qotd: Bernie Sanders is not giving up on Medicare for all

Senator Bernie Sanders

August 16, 2016

Sanders Statement on Aetna's Decision to Withdraw from Health Insurance Exchanges

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) issued the following statement Tuesday after Aetna announced plans to withdraw from Affordable Care Act health exchanges in 11 of 15 states where it currently operates:

"It is disappointing that Aetna has joined other large for-profit health insurance companies in pulling out of the insurance marketplace. Despite the Affordable Care Act bringing them millions more paying customers than ever before, these companies are more concerned with making huge profits than ensuring access to health care for all Americans.  

"In my view, the provision of health care cannot continue to be dependent upon the whims and market projections of large private insurance companies whose only goal is to make as much profit as possible. That is why we need to join every other major country on earth and guarantee health care to all as a right, not a privilege. That is also why we need to pass a Medicare-for-all single-payer system. I will reintroduce legislation to do that in the next session of Congress, hopefully as part of the Democratic Senate majority."

http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-statement-on-aetnas-decision-to-withdraw-from-health-insurance-exchanges

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Comment by Don McCanne

Since the Clinton Camp was successful in keeping single payer out of the Democratic Party platform, much of the media seems to believe that it has completely gone away as an issue. The good news is that Bernie Sanders assures us that it hasn't. We need to do our part to be sure that the nation knows that.

qotd: Aetna and Anthem shareholders condone secrecy of dark money contributions

Modern Healthcare

May 26, 2016

Shareholders vote down dark money disclosure at Aetna, Anthem

By Bob Herman

Health insurers Aetna and Anthem won't have to tell shareholders how much money they send to tax-exempt political organizations, at least for another year.

Shareholder resolutions that would've required Aetna and Anthem to disclose how much they spend on 501(c)(4) "social welfare" organizations and other business association groups failed to gain approval last week at the companies' respective annual shareholders meetings. Approximately 91% of Anthem investors rejected the proposal, and 75% of the votes were cast against Aetna's resolution.

Political not-for-profit organizations, also called dark money groups, do not have to reveal their donors, and they can receive unlimited amounts of money, much of which is routed toward influencing elections.

http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20160526/NEWS/160529926

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Comment by Don McCanne

The shareholders of Aetna and Anthem, by voting down disclosure of dark money contributions, are co-conspirators with the corporate executives in the efforts to prevent transparency of their financial contributions to dark money organizations that use their funds to influence elections.

Once we replace the private insurers with a publicly-owned Medicare for all program, we need show no special sympathy for the displaced insurance executives, and that goes for their rent-seeking shareholders as well. Our sympathies should be directed to the displaced employees of the insurance corporations who will need assistance in job training and in creating new employment opportunities.

Fwd: qotd: Urban Institute’s attack on single payer

Urban Institute

May 9, 2016

The Sanders Single-Payer Health Care Plan: The Effect on National Health Expenditures and Federal and Private Spending

By John Holahan, Matthew Buettgens, Lisa Clemans-Cope, Melissa M. Favreault, Linda J. Blumberg, Slyabonga Ndwandwa

Abstract

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders proposed a single-payer system to replace all current health coverage. His system would cover all medically necessary care, including long-term care, without cost-sharing. We estimate that the approach would decrease the uninsured by 28.3 million people in 2017. National health expenditures would increase by $6.6 trillion between 2017 and 2026, while federal expenditures would increase by $32.0 trillion over that period. Sanders's revenue proposals, intended to finance all health and nonhealth spending he proposed, would raise $15.3 trillion from 2017 to 2026—thus, the proposed taxes are much too low to fully finance his health plan.

http://www.urban.org/research/publication/sanders-single-payer-health-care-plan-effect-national-health-expenditures-and-federal-and-private-spending

Urban Institute Board of Trustees:

http://www.urban.org/about/board-of-directors

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Tax Policy Center

May 9, 2016

An Analysis of Senator Bernie Sanders's Tax and Transfer Proposals

By Gordon B. Mermin, Leonard E. Burman, Frank Sammartino

Abstract

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders proposes significant tax increases that would raise $15.3 trillion over the next decade. All income groups would pay more tax, but most would come from high-income households, particularly those with very high incomes. Sanders would also implement new government benefits—notably government-financed single-payer health care, long-term services and supports, college, and family leave benefits—and expand Social Security benefits. TPC finds the new government benefits would more than offset new taxes for 95% of households but the combined tax and transfer plan would increase federal budget deficits by more than $18 trillion over the next decade.

