Who is gaming the system? Surprise, it's the corporations!

I recently participated in a panel discussion following a presentation on the impact of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) by UC-Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong. Unsurprisingly, Dr. DeLong, who worked in the federal government as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy in the early years of the Clinton administration, during an earlier attempt to pass comprehensive health reform, took an economic point of view. He described the economic theories behind each of the approaches to health reform, how the ACA was put together, how it most resembled the “RomneyCare” model implemented in Massachusetts and endorsed by Hillary Clinton but abandoned by the Republicans; he also showed that the Obama administration miscalculated the near-unanimity of Republican opposition. He also looked at how the implementation of the ACA has been more successful than many feared (or hoped) and how the economic analysis behind it was distorted by the Supreme Court decision to allow states to not expand Medicaid, which has resulted in an enormous transfer of wealth from the “red” states that have not to the “blue” states that have done so. Apparently, the ideological commitment by many states (including my own, Kansas, and neighboring Missouri) to harm its people and give away money is puzzling from a purely economic, as well as a human, point of view.

One of the themes Dr. DeLong notes coming especially from “conservative” economists and Republican politicians (and we hear a lot) is the need for people to have “skin in the game”, by which they mean co-pays, deductibles, and other ways of people paying out of their pockets. As Dr. DeLong noted, the only large, well-designed, and meticulous study of the impact of such “skin in the game”, the 1983 RAND experiment (which I have previously discussed; see Insurance company profits up and patient care down, May 17, 2011*)  showed that even small out-of-pocket payments discourage people from seeking care for both minor and major conditions, ultimately cost much more to care for, and harm the health of those people. As noted by one of the audience, current requirements in many “high-deductible” plans for “skin in the game” cost-sharing are far greater than those studied by RAND (and can be 45% of a person’s income!) and are thus even more likely to have a major negative health impact.

Another common “game” meme, mentioned by one of the other panelists, is concern with people “gaming the system”. If this conjures up images of elegant gamblers in formal wear playing roulette with James Bond in a posh casino on the Riviera, that is the intent. Like Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” and Kansas Governor Sam Brownback’s “able-bodied adults who refuse to work”, it is meant to divide people by creating a “them” who are taking it easy while the hard-working “us” pay the price. Of course, this is nonsense; most of those individuals so “gaming the system” are merely trying their best not to break their budgets paying for health insurance until they get so sick that they need it. Yes, this is certainly contrary to the concept of insurance (everyone pays and only some people benefit, but you never know when it will be you), and is a big reason that most countries have gone to a “social insurance” system that just covers everyone.

In fact, despite all the fooforaw about it, there is no data suggesting that there is massive “gaming of the system” by regular people. Michael Hiltzik’s Los Angeles Times column of February 27, 2016 makes this clear, focusing on “Special Enrollment Periods” (SEPs), times when people can enroll in or change their insurance outside of the usual ACA annual period. Huge insurance companies like Aetna and Anthem have asserted, without much evidence, that people are using these SEPs (mostly designed to allow changes when you get married, divorced, have a baby, move to a different state where your current plan wouldn’t cover you) to “buy to use”, in Anthem’s words, meaning you wait until you’re sick to get insurance. Hiltzik presents data that shows this is not significantly the case, and that it is absurd; he writes “Aetna must think the entire country consists of people plotting how to get a quickie marriage or divorce or have a baby just in case they get sick. The vast majority of SEPs cover a relatively trivial number of cases, unless you think there are hordes of people applying to become members of a Native American tribe after they get sick.”

Of course, people do game the system. But the big gaming is by the insurance companies themselves and the providers of care. These corporations, big insurance companies, health systems, drug makers, who have the clout to “game the system” do so all the time as part of their core business models. It is convenient for them to divert our attention to regular people, middle-class people, and especially poor people, as the ones gaming the system. In fact these are of course the folks who suffer the most harm, whose health is most affected, whose access to care is most limited, and who are stuck with crummy health coverage because this is all they can afford.

