Tag: Medicare

There Is No Objective Definition of ‘Medical Necessity’

By
Michael F. Cannon

California regulators are coming down on Kaiser Permanente. According to HealthLeaders Media, the regulators reviewed a batch of coverage denials and “found that in excess of 75% of the cases the services indeed were medically necessary, and 10% were not.” Indeed?

Now seems like a good time to post what University of Tennessee law professor Haavi Morreim wrote about “The Futility of Medical Necessity“ in Regulation:

Clinical artificiality The ill fit between “necessity” and ordinary medical care is immediately obvious in the question facetiously bandied about when health plans first considered what to do about a recently approved drug for male impotence: How often per month (per week? per day?) is drug-assisted sexual intercourse “medically necessary”?

As typified by that case, most medical decisions do not post clear choices of life versus death, nor juxtapose complete cures against pure quackery. Rather, the daily stuff of medicine is a continuum requiring a constant weighing of uncertainties and values. One antibiotic regimen may be medically comparable to and much less expensive than another, but with slightly higher risk of damage to hearing or to organs like kidneys or liver. For a patient needing hip replacement, one prosthetic joint may be longer-lasting but far costlier than an alternative. Of two equally effective drugs for hypertension, the costlier one may be more palatable because it has fewer side effects and a convenient once-a-day dosage.

Across such choices, it is artificially precise to say that one option is “necessary” — with the usual connotation of “essential” or “indispensable” – while the other is “unnecessary” — with the usual connotation of “superfluous” or “pointless.” Various options have merits, and often no single approach is the clear, “correct” choice. A given option might be better described as “a good idea in this case,” “reasonable, given the cost of the alternative,” “probably better than the alternative, given a specific goal,” “about as good as anything else,” or “not quite ideal, but still acceptable.”

In many cases, the real question is whether a particular medical risk or monetary cost is worth incurring in order to achieve a desired level of symptomatic relief or functional improvement, or to reduce the risk of an adverse outcome or a missed diagnosis. A huge array of treatments fits that description: more or less worthwhile, but the patient will not die without it and other alternatives (that might have some drawbacks) exist. [Emphasis mine.]

More broadly, concepts like necessity, appropriateness, and effectiveness can only be defined relative to a goal. For example, antibiotics are not clinically effective for all illnesses; they are effective against bacteria but, barring placebo effect, they are ineffective against viruses. Hence, it makes no sense for a physician to prescribe antibiotics to eradicate a viral infection. However, if the goal is to placate a relentlessly demanding patient who insists on antibiotics for his viral infection, the prescription may indeed serve that latter aim – which is probably why so many physicians write so many antibiotic prescriptions for viral illnesses.

Choices in this realm require a level of clinical complexity that is not reflected in simplistic notions like necessity, and that should not be hidden under blanket categories connoting a façade of precision. It would be far better to acknowledge that, across a broad spectrum of such choices and trade-offs, it is legitimate for people to come to different conclusions about what sort of price is worth paying, medically and financially, to achieve specific goals. To presume that a medical intervention is objectively either necessary or unnecessary belies the legitimacy of such variation in human goals and values.

So the question becomes: who will do a better job of deciding whether and when hip replacements or antibiotics or Viagra are “medically necessary?” Regulators? Or patients choosing health plans (in part) based on how those plans define medical necessity?

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care, Political Philosophy, Regulatory Studies

Does Mitt Romney Have Health Insurance?

By
Michael F. Cannon

It’s an interesting question. Romney is under age 65, which means that he would have to obtain private health insurance. He jokes that he is unemployed, which means he may have to purchase it on his own. Or he may get it as a retiree benefit from Bain Capital.

The question is interesting because Romney is so wealthy that to spend his money on health insurance might seem like a waste. (Of course, Romney may be very risk averse, and a man to whom $10,000 is a small wager probably isn’t going to notice a $20,000 health insurance premium. But Romney could pay for whatever medical care he and his wife – and his children, and his grandchildren – could possibly need.) On the other hand, if Romney doesn’t have private health insurance, it would look bad that he forced other people to buy it.