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/analysis-senator-bernie-sanderss-tax-and-transfer-proposals

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The Huffington Post

May 9, 2016

The Urban Institute's Attack On Single Payer: Ridiculous Assumptions Yiel d Ridiculous Estimates

By David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler

The Urban Institute and the Tax Policy Center today released analyses of the costs of Sen. Bernie Sanders' domestic policy proposals, including single-payer national health insurance. They claim that Sanders' proposals would raise the federal deficit by $18 trillion over the next decade.

We won't address all of the issues covered in these analyses, just single-payer Medicare for all. To put it bluntly, the estimates (which were prepared by John Holahan and colleagues) are ridiculous. They project outlandish increases in the utilization of medical care, ignore vast savings under single-payer reform, and ignore the extensive and well-documented experience with single-payer systems in other nations - which all spend far less per person on health care than we do.

The authors' anti-single-payer bias is also evident from their incredible claims that physicians' incomes would be squeezed (which contradicts their own estimates positing a sharp rise in spending on physician services), and that patients would suffer huge disruptions, despite the fact that the implementation of single-payer systems elsewhere, as well as the start-up of Medicare, were disruption-free.

We outline below some of the most glaring errors in the Holahan analysis (which served as the basis for Tax Policy Center's estimates) regarding health care spending under the Sanders plan.

1. Administrative savings, Part 1: Holahan assumes that insurance overhead would be reduced to 6 percent of total health spending from the current level of 9.5 percent. They base this 6 percent estimate on figures for Medicare's current overhead, which include the extraordinarily high overhead costs of private Medicare HMOs run by UnitedHealthcare and other insurance firms. However, Sen. Sanders' proposal would exclude these for-profit insurers, and instead build on the traditional Medicare program, whose overhead is less than 3 percent. Moreover, even this 3 percent figure is probably too high, since Sanders' plan would simplify hospital payment by funding them through global budgets (similar to the way fire departments are paid), rather than the current patient-by-patient payments. Hence a more realistic estimate would assume that insurance overhead would drop to Canada's level of about 1.8 percent. Cutting insurance overhead to 2 percent (rather than the 6 percent that Holahan projects) would save an additional $1.7 trillion over the next 10 years.

2. Administrative savings, Part 2: Holahan completely ignores the huge savings on hospital administration and doctors' billing under a streamlined single-payer system. Every serious analyst of single-payer reform has acknowledged these savings, including the Congressional Budget Office, the Government Accountability Office, the Lewin Group (a consulting firm owned by UnitedHealth Group), and even Kenneth Thorpe (a former Clinton administration official who has criticized Sanders' plan, although his recent estimates of savings are far lower than those he made prior to the current presidential campaign).

These provider savings on paperwork would, in fact, be much larger than the savings on insurance overhead. At present, U.S. hospitals spend one-quarter of their total budgets on billing and administration, more than twice as much as hospitals spend in single-payer systems like Canada's or Scotland's. Similarly, U.S. physicians, who must bill hundreds of different insurance plans with varying payment and coverage rules, spend two to three times as much as our Canadian colleagues on billing.

Overall, these administrative savings for doctors and hospitals would amount to about $2.57 trillion over 10 years. Additional savings of more than $1.5 trillion from streamlined billing and administration would accrue to nursing homes, home care agencies, ambulance companies, drug stores and other health care providers.

In total, the Holahan analysis underestimates administrative savings by about $6 trillion over 10 years.

3. Drug costs: Holahan projects that a single-payer plan would have to pay 50 percent higher drug costs than those paid at present by Medicaid. Moreover, their estimate assumes that the U.S. would continue to pay much higher prices for drugs than other nations, despite the fact that a U.S. single-payer system would have much greater negotiating leverage with drug companies than other national health insurance schemes.

Reducing drug prices to the levels currently paid by European nations would save at least $1.1 trillion more than Holahan posits over 10 years. 

4. Utilization of care: Holahan projects a massive increase in acute care utilization, but does not provide detailed breakdowns of how big an increase they foresee for specific services like doctor visits or hospital care. However, it is clear that the medical care system does not have the capacity to provide the huge surge in care that he posits.

For instance Holahan's figures for the increase in acute care suggest that Sanders' plan would result in more than 100 million additional doctor visits and several million more hospitalizations each year. But there just aren't enough doctors and hospital beds to deliver that much care. Doctors are already working 53 hours per week, and experience from past reforms tells us that they won't increase their hours, nor will they see many more patients per hour.

