How Big is 1 Trillion?

1,000,000,000,000.

That’s 12 zeros. I heard a mathematics professor on NPR once explain, “imagine your kid’s first grade class, 1 teacher, 15 kids, comfortable but not spacious room; chalkboard at the front, ABC’s on the wall above. Consider that the number 1,000.”

Now we have to make the journey of multiples of 1,000. Imagine that same room, and that teacher, but now with 15,000 kids. That’s 1 million. Imagine that room with 15,000,000 kids. That’s 1 billion. Imagine that room with 15,000,000,000 kids (15 billion kids, wow!). That’s a trillion. Crowded, eh?

So I have to chuckle at today’s big news story: “Hospitals Reach Deal with Administration - $155 Billion in Health Savings Offered.” To quote, “The nation's hospitals agreed last night to contribute $155 billion over 10 years toward the cost of insuring the 47 million Americans without health coverage, according to two industry sources.” Contribute? They make it sound like a tax-deductible sponsorship for some PBS programming. Where’s it to come from? Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements and $40 billion in compensation for uninsured patients.

There’s an old joke about morals and prostitution that points out once you’ve established that you’re the latter, what’s left is quibbling about the price. “Hospitals” (“Agreeing to the plan were the American Hospital Association, the Federation of American Hospitals and the Catholic Health Association”) have bought a ticket to the party for $155 Big. So, if 155 is the 15 kids in that classroom, all we need is to get 6.5 more kids into that classroom to pay for the public plan (estimated cost $1 x 10 to the 12th power).

Apparently the hospitals have agreed to swallow hard if the final legislation includes a public plan and will take Medicare-or-less rates without a fight. And you thought the recession hurt hospital perfomance...seems like they’ve put $155 billion on the roulette table in hopes they can pressure the Administration to find a not-a-public-option.

By coming to the roulette table now, hospitals allegedly saved themselves $45 billion in cuts (the Administration’s threat was $200 billion) and they got to the table before the docs and the insurance industry. It seems everyone has to take a number and, when called, take a few lashes.

Jeff Goldsmith recently posted about the dangers of the public plan as the pathway to universal coverage. Quoting at length:

“The idea that you can simply insert a new public plan into the existing insurance market without the presently insured noticing any difference is political fiction, not market reality. Think of the private health insurance market as a $900 billion pool of money held back by a vast earthen dam consisting largely of provider/payer contracts. This pool has shrunk by some estimates by as much as 9 million lives due to the recession, due to people losing employer provided coverage.

Obviously, some of those newly insured through health reform will choose private plans and the size of the lake behind the dam could thus grow. Even with no public plan, it is absolutely appropriate for health reformers to demand concessions from private insurers for creating all these new customers.

However, if you also drill, say, a 3 foot wide hole in the dam, (the width of the hole depends on the cost difference between the new public plan and existing private offerings) both lives and dollars will gush out. Depending on the width of the hole, many previously private health plan enrollees will defect to the public plan, and the composition of the risk pool remaining behind the dam will change in completely unpredictable ways. Health plans will have to lower their premiums to avoid being run out of business, and many will gush red ink until they can revise their existing network contracts, many of which contain multi-year rate guarantees.”

Clearly there is an imperative for reform. The stress of the Baby Boom generation on the federal budget is soon to be overwhelming, nearly doubling Medicare Part A expenditures between 2000 and 2030—a burden that, if unchecked, will make it hard for the government to do much else and force a heavy tax burden onto American workers. The growth health costs is certainly impacting small business’ ability to fuel economic recovery and sustain long-term growth. I personally try to avoid being suckered into the “moral imperative” debate often tied to the uninsured but I do believe there are macroeconomic impacts to personal bankruptcies tied to medical care. Add to all this the matter of the US’s overall poor health for the dollar and certainly there is little basis for opposition to reform.

But is $155 billion a necessary Faustian bargain for American hospitals? Here’s one where I would have liked to seen more of a fight. Getting behind real payment and delivery reform in return for a slow, phased path to universal coverage – but only after the fixes suggested by the Health CEO’s for Health Reform parameters were implemented. Let the Government wield a heavy axe of deadlines on those recommended changes as the cost of patience. Hospitals, submit to overall cuts only after having failed to work with Medicare/Medicaid and the private insurance community to make real cost reduction systemic. Otherwise, signing off on $100 billion in cuts is essentially negotiating future update factors without changing anything that will actually improve the system.

