washington is unknown to me.  I will not be surprised, but will be disappointed if we are left as a nation with the status quo of declining access to a health care system of unknowable quality.

Peter Hasselbacher, MD    E-mail