My mother-in-law broke her hip last week. When she was admitted to the hospital, the hospital administered a COVID-19 test. Despite showing no COVID-19 symptoms and have been given the first COVID-19 shot earlier in the month, she tested positive for COVID-19. The doctors said she would have to be transferred to a medical facility housing COVID-19 patients. My wife was upset and demanded a second test. Not surprisingly, the second test came back negative. Although my mother-in-law has probably developed some immunity from the first shot, it is unlikely she has enough immunity to survive the viral load in a COVID-19 ward. The doctors almost made a dreadful mistake. Thanks to my wife, my mother-in-law dodged that bullet.
healthcare
Would Someone Please Remind Governor DeWine That He Is Governor Of A Fly-over State
When Governor DeWine announced that 100,000 people in Ohio might have the coronavirus in Ohio, I thought that was bold. That was daring. That was a Scientific wild-ass guess. It was apparent that he had a set of policies he wanted to implement and he needed some scientific justification. He probably reasoned that if California, New York, and Washington have self-quarantined then it must be a good idea for Ohio to get out in front of the issue. According to the John Hopkins coronavirus site, the top five states with confirmed coronavirus cases are New York, Washington, California, Massachusetts, and Florida. All of these states are logical ports of entry for the virus versus fly-over America. These states have large cities that make controlling community spread of the virus harder to do. Self-quarantining in these states is an appropriate policy to avoid overloading the hospitals. When we look at Ohio we see a different picture.
- According to the Ohio coronavirus website, Ohio has 50 confirmed cases and 14 cases that required hospitalization. These numbers are well underneath the capacity of our healthcare systems.
- Self-quarantining confirmed cases sounds practical. Large scale self-quarantining in Ohio is probably marginally useful at best. People are already annoyed at the pandemonium and chaos it has caused. A Scientific wild-ass guess is not a good reason for lost wages.
- Spring is only four days away. Warming weather and the official end to the flu season is on the horizon.
- Ohio’s population is more spread out than the cities on the east and west coasts.
All of these factors point to a pretty good scenario for preventing the spread of coronavirus. Getting to that 100,000 number in the next couple of months is going to pretty difficult. This is a goal I am happy not to reach. Thank God, I live in fly-over America!
Inquiring Minds Want To Now – How Long Is A Person Who Has Contracted The Coronavirus Contagious?
I have been looking at this graph and wondering why the number of New Recovered Patients is not exceeding the New Confirmed Patients? Click on the image for a larger version. If this disease runs its course in about two weeks, there should be thousands of additional recovered patients every day. That makes me think they do not know how long a person is contagious. A scarier thought is that a recovered patient could be asymptomatic and shedding active viruses. Shades of Typhoid Mary. Now we have reports you can get infected a second time. Zerohedge.com has a report stating that:
It’s highly possible to get infected a second time. A few people recovered from the first time by their own immune system, but the meds they use are damaging their heart tissue, and when they get it the second time, the antibody doesn’t help but makes it worse, and they die a sudden death from heart failure,” reads a message forwarded to Taiwan News from a relative of one of the doctors living in the United Kingdom.
Hopefully, this report is a mistake.
New Healthcare Regulations I Can Get Behind
Over at The Hill, they wrote about some new rules the Trump Administration hopes will drive down costs by increasing competition. I am leary of new healthcare regulations but I think these ideas may actually work. Here is what they said.
One regulation would require hospitals to provide a consumer-friendly online page where prices are listed for 300 common procedures like X-rays and lab tests. A second regulation would require insurers to provide an online tool where people could compare their out-of-pocket costs at different medical providers before receiving treatment.
Both of these regulations are slightly improved ideas for improving cost transparency. Recently I was looking at our Medicare plan to determine if our preferred doctors and hospitals were included in our network. Our preferred emergency care hospital and major hospitalization hospital were in our network so I was happy with our plan. So we know where we want to go. The next thing I looked at was planning our healthcare costs.
I like it when my doctor tells me upfront what a common procedure costs. I do not like it when doctors and hospitals surprise me with exorbitant out-of-pocket costs. This is a bipartisan issue so I help both sides will continue to work for our common good.
It is normal for me to shop for the best price. I do not have a problem shopping for the best price/value for any of the common procedures. As an example, I have been told by various friends that some common procedures such as an MRI may vary widely in price. In-network providers are great but if you have the cash on hand and you know the out-of-pocket costs then it may make sense for you to go out of the network for this service.
A regulation change the Trump Administration did not address is to allow people on Medicare to contribute to an HSA. People my age still have several more years before our first major hospitalization. It makes sense we should be allowed to continue to contribute to an HSA. The better we prepare for our future healthcare expenses, the better off we are. The lure of tax-exempt savings may just be the trick to better preparation.