Moreover, Romney turns 65 on March 12, meaning he becomes eligible for Medicare on March 1. He likely received his Medicare card in the mail two months ago. If Romney does not enroll in Medicare, it would again look bad that he who forced others to purchase health insurance is opting not to obtain health insurance himself. But if he does enroll in Medicare, it’s worth asking whether the 99 percent should subsidize people like him.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care

Cochrane on ObamaCare’s Contraceptive-Coverage Mandate

By
Michael F. Cannon

My Cato colleague John Cochrane – who is way smarter than I am – has a generally excellent op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal on ObamaCare’s contraception mandate:

Salting mandated health insurance with birth control is exactly the same as a tax—on employers, on Catholics, on gay men and women, on couples trying to have children and on the elderly—to subsidize one form of birth control…

The tax rate and spending debates that occupy the media are a small part of the effective taxes and spending that the government achieves by these regulatory mandates…

The natural compromise is simple: Birth control, abortion and other contentious practices are permitted. But those who object don’t have to pay for them. The federal takeover of medicine prevents us from reaching these natural compromises and needlessly divides our society…

Sure, churches should be exempt. We should all be exempt.

My only quibble is with his claim, “Insurance is a bad idea for small, regular and predictable expenses.”

That’s generally true. But medicine is an area where, potentially at least, small up-front expenditures (e.g., on hypertension control) could prevent large losses down the road. So it may be economically efficient for health plans to cover some small, regular, and predictable expenses. Both the carrier and the consumer would benefit. In fact, that would be the market’s way of telling otherwise uninformed consumers, “Hey! Controlling your hypertension is a really good for you!” And really, if someone is so risk-averse that they want health insurance with first-dollar coverage of everything – and they’re willing to pay the outrageous premiums that would accompany such coverage – why should we take issue with that?

ObamaCare’s contraceptive-coverage mandate demonstrates that government does  a horrible job of picking only those types of “preventive” services for which first-dollar coverage will leave consumers better off. But I also think advocates of free-market health care generally need to let go of the idea that health insurance exists only for catastrophic expenses.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care

The Ethos of Universal Coverage

By
Michael F. Cannon

Associated Press photojournalist Noah Berger captured this thousand-word image near the Occupy Oakland demonstrations last month.

(AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Many Cato@Liberty readers will get it immediately. They can stop reading now.

For everyone else, this image perfectly illustrates the ethos of what I call the Church of Universal Coverage.

Like everyone who supports a government guarantee of access to medical care, the genius who left this graffiti on Kaiser Permanente’s offices probably thought he was signaling how important other human beings are to him. He wants them to get health care after all. He was willing to expend resources to transmit that signal: a few dollars for a can of spray paint (assuming he didn’t steal it) plus his time. He probably even felt good about himself afterward.

Unfortunately, the money and time this genius spent vandalizing other people’s property are resources that could have gone toward, say, buying him health insurance. Or providing a flu shot to a senior citizen. This genius has also forced Kaiser Permanente to divert resources away from healing the sick. Kaiser now has to spend money on a pressure washer and whatever else one uses to remove graffiti from those surfaces (e.g., water, labor).

The broader Church of Universal Coverage spends resources campaigning for a government guarantee of access to medical care. Those resources likewise could have been used to purchase medical care for, say, the poor. The Church’s efforts impel opponents of such a guarantee to spend resources fighting it. For the most part, though, they encourage interest groups to expend resources to bend that guarantee toward their own selfish ends. The taxes required to effectuate that (warped) guarantee reduce economic productivity both among those whose taxes enable, and those who receive, the resulting government transfers.

In the end, that very government guarantee ends up leaving people with less purchasing power and undermining the market’s ability to discover cost-saving innovations that bring better health care within the reach of the needy. That’s to say nothing of the rights that the Church of Universal Coverage tramples along the way: yours, mine, Kaiser Permanente’s, the Catholic Church’s…

I see no moral distinction between the Church of Universal Coverage and this genius. Both spend time and money to undermine other people’s rights as well as their own stated goal of “health care for everybody.”