The insurers work every legal angle (and perhaps some not-so-legal) to figure out how to mostly insure relatively healthy, low-cost people (after all, 5% of people account for 50% of health costs and 1% for 20%, see my Red, Blue, and Purple: The Math of Health Care Spending, October 20, 2009, and Kaiser Health News report 2013),  while the high-cost patients are covered by Someone Else. Providers, especially health systems and hospitals, figure out how they can “upcode” to get maximum reimbursement from insurers, attract people who have high-profit-margin conditions to themselves, and encourage high-cost, low-reimbursement poor and poorly-insured people to find their care from Someone Else. Insurers blame providers for charging too much, providers blame insurers for paying too little. One of the other panelists, a hospital executive, complained about how insurers seek transfer risk, which is part of the definition of insurance, to the providers. Neither is blameless, and the other big players, pharmaceutical companies (and device manufacturers) make out like bandits, with no major candidate having a real plan to address this according to a report by Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health, (cited hereby Medpage Today). Of course, this equates all plans to “negotiate prices” and it is obvious that a single-payer health plan, such as that advocated by Bernie Sanders, will have a lot more negotiating clout than the multiple-insurer mess that other candidates support and exists today.

What did I say as a panelist? Basically, that the goal of the system should be to maintain and improve the health of people, and that the economic design of the system should be designed to achieve that goal, rather than having competing economic theory be the driver, and people the incidental victims. I said that spending money on providing health care to people was not a bad thing, but spending huge amounts on “health care” when more than half was going to profit was. I said that all this spending on medical care (and profit) limited what was left to be spent on creating the conditions that allowed people to benefit from medical care – like housing, food, education – the social determinants of health.

I think that this resonates with people, both at the event and in the world. Or maybe I’m one of those “hopeless idealists”. If the alternative is being cynically corrupt, I wouldn’t want to be anything else.

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* Citations from that blog post: “RAND Health Insurance Experiment (as cited in Freedom abroad, health at home: experiments in preventive health care, February 13, 2011; the study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1983[1]; and it is summarized in an article by Joseph P. Newhouse, "Free for all?:  lessons from the RAND Health Insurance Experiment", RAND 1993.”

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Corporate mergers, retail clinics, and monopoly capital

Two huge mergers have recently been announced in the health insurance sector. First, Aetna announced its intention to acquire Humana for $35 billion, creating a behemoth. Not to be outdone, Anthem (the enormous group of formerly non-profit Blue Cross/Blue Shields that have gone for-profit) announced it will buy Cigna for $47 billion. Consolidation in the industry is moving fast, and soon there will be oligopoly. Robert Reich, in his July 5, 2015 article The Choice Ahead: A Private Health-Insurance Monopoly or a Single Payer discusses these mergers, observing that

Executives say these combinations will make their companies more efficient, allowing them to gain economies of scale and squeeze waste out of the system. This is what big companies always say when they acquire rivals.

Yes, indeed. They always say it, and while sometimes they achieve efficiencies-- this usually involves firing people -- it almost never benefits the consumer; prices almost always go up. Remember airline mergers? Bought a ticket lately? Despite the rhetoric of capitalism about competition, virtually all companies would prefer to be monopolies, control the industry, and set prices, guaranteeing huge profit. If they cannot, the next best thing is oligopoly, control by a few companies, with collusion so that they all make huge profits. Competition is their bugbear. Yes, we have federal regulators, but the result of their regulation has been those airline mergers. And telecommunications mergers. And financial services mergers. And banks too big to fail. So don’t count on them.

Health insurance companies are not the only mega-corporations profiting from “health care” by siphoning off money that could actually be spent improving health, or at least providing medical care. Obviously, there are drug companies (as I recently discussed in Chemotherapy, Quality of Life, and Corporate Profit on July 26, 2015), but also big pharmacy chains (like CVS, Rite Aid, and Walgreens) as well as other retailers that usually have a pharmacy (like Walmart, Kroger and Target) that have now branched out into providing health care, through what are known as “retail clinics”.