Does Severability In The Texas v. U.S. Case Matter?
Randy Barnett wrote his thoughts about severability in Texas v. U.S. over at Reason.com and here is my comment.
The individual mandate is an example of why I believe the Affordable Care Act was a bunch of dumb ideas that were poorly implemented. The individual insurance market as envisioned by the ACA depended on a carrot and stick approach. The carrot was affordable health insurance for the unsubsidized healthy people to lure them into the market willingly. This is how insurance companies make the money to pay for their unprofitable customers. The stick was the individual mandate. The individual mandate was designed to be scary, not effective. It would never have an influence on healthy customers like affordable health insurance. In 2010 individual insurance rates were already too expensive so healthy people made their adjustments. Some stuck with their grandfathered plans. Some went to alternative insurance products. Others dropped their insurance because they were exempt from the mandate because health insurance premiums would exceed 8.15% of their adjusted gross income. Insurance companies lost their best customers but were largely protected by the Risk Adjustment, Reinsurance, and Risk Corridor provisions. There is no free lunch. Like all dumb ideas that are poorly implemented, the American government got stuck with the bill.
The only portion of the ACA that must continue to exist for the subsidized individual health insurance market to continue to exist is the Risk Adjustment, Reinsurance, and Risk Corridor provisions. If we want to continue to subsidize health insurance premiums for those people earning less than four times the federal poverty level then it will be born the general population rather than the unsubsidized healthy customers. For the unsubsidized healthy customers, this is sweet revenge. The individual mandate has always been a moot point.
Back in 2016, I wrote a post, The Health Exchange Transformation Is Almost Complete, in which I made the argument that the individual health exchange had a better chance of reverting back to a high-risk pool exchange than a market-based exchange. It all depended on the affordability of health insurance for unsubsidized healthy customers. If you do not keep your best customers, the government will be left holding the bag. When it comes to the individual mandate, the people who wrote the ACA were not that smart. The most important thing that matters to a customer who might get penalized is not the penalty but affordable unsubsidized health insurance. Affordable health care has always been the primary objective of the Affordable Care Act and the American people. Our politicians seem to have forgotten that aspect of the ACA. If the individual mandate has always been a moot point then severability has always been a moot point, too.
Too Woke To Check Her Facts, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez And The Ringworm Crisis
I try not to listen to her but this tidbit caught my attention, “there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health”. When my son was in high school he was diagnosed before a wrestling match with a ringworm infection. It took us several days to get a doctor’s appointment so we treated it with Selsun Blue we picked up at the grocery store. By the time the doctor saw him, it was gone. Ringworm is a contagious skin infection but it is not a public health crisis.
If Ms. Ocasio-Cortez had spent just a few moments checking her facts, she would have noticed two things wrong with her statement. According to al.com, the two problems with her statement are:
- The problem in Alabama is with hookworms, not ringworms.
- Rural Alabama has a hookworm problem because it has a sewage problem. It has nothing to do with access to public health.
I found it especially ironic that the first public health crisis that the representative from Brooklyn can think of is hookworms in Alabama. The opioid crisis is undoubtedly a better example of a public health crisis she should have used her position to discuss. Unlike the hookworm problem in Alabama, public health policies play an important part in treating opioid addiction. Her opinion on this public health crisis is important and relevant to her constituents.
ObamaCare Is Dead, Long Live ObamaCare
A Federal judge ruled that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional and I am not sorry. The Affordable Care Act has always been a bunch of dumb ideas that were poorly implemented. The only way the Affordable Care Act would be a “good first step” at reforming health care is if it provided affordable health care costs for everyone. The Affordable Care Act has always been a great deal for doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and health insurance companies. It was a great deal for those who will never pay enough into the system to cover their health care. For the rest of us who pay for our health care costs, it didn’t provide a path to affordable health care costs. For healthy people buying health insurance in the individual health insurance market, the Affordable Care Act has always been a failure. There has never been a greater condemnation of the Affordable Care Act than healthy people opting out of the health
The health care industry has always been a hotbed for cronyism. So while those of us who pay for our health care struggle to find a way to pay for the same old insurance at a much higher price, the Affordable Care Act supporters have been doing their touchdown dance with their industry friends. The trouble with the Affordable Care Act is that you eventually run out of other people’s money and the only path forward is to focus on health care costs. The party is over!
A Good First Step Toward #MedicareForAll Is To Require Health Insurance Plans To Pay The Same Price For Treatments And Drugs As Medicare
The biggest obstacle to Medicare For All is figuring out what price you are going to pay the doctors, hospitals, and drug companies. Currently, the price being paid by Medicare is higher than Medicaid but much lower than private insurance. So if the pricing formula remains unchanged under Medicare For All plan then the doctors, hospitals, and drug companies will take a pay cut. You should expect the healthcare industry will do everything in their power to avoid this situation.