Enough on this topic for now. There’s more to our business than reform. Stay tuned for a new theme later in the week.

Wow!

I hope someone in DC is paying attention, because a dose of solid logic just succinctly, realistically, actionably, landed on their doorstep.

I was tipped off by a HealthLeaders article titled, “Healthcare CEOs Offer Quality-Driven Payment Model.” An organization called Health CEOs for Health Reform issued the white paper “Realigning U.S. health Care Incentives to Better Serve Patients and Taxpayers,” and, according to the HL article was led to Congress by the Reform Czar herself, Nancy-Ann DeParle. Having read the 12-page paper, I can see why.

They get it.

They begin by agreeing to quality, affordable coverage for all, with limits (among them, no new public plan – YAY!) and only permitting an individual mandate once coverage systems are proven to be accessible and affordable. No rush to create a mess that would distract from real reform. Good.

Then they spend the next 9 pages succinctly running down how to do the thing(s) that most need to be done – reforming the delivery of care to bring down cost and improve quality facilitated by broad payment system reforms. There’s an old planning adage, “you are what you measure,” and its corollary, “what gets measured gets done,” and they, rightly, frame nearly all their suggestions on the canvas of incentives. Markets work wonders!

“We will not control health care costs until we create clear incentives for providers…to focus on quality and efficiency. Likewise, patients must be encouraged to make healthier choices through changes to their incentives…This will require…courageous provider leadership and significant cultural change.”

The authors present a comprehensive range of ideas, but focus primarily on concrete steps that could be undertaken tomorrow to get us moving down this pathway: End fee-for-service payments, hold providers accountable to cost and quality standards by a specified date, and move to bundled payment models. The last point begs questions (which they address) about how to pull this off. It’s powerful stuff.

A corner post of the plan to move to bundled payments rekindles the 90’s-era conversations around full- and partial-risk contracts and accountable care organizations (called integrated delivery systems back in the day, supported by things like PHO’s). It was a great idea then, it’s a good idea now. But, I wondered, why would it work this time?

A few possibilities came to mind. First is scale. When only capitated HMO contracts were the drivers of these ideas, there was no reason to push ahead, really. It was too small a portion of the payment stream to a hospital/practice to meaningfully change behavior. If fee-for-service goes away entirely and all payers of all stripes move to a bundled methodology, it would force change.

Secondly, the 90's effort emphasized the primary care “gatekeeper” as blocker, er coordinator, of care. Even the phrase “gatekeeper” suggested restricting access. Bad. While the exact specifics of how care organizations are formed and identified for bundled payment purposes are not clear (for obvious reasons) it feels more like primary care physician-as-care-quarterback than as preventer of care.

And that changes because under the old “full risk” models, the PCPs sat on the capitation cash and had to pay bills to others, incentivising the hoarding of cash and a stinginess to refer. If the payer holds the cash and reconciles payments later based on performance it removes that power role from the relationship between providers and might inspire greater care team cooperation. That said, if you don’t capitate, how do you make this work practically? Case rates for inpatient services that cover the right quantity of pre- and post-admission elements of care? On the outpatient side, what? Some modified ICD structure? The devil's in the details.

Lastly, the 90’s model emphasized capturing covered lives. More was better. This compelled odd alliances, irrational hospital system relationships and emphasized scale over outcomes. While Health CEOs for Health Reform do suggest regionalizing high-cost, resource-intensive services, network scale is not necessarily an advantage (fairly, nor a disadvantage). If a small community hospital has a system and processes for delivering excellent outcomes in chronic disease management they can do quite fine financially. That seems sensible.

This opens up a host of strategic, marketing and business planning questions. How should care delivery organization leaders begin to re-engineer their businesses in light of an end to fee-for-service? What are the right business/system organization structures to support clinicians and promote success under bundled payments? If there are national benchmarks for clinical performance with financial penalties for falling below the mark, does quality of care muscle its way back into the strategic plan?

I hope these ideas get some traction on the Hill. They’re offering good advice that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg to implement and would actually attack the heart of the problem.

However, hope is not a strategy. Maybe I need to email my elected leaders….