Scenarios for Health Care Reform (Part 2 of 2)

The first part of this article suggested two scenarios that could promote health care reform. We’ll finish off the scenarios in this part of the article.

Capitalism Disrupts Health Care

In the third scenario, reform is stimulated by an intrepid data science firm that takes on health care with greater success than most of its predecessors. After assembling an impressive analytics toolkit from open source software components–thus simplifying licensing–it approaches health care providers and offers them a deal they can’t refuse: analytics demonstrated to save them money and support their growth, all delivered for free. The data science firm asks in return only that they let it use deidentified data from their patients and practices to build an enhanced service that it will offer paying customers.

Some health care providers balk at the requirement to share data, but their legal and marketing teams explain that they have been doing it for years already with companies whose motives are less commendable. Increasingly, the providers are won over. The analytics service appeals particularly to small, rural, and safety-net providers. Hammered by payment cuts and growing needs among their populations, they are on the edge of going out of business and grasp the service as their last chance to stay in the black.

Participating in the program requires the extraction of data from electronic health records, and some EHR vendors try to stand in the way in order to protect their own monopoly on the data. Some even point to clauses in their licenses that prohibit the sharing. But they get a rude message in return: so valuable are the analytics that the providers are ready to jettison the vendors in a minute. The vendors ultimately go along and even compete on the basis of their ability to connect to the analytics.

Once stability and survival are established, the providers can use the analytics for more and more sophisticated benefits. Unlike the inadequate quality measures currently in use, the analytics provide a robust framework for assessing risk, stratifying populations, and determining how much a provider should be rewarded for treating each patient. Fee-for-outcome becomes standard.

Providers make deals to sign up patients for long-term relationships. Unlike the weak Medicare ACO model, which punishes a provider for things their patients do outside their relationship, the emerging system requires a commitment from the patient to stick with a provider. However, if the patient can demonstrate that she was neglected or failed to receive standard of care, she can switch to another provider and even require the misbehaving provider to cover costs. To hold up their end of this deal, providers find it necessary to reveal their practices and prices. Physician organizations develop quality-measurement platforms such as the recent PRIME registry in family medicine. A race to the top ensues.

What If Nothing Changes?

I’ll finish this upbeat article with a fourth scenario in which we muddle along as we have for years.

The ONC and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services continue to swat at waste in the health care system by pushing accountable care. But their ratings penalize safety-net providers, and payments fail to correlate with costs as hoped.

Fee-for-outcome flounders, so health care costs continue to rise to intolerable levels. Already, in Massachusetts, the US state that leads in universal health coverage, 40% of the state budget goes to Medicaid, where likely federal cuts will make it impossible to keep up coverage. Many other states and countries are witnessing the same pattern of rising costs.

The same pressures ride like a tidal wave through the rest of the health care system. Private insurers continue to withdraw from markets or lose money by staying. So either explicitly or through complex and inscrutable regulatory changes, the government allows insurers to cut sick people from their rolls and raise the cost burdens on patients and their employers. As patient rolls shrink, more hospitals close. Political rancor grows as the public watches employer money go into their health insurance instead of wages, and more of their own stagnant incomes go to health care costs, and government budgets tied up in health care instead of education and other social benefits.

Chronic diseases creep through the population, mocking crippled efforts at public health. Rampant obesity among children leads to more and earlier diabetes. Dementia also rises as the population ages, and climate change scatters its effects across all demographics.

Furthermore, when patients realize the costs they must take on to ask for health care, they delay doctor visits until their symptoms are unbearable. More people become disabled or perish, with negative impacts that spread through the economy. Output decline and more families become trapped in poverty. Self-medication for pain and mental illness becomes more popular, with predictable impacts on the opiate addiction crisis. Even our security is affected: the military finds it hard to recruit find healthy soldiers, and our foreign policy depends increasingly on drone strikes that kill civilians and inflame negative attitudes toward the US.

I think that, after considering this scenario, most of us would prefer one of the previous three I laid out in this article. If health care continues to be a major political issue for the next election, experts should try to direct discussion away from the current unproductive rhetoric toward advocacy for solutions. Some who read this article will hopefully feel impelled to apply themselves to one of the positive scenarios and bring it to fruition.

About the author

Andy Oram

Andy is a writer and editor in the computer field. His editorial projects have ranged from a legal guide covering intellectual property to a graphic novel about teenage hackers. A correspondent for Healthcare IT Today, Andy also writes often on policy issues related to the Internet and on trends affecting technical innovation and its effects on society. Print publications where his work has appeared include The Economist, Communications of the ACM, Copyright World, the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Vanguardia Dossier, and Internet Law and Business. Conferences where he has presented talks include O'Reilly's Open Source Convention, FISL (Brazil), FOSDEM (Brussels), DebConf, and LibrePlanet. Andy participates in the Association for Computing Machinery's policy organization, named USTPC, and is on the editorial board of the Linux Professional Institute.

   

Categories