Of course, it is always possible that, as with their foot soldier in Oakland, the Church’s efforts are as much about making a statement and feeling better about themselves as anything else.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care, Political Philosophy, Regulatory Studies

Contraceptives Mandate Brings ObamaCare’s Coercive Power into Sharper Focus

By
Michael F. Cannon

President Obama is catching some well-earned blowback for his decision to force religious institutions “to pay for health insurance that covers sterilization, contraceptives and abortifacients.” You see, ObamaCare penalizes individuals (employers) who don’t purchase (offer) a certain minimum package of health insurance coverage. The Obama administration is demanding that coverage must include the aforementioned reproductive care services. The exception for religious institutions that object to such coverage is so narrow that, as one wag put it, not even Jesus would qualify. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius reassures us, “I believe this proposal strikes the appropriate balance between respecting religious freedom and increasing access to important preventive services.” Ummm, Madam Secretary…the Constitution only mentions one of those things. The Catholic church is hopping mad. Even the reliably left-wing E.J. Dionne is angry, writing that the President “utterly botched” the issue “not once but twice” and “threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus.”

As I wrote over and over as Congress debated ObamaCare, anger and division are inevitable consequences of this law. I recently debated the merits of ObamaCare’s individual mandate on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Here’s a paragraph that got cut from my essay:

We can be certain…that the mandate will divide the nation. An individual mandate guarantees that the government—not you—will decide what medical services you will purchase, including contraceptives, fertility services that result in the destruction of human embryos, or elective abortions. The same apparatus that can force Americans to subsidize elective abortions can also be used to ban private abortion coverage once the other team wins. The rancor will only grow.

Or as I put it in 2009,

Either the government will force taxpayers to fund abortions, or the restrictions necessary to prevent taxpayer funding will reduce access to abortion coverage. There is no middle ground. Somebody has to lose. Welcome to government-run health care.

The same is true for contraception. The rancor will grow until we repeal this law.

ObamaCare highlights a choice that religious organizations – such as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, where my grandfather served as counsel – have to make. Either they stop casting their lots with Caesar and join the fight to repeal government health care mandates and subsidies, or they forfeit any right to complain when Caesar turns on them. Matthew 26:52.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Health Care

‘The Dangerous Gym Membership’?

By
Michael F. Cannon

Here’s a poor, unsuccessful letter I sent to the editor of the Washington Post:

“The dangerous gym membership” [Jan. 12] claims that in Medicare Advantage, “advertising a plan as the go-to health insurance source for marathoners could lure in a healthier subscriber base, disrupting the rest of the market place in the process.” Oh?

Does it disrupt the market for sneakers when running shops advertise themselves to marathoners? Since when does giving consumers something they want disrupt the market? That’s why markets exist.

What’s disrupting the market for seniors’ health insurance is government—in this case, Congress’ counter-productive attempt to cross-subsidize the sick via price controls that forbid carriers to consider each applicant’s risk when offering and pricing health insurance.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Health Care, Regulatory Studies

Personal Accounts—for Medicare

By
Michael F. Cannon

Last night, Newt Gingrich praised the Chilean Social Security system, which allows workers to save for their retirements in personal accounts, rather than contribute to the government pension scheme. Several of my Cato colleagues are far more qualified than I am to comment on that system, including Mike Tanner, Jagadeesh Gokhale, and Jose Pinera–who designed and implemented it. But personal accounts are as important for reforming compulsory health insurance schemes like Medicare as they are for reforming compulsory pension schemes.

In 2010, I traveled to Chile to deliver an address to the International Federation of Pension Fund Administrators (FIAP).  I detailed the harms caused by compulsory health insurance schemes and explained how personal medical accounts would improve health care and generate wealth even for the poor:

In designing health care markets, perfection is not an option. Under any system, whether state-run or the free market, some patients will inevitably fall through the cracks.

Personal medical accounts can help fill in those cracks by enabling innovations that improve medical care and bring it within reach of the poor. Yes, some will not earn enough to provide for themselves. And when we are free to make our own decisions, a small number of people will make poor decisions. I believe we have a moral duty to care for patients who could not or would not provide for themselves. Personal medical accounts will make it easier for us to meet that moral duty.

Under compulsory health insurance schemes, those cracks widen, and more people fall through. Price and exchange controls block innovation. Governments waste resources on low-value medical care. Some would describe these as the unavoidable costs of creating an equitable society. But those wasted resources do not purchase solidarity. They purchase sickness and poverty.

FIAP turned my address into this book chapter, which also explains how to craft a system of personal medical accounts.

For current enrollees, who have not built up savings in a personal medical account, Congress should make Medicare look more like Social Security. That is, the government should subsidize Medicare enrollees by giving them cash, rather than creating a complex health-insurance scheme that effectively lets government officials shape the entire health care sector.

Topics: 
Cato Publications, General, Government and Politics, Health Care

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