Steven Brill’s taboo-busting X-ray of the US medical system, “Bitter Pill,” has a chance to reframe the way we think and talk–and report–about healthcare costs.
In a penetrating, systemic, and long (36 pages) look at medical care, US style, for Time magazine, with tale after tale of the financial miseries befalling the system’s victims, with number after number bolstering his analysis, Brill zooms in on the nation’s unrealistic and destructive healthcare costs–why they exist and persist.
Brill, a journalist and an entrepreneur, offers the media a rare chance to move beyond the fence that usually corrals this discussion. High healthcare costs are spawned by a powerful ethic in American medicine that is too often nurtured by the press, an ethic that dictates that the medicine men–doctors, hospitals, and drug companies–sit at the right hand of God and deserve all they can get. Brill’s article crashes right through that fence, in fact, and provides the stuff for further productive reporting.
“When we debate health care policy,” he writes, “we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?” Precisely. Brill gives us some answers, too, not based on quotes from the self-serving players we hear from so often in this dreary debate, but based on serious investigation.
The waste at nonprofit hospitals: Waste in the US system is the recurring theme throughout Brill’s piece. The sacred cows he slaughters are the country’s nonprofit hospitals, which he holds largely responsible for much of the overspending. When McKinsey, the consulting firm, examined hospital financial reports with the help of a Bank of America survey, it found, as Brill put it:
The 2,900 nonprofit hospitals across the country, which are exempt from income taxes, actually end up averaging higher operating profit margins than the 1,000 for-profit hospitals after the for-profits’ income-tax obligations are deducted. In health care being nonprofit produces more profit.
Brill dissects some of these nonprofit places of healing–from the world-famous MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston to less well known facilities, such as Stamford Hospital in Stamford CT–by showing, with real live bills from patients, the absurdity of some of their charges. For example: a $77 charge for one box of sterile gauze pads. Or consider this: $18 for a single diabetic test strip. Amazon sells a box of 50 for $27.85, about 55 cents a strip. In hundreds of small and midsize cities across the country–the American health care market has transformed tax-exempt ‘nonprofit’ hospitals into the towns’ most profitable business and largest employers, Brill reports. (Indeed, that latter point often makes it tough for local reporters to tackle these institutions.)
But Brill goes beyond the obviously absurd charges and examines where they come from–the chargemaster, an uber-list of prices each hospital keeps for every possible treatment and service. It governs what patients are actually charged and what payers actually pay. The chargemaster is phony and utterly flexible; it bends according to the negotiating leverage of hospitals and insurance companies when they joust for the final prices.
Brill describes the elaborate games that hospitals and payers play in determining who gets what discounts from the chargemaster, which result in an inequitable patchwork payment system. The leverage of the biggest of the big hospitals and insurers determines which patients are charged more or less depending on their carrier’s negotiating skill. As Brill demonstrates, that leaves plenty of room for hugely inflated prices, which in turn make it possible to pay over-the-top salaries to hospital executives.
Few patients know about the chargemaster and its amazing flexibility. Even hospital execs profess ignorance. When Brill asked for a chat with the CEO of Stamford Hospital to find out more about a patient’s bill, a spokesman replied that he doubted the CEO “has even seen the list in years. So I’m not sure why you care.” Most top hospital execs refused to talk when Brill inquired about their charges. Instead he got blah-blah comments from communications operatives.
But supposedly nonprofit hospitals are accountable to the public. They get generous tax exemptions in return for giving community benefits that can range from health fairs to free care for the poor. Some reporters have tried to investigate these community benefits, and they often run in to the same stone wall as Brill did. It makes you wonder to whom these institutions are accountable.
Handcuffing Medicare: Perhaps the biggest public service Brill has done is give credit where credit is due–to Medicare, an efficient social insurance program that is the only thing that keeps the hospitals and doctors in check and deserves far better press than it has gotten. Brill’s comprehensive reporting on Medicare could be a game changer, switching the conversation from cutting Medicare and cost-shifting (to beneficiaries), to helping Medicare do its job even better.
By carefully parsing so many hospital bills from non-Medicare patients and comparing them to how much less Medicare would have paid, Brill shows what happens when the government gets involved in the price of care. The price goes down. One hospital charged a patient $333 for a particular X-Ray. Medicare pays $23.83.
The government’s involvement is what healthcare sellers fear, and that opposition has prevented a more rational discussion of alternatives to a bloated system.
Doctors and hospitals may grumble about Medicare’s lower reimbursement, but as Brill notes, most still treat Medicare patients. “Hospitals don’t lose money when they treat Medicare patients,” says Jonathan Blum, Medicare’s deputy administrator, whom Brill interviewed for his piece. (Take a look at all the billboard and TV advertising–often focused on the elderly–that hospitals spend a fortune on, partly to attract Medicare patients.)
