Essays on Employee Health Benefits and Other Health Care Topics, Hosted by Brian Klepper
Brian Klepper
This beautifully written letter was forwarded after an interview with me on health care cost appeared in a Florida newspaper.
Many of us with coverage often think in abstract terms about working families that do not have access to employer-sponsored coverage, and that must shoulder the overwhelming burden of costs on their own. As Mrs. Doss describes, health care costs dominate her family’s economic life and drive many of their most important decisions.
Brian Klepper
Recently-fired Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman waxed progressive in a self-promotional Forbes article last week, describing the ways past and forward for electronic health records (EHRs) and health information technology (HIT). He may have been trying to recover from a damning New York Times article that clearly illustrated the relationships between campaign contributions, influence over health information technology policy, and business success.
Tullman recalls building EHRs that moved many physicians away from paper and the errors it fosters. He calls out David C. Kibbe, MD as an example of the forces wanting to preserve paper and opposing EHRs, with quotes from a 2008 blog post suggesting that the current crop are “notoriously expensive,” “difficult to implement” and unable to demonstrate care quality improvements. He predicts that, in the future, the industry will leverage open platforms and interoperability, yielding new monitoring and management utilities that can facilitate better care at lower cost.
Continue reading “Why EHRs Really Haven’t Made Us Healthier: A Response To Glen Tullman”
Brian Klepper
Posted 2/15/13 on Medscape Connect’s Care & Cost Blog
Health care’s purchasers crave certainty. But complexity – and therefore uncertainty – rules. Assurances are hard to come by.
The most common question asked by prospective clients of my onsite clinic/medical management firm is how much less their employee health benefits will cost if they deploy our services. They often expect that we’ll review their claims history and nail down what their health care will cost once we’re involved. Looking in the rear view mirror can inform the future, but it isn’t foolproof.
The Complexity of Health Care Risk
The challenge here is that so many different mechanisms contribute to the need for care, the ways care is accessed, the ways care is delivered, and the ways it is priced. Even mechanisms that, in isolation, are strong, often are inadequate in the context of larger cost drivers.
Continue reading “A Broader Approach To Managing Health Care Risk”
Brian Klepper
Published 12/09/12 in the Eau Claire, WI Leader-Telegram
Note from Brian: This piece appeared last weekend in the Eau Claire, WI newspaper, and was written with the encouragement of employers in that community who, rightly, believe they’ve been raked over the coals on their health care costs.
This argument is mainly directed at other employers, as a way of explaining that there are alternatives. That said, the dynamics described here occur in almost every community in the country.
Even compared to national health care cost growth that has skyrocketed nearly 4 times as fast as general inflation for more than a decade, Wisconsin stands out and northwest Wisconsin stands out more. Eau Claire’s health care cost burden is a whopping 16 percent higher than the national average. This is pricing many individuals and employers out of the coverage market and sapping the region’s economic vitality and competitiveness.
As Robert Kraig meticulously details in Citizen Action’s Wisconsin Health Insurance Cost Rankings 2012, Eau Claire is Wisconsin’s second-highest cost health care market, with 2011 monthly premiums of $750.46, 9.1% higher than the state average of $687.68. (La Crosse is 1st, only a hair higher at $756.70.)
Continue reading “When Employers Collaborate To Manage Health Care Costs”
Brian Klepper
Posted 12/06/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care & Cost Blog
On The Health Care Blog, veteran analyst Vince Kuraitis reviews a report from the consulting firm Oliver Wyman (OW), arguing that the trend toward reconfiguring health systems to deliver more accountable care is more widespread than any of us suspect.
“The healthcare world has only gotten serious about accountable care organizations in the past two years, but it is already clear that they are well positioned to provide a serious competitive threat to traditional fee-for-service medicine. In “The ACO Surprise,” our analysis finds that 25 to 31 million Americans already receive their care through ACOs-and roughly 45 percent of the population live in regions served by at least one ACO.”
Brian Klepper
Posted 11/12/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care & Cost Blog
The most striking aspect of the election was that it decisively clarified the philosophical preferences of most Americans. And because the outcome was largely determined by minorities, women, and the young, it appeared to be a much broader and more independently-minded vision than most pundits have given the electorate credit for. That unexpectedly portends big changes.
Peggy Noonan’s analysis in the Wall Street Journal quotes a brutal summation by conservative activist Heather Higgins:
A majority of the American people believe that the one good point about Republicans is they won’t raise taxes. However they also believe Republicans caused the economic mess in the first place and might do it again, cannot be trusted to care about cutting spending in a way that is remotely concerned about who it hurts, and are retrograde to the point of caricature on everything else.
Brian Klepper
Posted 10/28/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care & Cost Blog
At our first meeting years ago, Tom Emerick, Walmart’s then VP of Global Benefits, told me,
“No industry can grow indefinitely at a multiple of general inflation. It will eventually become so expensive that purchasers will simply abandon it.”
Note from Brian: The article below describes my recent keynote address to a large meeting of imaging center administrators, and appears in the Sept 2012 Radiology Today. I’m reposting it because it accurately reflects, in depth, the message that I tried to deliver.
Remarkably, the audience was evenly divided in their evaluations. Half thought it was a very important but difficult to hear talk. The other half thought I was a jerk and it was the worst talk they’d ever heard. My take on this is that the responses reflected an industry that has become comfortable with a lack of accountability and market forces, and that is highly threatened by change.
Jim Knaub
Published in Radiology Today, September 2012, 13:8, p18
A keynote speaker told administrators to expect businesses threatened by ever-increasing healthcare costs with new approaches that will change how imaging organizations compete.