As an example, Ohio voters defeated Issue 2, Drug Price Relief Act, last November. This ballot initiative would have required the state to pay a price for prescription drugs that was not higher than the lowest price that the United States Department of Veterans Affairs pays for them. Even though these costs are a relatively minor component of Ohio’s overall health care costs, the healthcare industry fought tooth and nail to defeat this bill. If we cannot pass a relatively small ballot initiative to control health care costs, what chance do we have with a drastic overhaul like #MedicareForAll?
#Unaffordable Health Insurance Has Officially Killed The Individual Mandate
It was not that long ago that there was general agreement amongst the health care policy wonks that the “mandate was considered necessary for the market to work“. In reality what they meant to say was that the market needed both the individual mandate and affordable, unsubsidized health insurance to work. The Affordable Care Act(ACA) supporters realized that they could not deliver expanded benefits and affordable, unsubsidized health insurance. Expanding benefits was more appealing to their political base so they chose to kill the one thing that was essential for the market to succeed, affordable health insurance. So while the individual insurance market rotted away our courts debated whether the individual mandate was a “penalty” instead of a “tax” while maintaining that it was a valid exercise of Congress’s power to “lay and collect taxes”. The idea that the individual mandate was not as important as everyone claimed must be a grating reminder to Supreme Court justices like Justice Roberts who went out of his way to rationalize its legality. I wonder if the Supreme Court Justices learned anything from this exercise in futility.
The Irony of Repealing The Individual Mandate As Part Of A Tax Cut Package
Now after the ACA has blown up the individual insurance market, our legislators find themselves in a strange predicament. They cannot pass a health reform bill but they can pass a middle-class tax cut if they repeal the individual mandate. You got to love the idea of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office providing the intellectual foundation for repealing the individual mandate. What’s next? Repeal the Medicaid expansion because it would save the federal government even more money? According to their analysis, the primary source of savings comes from reduced subsidies due to healthy people leaving individual health insurance market. Avik Roy has more details in his Forbes article, How The CBO Drove Obamacare’s Individual Mandate Repeal Into Tax Reform. Although this sounds like a win-win situation, there are health insurance problems when you repeal the individual mandate. Robert Laszewski goes as far to call it a nightmare for the middle class. Then he backs off from this statement when he agrees that the repeal is good for the poor and healthy people. For the poor struggling with out of pocket costs, this is probably a better alternative than insurance. The group Mr. Laszewski says has the greatest risk are those healthy people whose income is greater than 400% of the Federal Poverty Level, who get sick, and do not have the money to pay for their illness. This sounds scary but for most major medical expenses, the combination of unaffordable health insurance and high deductibles puts this group in a more precarious financial position than going without health insurance. Earlier this year I wrote how we reduced the risk of this lesser evil.
In 2015 my wife and I came to the conclusion that the healthcare industrial complex would not willingly change their ways so we started building up our HSA. At the end of 2016, I asked our insurance company if they would offer me a lower rate. They declined and we chose to drop our health insurance. The markets are working, the customer has spoken, and our health policies are dysfunctional. Although we are nervous about our choice, we think we can do a better job managing our health care than the healthcare industrial complex. It is amazing how fast the money builds up when you divert your old health insurance premium amount into a savings account. I am mildly optimistic we can get better health care advice for non-emergency room treatments if we tell our health care providers that we are a cash customer. Every month we get by without a cancer diagnosis makes us a little more confident we made the right decision. If the insurance companies want us back all they have to do is show us an affordable health insurance plan!
In retrospect, we are a lot more comfortable with our decision now than when we started. We stuck to the plan and our emergency funds are in better shape. We are confident enough about our health that I am not sure an “affordable” health insurance plan could lure us back in. The only healthcare benefit we wish we had was the ability to add more money to our Health Savings Account.
Vote #YesOnIssue2 As The First Step At Controlling The Exorbitant Cost Of Medications
The greatest failure of the Affordable Care Act(ACA) was its unwillingness to control health care costs. In retrospect, the ACA looks more like cronyism than meaningful health care reform. For the last eight years the hospitals, doctors, drug companies, and insurance have worked with government officials to make health care more unaffordable. In this case, I find myself agreeing with my friends on the left and the Ohio Academy of Family Physicians who said:
On August 13, the Ohio Academy of Family Physicians voted to support Issue 2, the Drug Price Relief Act, because we know something must be done so that Ohioans can afford and have access to needed medications. This initiated statute is far from perfect, simplistic, and flawed in many respects, and may not be the best approach for addressing high drug costs. But, because of the inaction of state and federal lawmakers, it is all we have. By supporting this issue, we hope to send a message to legislators—the exorbitant cost of medications and the negative impact those costs have on patients must be addressed.