In the New England Journal of Medicine on July 15, 2015, John Iglehart writes about “The expansion of retail clinics—corporate titans vs. organized medicine”.[1] Here the case against the corporations is less clear, or at least the case in favor of organized medicine is. Iglehart points out that the opposition from organizations like the AMA, the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) have focused on the lack of continuity of care and “disruption of the patient-physician” relationship. Recently, opposition has softened (I guess folks know when they’ve lost) except from the AAP. It seems to me that these clinics provide a menu of services that primarily is focused on acute care for relatively minor infections and injuries, immunizations, and monitoring of chronic diseases like high blood pressure, and are pretty popular with the people who use them. They are conveniently located (for the people who use them), generally have little or no wait, and are staffed by professionals (usually nurse practitioners) who know what they are doing.

The problems with such retail clinics fall into two broad categories. First, when people use them inappropriately, not for acute or minor conditions, but as their usual source of care. For healthy younger people, this may be all they need. For older folks and others with chronic conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, hyperlipidemia, chronic lung disease, heart disease, etc., they are not sufficient. The danger is when people only seek care when they have symptoms, such as (particularly) pain, whether to such a retail clinic, traditional physician’s office, or emergency room, and ignore prevention and management of their chronic conditions. I do not fault the providers in these settings; there is evidence that they urge people with such needs to follow up with their primary provider. But, once the acute symptoms are gone, they may not. Some of this, sadly, may be financial.

The other problem is more interesting, and gets back to the financial issue. Providers and the organizations representing them (“organized medicine”) has real concerns because such retail clinics “cherry pick”, or skim the easy cases that pay for (or more than pay for) themselves, leaving physicians with the care of patients with diseases that take more time and are reimbursed less per hour (or minute) of work; this destroys the business model of primary care practice. As long as we depend upon a fee-for-service, reimbursed-for-care-provided, private medical model, this puts a real burden on physician practices which, while looking bigger than the small retail clinics, are usually tiny compared to the corporations that own those clinics.

Another medical area in which there is a clearer case of fear of competition disguising itself as virtue is in the shrill hostility of US-based medical schools, represented by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) to off-shore (mainly Caribbean-based) medical schools, as described by Robert Goldberg in Discrimination against foreign medical schools is bad for your health in the online publication “The Hill”. The argument against such schools from the AAMC is in part that the students are “lower quality”, the ones rejected by US medical schools. The flaw here is that there are many highly-qualified students who do not get into US medical schools, demonstrated by the recent dramatic expansion of the number of US schools and the class size of existing schools. Are there Caribbean schools of poor quality? Yes. Is the academic preparation of students in Caribbean schools, on average, lower than those in US schools? Probably. Is this a reason to try to put them out of business, by both bad-mouthing and trying to limit the access that their students have to educational loans? I don’t think so.

Our US medical schools get talented students, and then put them through a process that ends up producing doctors underrepresented in the primary care specialties and overrepresented in urban – and especially suburban – areas. As I have often pointed out, we produce the wrong mix of doctors who practice in the wrong mix of places. If (and it is, of course, an if) graduates of off-shore medical schools are likely to fill the medical needs not being met by graduates of US medical schools, then the title of Goldberg’s piece is correct. The same might be said for retail clinics, if indeed they were mostly present in underserved communities, but, based on the business models of their owners, they are generally not.

So, then, we see a spectrum of corporate involvement in health care ranging from the off-shore, for-profit medical school, to the acute care clinics run by large retailers, to the consolidation into oligopoly of health insurance companies, to the large pharmaceutical manufacturers. We also see a response of tepid regulation of the latter two, and protectionism by organized medicine and organized medical schools to the first two. None of these are good for our health. What would be good for our health would be the rational use of health care dollars to provide health care, for everyone, of the right kind in the right setting.

Reich ends his article with

If we continue in the direction we’re headed we’ll soon have a health insurance system dominated by two or three mammoth for-profit corporations capable of squeezing employees and consumers for all they’re worth – and handing over the profits to their shareholders and executives. The alternative is a government-run single payer system – such as is in place in almost every other advanced economy – dedicated to lower premiums and better care.

Which do you prefer?

I feel like raising my hand and waving it in the air saying “I know, I know!”

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[1]Iglehart JK, The expansion of retail clinics—corporate titans vs. organized medicine, NEJM 15 Jul 2015;373(4):301-303

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