Instead of a huge surge in utilization, more realistic projections would assume that doctors and hospitals would reduce the amount of unnecessary care they're now delivering in order to deliver needed care to those who are currently not getting what they need. That's what happened in Canada. Doctors and hospitals can adjust care to meet increasing demand, as happens every year during flu season.

Moreover, no surge materialized when Medicare was implemented and millions of previously uninsured seniors got coverage. Between 1964 (before Medicare) and 1966 (the year when Medicare was fully functioning) there was absolutely no increase in the total number of doctor visit in the U.S.; Americans averaged 4.3 visits per person in 1964 and 4.3 visits per person in 1966. Instead, the number of visits by poor seniors went up, while the number of visits by healthy and wealthy patients went down slightly. The same thing happened in hospitals. There were no waiting lists, just a reduction in the utilization of unneeded elective care by wealthier patients, and the delivery of more care to sick people who needed it.

Bizarrely, despite projecting a roughly $1.6 trillion increase in total payments to doctors over 10 years, Holahan says in his discussion that "Physician incomes would be squeezed by the new payment rates."

5. Holahan's argument that the Sanders plan would cause a huge disruption of health care: This argument mirrors scare tactics used by Medicare's opponents in 1963. Back then, there were claims that doctors would boycott Medicare, and Wall Street Journal headlines warned of a "Patient Pileup," as "flocks of Medicare beneficiaries ... suddenly clog the nation's 7,200 hospitals." Nothing like that ever happened, nor did it happen when Taiwan implemented single payer more recently. And there's no reason to think it would happen here.

Moreover, surveys show that most doctors would welcome national health insurance, and thousands of doctors have recently issued a call (and detailed proposal) for single-payer reform in the American Journal of Public Health.

In summary, Holahan grossly underestimates the administrative savings under single payer; projects increases in the number of doctor visits and hospitalizations that far exceed the capacity of doctors and hospitals to provide this added care; and posits that our country would continue to pay much more for drugs and medical equipment than people in every other nation with national health insurance.

Rather than increasing national health spending, as Holahan claims, Sanders' plan (and the plan proposed by Physicians for a National Health Program) would almost certainly decrease total health spending over the next 10 years.

Drs. Himmelstein and Woolhandler are professors of health policy and management at the City University of New York School of Public Health and lecturers in medicine at Harvard Medical School. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those institutions'.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-himmelstein/the-urban-institutes-attack-on-single-payer-ridiculous-assumptions-yield-ridiculous-estimates_b_9876640.html

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Comment by Don McCanne

The health policy literature is rich with studies, reports and data confirming the that single payer health care financing is much more effective in ensuring universal coverage at lower costs than is our current fragmented, dysfunctional system of financing health care. Yet there has been a recent surge of interest in analyzing the single payer model, directly attributed to Sen. Bernie Sanders' advocacy for it during his presidential campaign. These reports from the Urban Institute and the Tax Policy Center are the latest which question the well documented fact that single payer would reduce per capita spending.

What is going on here? These two organizations are highly reputable and have produced many studies that are quite credible. Yet the nation's two leading researchers in single payer, Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, with their impeccable integrity, have shown that the researchers producing the critical reports have used incorrect assumptions in their analyses. This is not a matter of conflicting opinions, but rather a matter of the factual basis behind the assumptions. Yet the media ignore the facts and distribute only the compromised results from these otherwise reputable individuals and institutions that challenge the savings that would be accrued through the single payer model.

Why would John Holahan and his colleagues at the Urban Institute do this, at this time? Perhaps the composition of the Board of Trustees might give us a clue (link above). Most of them are members of "the establishment", many of them have served in President Clinton's administration (as did another critic - Kenneth Thorpe), and some are conservatives opposed to single payer. (The Tax Policy Center is a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution.) The timing of this report suggests that it is more than coincidental that it would be used to help defeat the only current challenger to Hillary Clinton's quest for the Democratic presidential nomination.

But why would respected researchers agree to such a blatantly political use of their work product? If you check their credentials, they are all deeply involved in health policy research that is designed to improve the function of our health care system, particularly its financing. That is, they are avowed incrementalists. Single payer would displace much of the work they have done with private insurance markets, Medicare, Medicaid, safety-net institutions and other aspects of our dysfunctional system. They are likely not well informed on single payer policy science since that has not been on their radar. This is not questioning the integrity of these researchers but merely an observation as to how they could come up with invalid conclusions. Their minds are simply pre-programmed to produce the results they get.