When Brian Klepper, PhD, delivered his keynote speech to the audience at the AHRA annual meeting in Kissimmee, Florida, last month, it was not the feel-good speech of the summer. Klepper, whose companies develop and manage worksite primary care clinics for employers and manage specialty care for those employees, told the audience that his company had recently negotiated a deal in Indiana for $450 MRI exams in a market that had technical fees ranging between $1,750 and $3,200. That was the opposite of a warm and fuzzy message to the 900 or so imaging administrators attending the meeting at the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center.
“Somebody like me is going to come in to your market, and your volumes are going to plummet because there is no way you can compete against a $450 imaging price when you’re currently used to getting $2,800 or whatever you’re getting,” Klepper told the audience. “That is the problem.”
Continue reading “Are You Ready for Intense Price Competition?”
Brian Klepper
Posted 8/19/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care and Cost Blog
My recent 3-hour outpatient prostate biopsy generated nearly $25,000 in charges. My health plan will probably settle for four to five thousand dollars – this is the real market value – but if we were uninsured we’d be on the hook for the whole thing. All in all, a minor diagnostic procedure – nothing cured or treated – for the cost of a pretty nice car.
The capricious insanity of health care pricing is delivered with straight faces by health care professionals and executives to flabbergasted patients and benefits managers. It is the by-product of a system utterly devoid for decades of transparency, accountability or market pressures.
Brian Klepper
Posted 7/31/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care and Cost
Several years ago I had dinner with a woman who had served in the late 1990s as the national Chief Medical Officer of a major health plan. At the time, she said, she had developed a strategic initiative that called for abandoning the plan’s utilization review and medical management efforts, which had produced heartburn and a backlash among both physicians and patients. Instead, the idea was to retrospectively analyze utilization to identify unnecessary care.
This was at the height of anti-managed care fervor. A popular movie at the time, As Good As It Gets, cast Helen Hunt as the mother of a sick kid. When someone mentioned an HMO, Ms. Hunt’s character let fly a flurry of expletives. America’s theater audiences exploded in applause.
Brian Klepper
Posted 7/16/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care and Cost
The news of my wife Elaine’s primary peritoneal cancer 27 months ago began a fevered effort to learn all we could about her disease and our options. Peritoneal cancer, which is close in form and behavior to ovarian, is rooted in the abdominal lining. “Gold standard” treatments notwithstanding, the prognosis isn’t good. After a 12-36 month remission in which tumors are inactive, the disease generally returns, and a high percentage of women are gone within 5 years of diagnosis.
Cancer elicits a primal fear that can provoke fantasy and baseless speculation. Cancer patients in remission have told us they are cured. Others, well-meaning, have announced they know someone with “exactly what you have,” and that theirs went away by applying a strict dietary or spiritual discipline.
Continue reading “Is Genomic Medicine Clinically Useful Yet?”
Brian Klepper
Posted 6/29/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care and Cost Blog
Like most health law watchers, I was surprised by yesterday’s decision. I’m sure that on this issue, as with everything else, zealous responses will rationalize the result and split the country down the middle.
I expected the Court to be purely partisan, but apparently Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged the gravity of his role and saw his way clear to support the law with some constraints. Here’s the comment from SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) Blog:
Salvaging the idea that Congress did have the power to try to expand health care to virtually all Americans, the Supreme Court on Monday upheld the constitutionality of the crucial – and most controversial – feature of the Affordable Care Act. By a vote of 5-4, however, the Court did not sustain it as a command for Americans to buy insurance, but as a tax if they don’t. That is the way Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., was willing to vote for it, and his view prevailed. The other Justices split 4-4, with four wanting to uphold it as a mandate, and four opposed to it in any form.
Continue reading “The Game’s Not Over, and It May Not Even Be The Real Game”
Brian Klepper
Posted 6/25/12 on Medscape’s Care & Cost Blog
The dream of reason did not take power into account – modern medicine is one of those extraordinary works of reason – but medicine is also a world of power.
Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, 1984
How can primary care’s position be reasserted as a policy leader rather than follower? Even though it is a linchpin discipline within America’s health system and its larger economy – a mass of evidence compellingly demonstrates that empowered primary care is associated with better health outcomes and lower costs – primary care has been overwhelmed and outmaneuvered by a health care industry intent on freeing access to lucrative downstream services and revenues. That compromise has produced a cascade of undesirable impacts that reach far beyond health care. Bringing American health care back into homeostasis will require a approach that appreciates and leverages power in ways that are different than in the past.
But primary care also has complicity in its own decline. It has been largely ineffective in communicating and advocating for its value, and in recruiting allies who share its interests. Equally important, it has failed to appreciate and protect primary care’s foundational role in US health care and the larger economy, as well as the advocacy demands of competing in a power-based policy environment.
Continue reading “Galvanizing Primary Care’s Power: A Call For A New Society”
Kevin Davies
Posted 5/31/12 on Bio-IT World
The long-term success of N-of-One, a Waltham Mass.-based company offering personalized cancer information, will undoubtedly be shaped by the vision of its newly appointed CEO, Christine Cournoyer, and strategic partnerships with companies like Foundation Medicine, announced this week.
But ultimately it comes down to whether the company’s original direct-to-patient strategy works for cancer patients like Elaine Waples.
Continue reading “Cancer Survivor on N-of-One’s Direct-to-Patient Ombudsman Model”
Brian Klepper
On May 13th, I announced that I would merge C&C into The Doctor Weighs In, a process that I have already begun in earnest.
I meant that I would not longer actively aggregate and re-post great health care writing from around the Web. There are other people that do that very well. But I will continue to re-post my writings from elsewhere, and also highlight noteworthy news and thoughts that come my way.
In other words, C&C, in its diminished form, will be a more personal collection of health care observations. I hope you’ll continue to stop by now and then.
Thanks.
Care And Cost 