Another major theme of Brill’s piece is that Medicare could do way more to control medical costs if only Congress would let them is a point he made on ABC’s This Week in late February, where he talked about the legal prohibition on negotiating prices with pharmaceutical companies. In many other countries drug prices are regulated; America could save some $94 billion a year if we paid what other countries pay for the same products, he reported. (It’s worth noting too that drugs in England are free to people age 60 and older. In the US, thousands of seniors pay hundreds of dollars each month, even with Medicare’s drug benefit, because the prices are so high, and because insurers, which provide the drug coverage, make them pay huge amounts of coinsurance and copays–cost-shifting arrangements that Congress allows.)
Yet drug makers have won over public opinion by arguing that their high profit margins in the US are justified because they subsidize R & D needed for trailblazing drugs. Brill writes:
Apart from the question of whether a country with a health-care spending crisis should subsidize the rest of the developed world–not to mention the question of who signed Americans up for that mission–there’s the fact that the companies’ math doesn’t add up.
Using the case of Flebogamma, a sterile solution to boost the immune system, and its maker, Grifols, he lays bare some of that fuzzy math.
Congress has placed other kinds of handcuffs on Medicare, too. Brill’s discussion of how the program is prohibited from considering whether drugs and medical devices are both cost effective and clinically effective in making payment decisions is illuminating, and one the press almost completely missed during the debate on Obamacare and afterward. The law did set up a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to do comparative effectiveness research.
But so what? “Medicare could see the research and say, Ah, this drug works better and costs the same, or is even cheaper,” says John Gunn, the chief operating officer at Sloan-Kettering. “But they are not allowed to do anything about it.” (In England and in other countries, government or quasi-government agencies use both cost and clinical effectiveness in recommending which drugs should be used. Maybe that helps explain why seniors in the UK get free medications. The National Health Service usually doesn’t pay for stuff that doesn’t work, and if there’s a cheaper and just-as-effective alternative, that’s what docs prescribe.)
The influence of drug and device makers: Brill makes clear that these two very profitable business sectors have a stranglehold on Congress. From the prohibition on Medicare to use competitive bidding for what’s called durable medical equipment–like wheelchairs, syringes for diabetics, hospital beds, and canes–to the high price of cancer drugs, Brill demonstrates how they manage to keep Congress on their side, to the detriment of the public purse.
Medicare spends about $15 billion a year on medical equipment, and it has been conducting a pilot program to see if those costs can come down. This pilot, which embraces competitive bidding, has resulted in a 40 percent savings. However, it covers only about three percent of the medical equipment that beneficiaries use. If the program went nationwide, Brill estimates Medicare could save some $6 billion annually.
The lobbying campaign of device makers such as the Minneapolis-based Medtronic, whose practices Brill carefully dissects, shows what healthcare sellers do when they don’t like some rule or regulation or tax. Time’s piece describes how device makers are trying to rid themselves of a 2.39 percent excise tax on medical devices called for by Obamacare. Their arguments are the usual ones–the tax would reduce sales so much that the industry would lose some 400,000 jobs, they say. The press, for the most part, has passed along the gloom and doom scenarios from device makers, who Brill calls “superstar performers in a booming medical economy,” without questioning their numbers.
Brill did question them, and found the Affordable Care Act, which imposed the tax to help fund subsidies for the uninsured, would barely hurt the industry. He cited a 2011 McKinsey report, showing that Medtronic “delivered an amazing compounded annual return of 14.95 percent to shareholders from 1990 to 2010.” If the tax were so disruptive that it would kill sales, why, Brill asks “would the industry pass it along to consumers as a price increase? It hardly has to given its profit margins.”
Flaws in Obamacare: “With Obamacare we’ve changed the rules related to who pays for what, but we haven’t done much to change the prices we pay,” Brill asserts. That’s an important observation, and one that was brushed aside by many policymakers in the haste to pass health reform. As CJR has pointed out, the media, too, may have helped oversell what the law is to accomplish.
Brill analyzes what the law does this way: Obamacare, he says, tinkers at the edges of the system but does not address the core problem. It does improve the claims appeal process, for example, and makes some insurance terms available in plain English. While such changes are positive, he writes, “none of it is a path to bending the healthcare cost curve.” That gets to the heart of the debate over the affordability (which CJR recently addressed in an Exchange Watch piece about the efforts to set up Connecticut’s Obamacare health exchange).
Brill observed the “exchanges could raise costs, not lower them.” Indeed, three of Obamacare’s best provisions–prohibiting exclusions for preexisting conditions, ending annual and lifetime caps on coverage, and restrictions on copays for preventive care, will most likely raise insurance premiums, Brill tells readers.
Unfortunately, Brill doesn’t fully explore the affordability conundrum. Many of the people whose misery he described owned “limited benefits policies,” which don’t cover much if someone has a catastrophic illness. Obamacare eliminates such restrictions.
Yet patients could still find themselves in the same financial boat when series illness strikes. Because insurance in the state insurance exchanges, as Brill argues, may well still be expensive, consumers faced with the mandate to buy coverage are likely to choose the cheapest policies–and those are designed to cover only 60 percent of the costs. Families might still struggle to pay the remaining 40 percent. Medical bills that seem like monsters from outer space will not disappear for many Americans–even with Obamacare.