Hillary Clinton has declared that she will not consider single payer. When the policy community should be making efforts to convince her to support a superior model of reform they are instead discrediting that model in order to support her and Obamacare - the most expensive model of reform and one that fails to accomplish our goals of universality, efficiency and equity. Sadly, that reflects poorly on the policy community.

PNHP is a single issue organization supporting research and education on single payer reform. PNHP does not support nor oppose any political candidates.

qotd: Jonathan Oberlander on the prospect for single payer

The New England Journal of Medicine

April 14, 2016

The Virtues and Vices of Single-Payer Health Care

By Jonathan Oberlander, Ph.D.

The 2016 U.S. presidential campaign has produced many surprises. One unexpected turn is the reemergence of single-payer health insurance on the public agenda. Senator Bernie Sanders has made Medicare for All a centerpiece of his platform. His opponent for the Democratic party's presidential nomination, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has criticized Sanders's plan as unrealistic. An old debate has thus reopened. What are the virtues and vices of single-payer reform? Is it a realistic option for the United States or a political impossibility?

First, a note on language. "Single payer" is often used loosely to refer to everything from Canadian national health insurance to the British National Health Service (NHS) and even Obamacare — though depicting the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as a "slippery slope" to single payer is bizarre, given that it relies on private insurance. U.S. observers often mistakenly lump all foreign health systems together under the single-payer label — a classification that grossly oversimplifies the range of models in place elsewhere. In some rich democracies (Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland among them) people enroll in multiple insurance plans, which are typically highly regulated and are operated by private companies or nonprofit associations. Alternatively, in the NHS, the government traditionally owned most hospitals and directly employed many physicians.

Most U.S. single-payer advocates instead have in mind emulating Canada, where all legal residents in each province or territory receive coverage from one government insurance plan for medically necessary hospital and physician services. Canadians can obtain private policies for supplemental services not covered by the government plan. The government does not directly employ most doctors, nor does it own most hospitals, though their payments come from the single provincial insurance program. Canadian national health insurance arrangements — and Taiwan has a similar system — resemble traditional U.S. Medicare, with public financing for privately delivered services. Sanders is not the only presidential candidate to find this model appealing. Donald Trump has praised the Canadian program, though recently he suggested it wouldn't work here.

Proposals for U.S. single-payer reform have a long history. A 1943 bill subsequently endorsed by President Harry Truman in 1945 envisioned national health insurance funded through payroll taxes. That bill and subsequent efforts by the Truman administration to pass universal insurance went nowhere. However, Medicare, conceived in the 1950s and enacted in 1965, embodied the single-payer model. Medicare's architects saw it as the cornerstone of a national health insurance system. They believed that Medicare would eventually expand — with children perhaps the next group to join the program — to cover the entire population. That aspiration was never realized. Meanwhile, Congress created Medicaid as a separate program for some categories of low-income Americans, including families with dependent children, further fragmenting the insurance pool.

Single payer enjoyed strong support during the early 1970s among liberal Democrats such as Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), yet it never came close to passing. Subsequently, its political fortunes faded. Democratic policymakers increasingly pursued incrementalism (primarily through Medicaid expansion) and more conservative models that relied on private insurance (managed competition) as the only feasible reform routes. Medicare itself underwent a transformation as the role of private insurers in the program grew substantially. The 2010 ACA represented both a landmark achievement in expanding access to insurance and the culmination of a turn away from single payer. In 2009, the House of Representatives did pass legislation creating a Medicare-like government insurance program that would be available to the uninsured in competition with private plans. But this "public option" couldn't clear the Senate. Even with a Democratic president and large Democratic congressional majorities, a narrow remnant of single payer failed to pass.

Nevertheless, the single-payer approach enjoys a dedicated following among groups such as Physicians for a National Health Program, and Sanders's embrace has generated renewed attention for the idea. Regardless of the outcome of the 2016 election, the single-payer debate will persist. The enduring appeal of Medicare for All is understandable, given the fragmented, inequitable, costly, profit-driven, and wasteful non-system that prevails in the United States. The ACA's shortcomings are sufficiently serious, single-payer adherents argue, that Obamacare has left unsolved many of U.S. medicine's major problems. For all the ACA's considerable achievements, health insurance and medical care are still unaffordable for many people. In a country where nearly 30 million persons remain uninsured, where health insurance is increasingly thinned out by rising deductibles and cost sharing, where even insured patients face staggering bills and the prospect of medical bankruptcy, where myriad insurers and payment systems generate astonishing complexity, and where more money is spent on administration than on heart disease and cancer, it's no surprise to hear calls for sweeping change.

The lessons of Canadian national health insurance are as straightforward as they are neglected. Having a single government-operated insurance plan greatly reduces administrative costs and complexity. It concentrates purchasing power to reduce prices, enables budgetary control over health spending, and guarantees all legal residents, regardless of age, health status, income, or occupation, coverage for core medical services. Canadian Medicare charges patients no copayments or deductibles for hospital or physician services. Controlling medical spending does not, the Canadian experience demonstrates, require cost sharing that deters utilization. The Canadian system is hardly perfect. All countries struggle with tensions among cost, access, and quality; at times, Canada has grappled with fiscal pressures, wait lists for some services, and public dissatisfaction. Yet its problems pale in comparison to those in the United States.

The substantive virtues of single-payer programs are compelling. But so are their political liabilities. Medicare for All, which aims to constrain health care spending, faces intense opposition from insurers, the medical care industry, and much of organized medicine. It would t rigger fierce resistance from conservatives and the business community and anxiety in many insured Americans fearful about changing coverage and the specter of rationing. The ACA's comparatively conservative reform approach inspired false charges of "socialized medicine," "pulling the plug on grandma," and "death panels." It takes only a little imagination — or a look back at the history books — to predict the reactions that an actual single-payer plan would evoke.

Single payer would also require the adoption of large-scale tax increases. Although Americans would save money by not paying premiums to private insurers, the politics of moving immense levels of health care spending visibly into the federal budget are daunting, given the prevailing anti-tax sentiment. Furthermore, converting our long-established patchwork of payers into a single program would require a substantial overhaul of the status quo, including the ACA. Then there are the familiar institutional barriers to major reform within U.S. government, including the necessity of securing a supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster.

In short, single payer has no realistic path to enactment in the foreseeable future. It remains an aspiration more than a viable reform program. Single-payer supporters have not articulated a convincing strategy for overcoming the formidable obstacles that stand in its way. Nor have they, despite substantial public support for single payer, succeeded in mobilizing a social movement that could potentially break down those barriers. The pressing question is not about whether Medicare for All can be enacted during the next presidential administration — it can't — but where health care reform goes from here.

It's possible that some states could, through waivers that begin in 2017, consider adding a public option to their marketplaces or even adopt single-payer systems. Yet Vermont's recent struggles to make a modified single-payer plan work underscore the challenges to state action. At the federal level, incremental steps toward Medicare for All, such as expanding program eligibility to younger enrollees, are conceivable — though challenging in this political environment. Moreover, the fight over Obamacare is not over. Preserving and strengthening the ACA, as well as Medicare, and addressing underinsurance and affordability of private coverage is a less utopian cause than single payer. I believe it's also the best way forward now for U.S. medical care.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1602009#t=article

NEJM Interview with Dr. Jonathan Oberlander

Closing comments:

When we look at the entire patchwork of the American medical care system and our insurance system there're still so many holes in it, there's so much redundancy, and it's so inefficient. And that's why the single payer idea is going to resonate far beyond whatever the outcome of the 2016 election is. Because when you have a health insurance that leaves tens of millions uninsured, tens of millions underinsured, that is beset by administrative complexity and is governed too often by profit, there's going to be an appetite for sweeping change. And whatever its political fortunes are, and I don't think they're particularly good, single payer is going to continue to speak to those who are disaffected by what's going on in American medical care and are looking for something different, something better.

(The full 8 minute audio can be accessed for free at the link above.)

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Comment by Don McCanne

Although single payer advocates may be disappointed with Professor Oberlander's conclusion that the best way forward now is to strengthen ACA and Medicare and to address underinsurance and the affordability of private coverage, we need to keep in mind that he has described the clear superiority of the single payer model, and that it still has widespread popular support. His pessimism is based on current political realities, which have been confirmed by over half a century of failure to advance comprehensive, universal single payer legislation.

Since single payer seems to be an imperative, why has it not been enacted? Oberlander writes, "Single-payer supporters have not articulated a convincing strategy for overcoming the formidable obstacles that stand in its way. Nor have they, despite substantial public support for single payer, succeeded in mobilizing a social movement that could potentially break down those barriers."

He's right, based purely on results to date. We have a lot of work to do.