An official of a firm who helps people untangle their medical bills and negotiate with providers tells Brill that most of the firm’s clients are middle or upper-middle people with insurance. That tracks with studies by CUNY professors Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein and Elizabeth Warren (now a US Senator from Massachusetts), who found it was mostly middle class people with insurance who declared medical bankruptcy. Brill’s predictions about rising premiums and rising medical costs may not change this picture.
Brill’s solutions: A big omission in Brill’s remarkable tour through the American health system is a serious critique of the doctors. Although the piece devotes a brief section to the doctors’ role in creating this mess, he gives their complicity short shrift. To bolster this notion of what he calls “over-doctoring,” Brill seems to generalize from an 89-year-old patient named Alan A., who got 33 visits in one year from 11 doctors who, according to Brill, “had nothing to do with his recovery from the heart attack or his cancer.” While noting there’s been some progress toward weaning the docs from fee-for-service payments to salaries, he doesn’t directly address the question of whether US physicians, particularly specialists, are paid too much, a subject policymakers have been reluctant, for decades, to address.
Nor does Brill discuss Congressional efforts to limit inflation in doctors’ fees through the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, and the doctors’ mostly successful efforts to thwart its mandated cuts in Medicare reimbursements. Failing to discuss the “Doc Fix” campaigns by physicians’ professional organizations leaves the impression they have no role in the high cost of care. They do.
Brill does talk about hospital consolidation and how hospitals are buying up doctor practices and steering patients to them, thus increasing their leverage with insurance companies–an ominous trend. As news outlets like National Journal, the Tampa Bay Times, and The Charlotte Observer have reported, such consolidations have already boosted prices and set up a battle between giant hospitals and giant insurers. Perhaps someday a Brill Part 2 might explore all this.
His offers some solutions, which Time lays out in an infographic. Each yields billions of dollars in savings.
• Recapturing 75 percent of the profits from hospitals by taxing them, regulating their prices, ensuring real competition and transparency, and rethinking the chargemaster so it reflects real costs, not phony ones. The savings: $84 billion.
• Allowing and funding comparative effectiveness evaluations in prescribing drugs. (We hope he means both clinical and cost effectiveness.) The savings: $28 billion.
• Reducing the number of tests and procedures done only to prevent malpractice lawsuits. (The literature is full of alternatives to this broken system, which both sides perpetuate.) The savings: $74 billion.
Brill’s list goes on, totaling some $360 billion in savings, or about 13 percent of the country’s total healthcare spending.
What’s really eye-opening is the $3.6 billion operating profit amassed by the country’s ten largest nonprofit hospitals–money that now goes for huge executive salaries and for buying up other hospitals and doctor practices, which, as the consolidation frenzy continues apace, will further drive up costs.
Are his remedies adequate? He concedes some are unlikely to happen. And he doesn’t quite follow the logic of his own research all the way.
He convincingly argues that Medicare is the superior angel in the US system, and that it could actually control costs if only Congress would let it. Medicare is “the only player in the system that seems to have to balance countervailing interests the way market players in a real market usually do,” he writes.
Brill recommends lowering, not raising, the age for Medicare eligibility–a goal the creators of Medicare had in 1965. Lowering the age would improve the government’s cost challenge, because people in their late 50s and early 60s would be covered by a more efficient and less costly arrangement than will be the case under Obamacare’s insurance exchanges, which will be able to exert little, if any downward pressure on prices.
Brill’s solution seems to set the nation on the path of Medicare for All and toward a national health system–that Brill cannot bring himself to endorse.
Gunn, the chief operating officer at Sloan-Kettering, told Brill. “If you could figure out a way to pay doctors better and separately fund research… adequately, I could see where a single-payer approach would be the most logical solution.”
Brill sees it somewhat differently: “The real issue isn’t whether we have a single payer or multiple payers. It’s whether whoever pays has a fair chance in a fair market.” Yet he still roots for government power to strip away some of the tremendous leverage held by healthcare providers in today’s health market.
Logically, that circles back to how much doctors should get paid, who pays for their education (Medicare finances some of it), how much nonprofit hospitals should profit, and how much drug and device manufacturers really need to earn. Those questions have been on the shelf for decades. Brill’s contribution dusts them off, exposing them once again to scrutiny by the public and the press.
Maybe Brill has finally succeeded in breaking down the fences that have penned in what’s possible to discuss when it comes to healthcare, and offering to Americans some previously out-of-sight, out-of-mind topics for honest, objective consideration. In his morning on the Sunday network news circuit, the roundtable participants on ABC’s This Week raced as hard as they could to fence in the discussion and cut Brill off, but they didn’t completely succeed.
The Second Opinion, CJR’s healthcare desk, is part of our United States Project on the coverage of politics and policy. Follow @USProjectCJR for more posts from this author and the rest of the United States Project team. And follow Trudy Lieberman @Trudy_Lieberman.
Related stories:
How an antii-tax HIT squad employs the press
The Big Boys: An affordability puzzle
The Big Boys: hospitals and their pricing muscles
