The September 20, 2012, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine carried two Sounding Board pieces about recommendations to contain health care spending. One article is titled “A Systematic Approach to Containing Health Care Spending” was produced by nationally known health policy experts working in cooperation with the Center for American Progress.

About half of the 11 recommended solutions are not new, nor have they proven to be anything more than platitudes from the past. Among these recommendations are: (a) “accelerate use of alternatives to fee-for-service payment”; (b) “simplify administrative systems for all payers and providers”; (c) “make better use of nonphysician providers [such as nurse practitioners and physicians assistants]”; (d) “expand the Medicare ban on physician self-referrals”; and (e) “reduce the costs of defensive medicine.” Should one peruse any one of several books produced in the 1980s written by politicians and health system gurus – such as Alain C. Enthoven’s Health Plan (1980), Joseph A. Califano, Jr.’s America’s Health Care Revolution (1986), Victor R. Fuch’s The Health Economy (1986), and Rashi Fein’s Medical Care, Medical Costs (1989) – they would find the same recommendations. Also, not so curiously, all of these authors and many others agreed in spirit – in the 1980s – that health care spending “trends [then] could squeeze out critical investments in education and infrastructure, contribute to unsustainable debt levels, and constrain wage increases for the middle class.” This at a time when total health care spending was one-tenth of what it is today (health care spending in 1980 was $256 billon; health care spending in 2020 was $2.6 trillion).

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers a Master of Science in Bioethics, a Doctorate of Professional Studies in Bioethics, and Graduate Certificates in Clinical Ethics and Clinical Ethics Consultation. For more information on AMBI's online graduate programs, please visit our website.

An article about the concept of overtreatment recently caught my eye. We live in a world of excess-bigger houses and larger food portions, among others. These are necessarily bad, just perhaps more than we need. The same goes for medical treatment. Like many things in the U.S., people equate “more” or “bigger” with “better.”

The problem with this mentality when it comes to healthcare procedures is the large cost that comes with it. According to the article, overtreatment is costing the U.S. healthcare system $210 billion each year. And spending that money doesn’t earn us high marks in terms of our health outcomes compared to the rest of theworld. Between “one fifth and one third of our health care dollars” are spent “on care that does nothing to improve our health” according to Shannon Brownlee, author of “Overtreated.” In a 2009 New Yorker article, Dr. Atul Gwande also points out the fact that simply because you’re receiving more aggressive healthcare doesn’t necessarily mean you’re healthier. 

Overtreatment has additional, non-financial ramifications as well. Emotional consequences can be quite serious. What if you had a cough for a few weeks? And when looking into the cough, you discover something else? And when looking into that new diagnosis, yet another problem comes to light? When your expectation was just to be treated for your cough, would you want to find out all of the other illnesses you might have? Maybe. But maybe not. Perhaps, other than your cough, you felt fine, but now your days are spent getting test done, blood work run, procedures scheduled.

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers a Master of Science in Bioethics, a Doctorate of Professional Studies in Bioethics, and Graduate Certificates in Clinical Ethics and Clinical Ethics Consultation. For more information on AMBI's online graduate programs, please visit our website.

In a recent article about medical repatriation in a national bioethics journal, philosopher Mark Kuczewski argues that the practice can be an “ethically accepted option” only if three conditions are met:

1. Transfer must be able to be seen by a reasonable person as being in the patient’s best interests aside from the issue of reimbursement.
2. The hospital must exercise due diligence regarding the medical support available at the patient’s destination.
3. The patient or appropriate surrogate must give fully informed consent to being returned to another country.

Surely Dr. Kuczewski knew – when he wrote the article – how completely absurd these three “conditions” or prerequisites are?

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers a Master of Science in Bioethics, a Doctorate of Professional Studies in Bioethics, and Graduate Certificates in Clinical Ethics and Clinical Ethics Consultation. For more information on AMBI's online graduate programs, please visit our website.

Thanks to health care reform, beginning last month women with health insurance no longer have to pay for contraception. While I fully support this legislation, I think it has unintended negative consequences for both women and men. Specifically, I am concerned that this legislation, as well as the debate surrounding it, once again conflates reproduction with women, thereby ignoring men’s reproductive responsibility and autonomy.

This legislation is based on and buttresses our current heterosexual contraceptive arrangement in which women are largely held responsible for contraception, especially in monogamous relationships where couples are more likely to depend upon long-acting, reversible contraceptives (LARCs) or sterilization rather than barrier methods. Women today actively participate in all contraceptive methods except vasectomy, which only accounts for 9% of contraception use in the U.S. Part of the reason for this is due the disparity between the number and types of female and male contraceptives: there are eleven contraceptive options for women, including various types of LARCs, and only two for men—male condoms and vasectomy—neither of which are LARCs. Monogamous couples not ready for sterilization generally don’t delegate contraceptive responsibility to men because male condoms are not well-suited to their needs: they are not nearly as effective as female LARCs (16% versus under 3% failure rate for typical use) and they can interrupt and minimize pleasure during sex.

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers a Master of Science in Bioethics, a Doctorate of Professional Studies in Bioethics, and Graduate Certificates in Clinical Ethics and Clinical Ethics Consultation. For more information on AMBI's online graduate programs, please visit our website.

The Supreme Court ruled this past June that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise known as Obamacare, was indeed constitutional. But this ruling only occurred when Chief Justice came over to the more liberal side. However, he made it clear that the basis for its constitutionality could not be the commerce clause but rather the right of the federal government to impose new taxes. That is, the government could not require citizens to buy certain services but they could, via elected representatives, impose new taxes to support those services. On the conservative side, there seems to be the notion that health care itself is a normal market service or product like any other. Requiring someone through the imposition of a mandate to purchase health care is therefore the same as requiring them to purchase broccoli. Though most of us on the liberal side are glad that the ACA was deemed constitutional, it causes us considerable pause to leave just a wrongheaded legal understanding embedded in our public policy moving forward.

Broccoli has many health benefits. It is filled with vitamin A and C, folic acid, calcium and fiber. It may help prevent high blood pressure and colon cancer. And it’s really delicious steamed up as an accompaniment with other vegetables and almost any meat or carbohydrate. In fact I would prefer to spend the remaining time in this blog describing all the ways broccoli can be enjoyed and used to promote health. But my point here is only to say, as wonderful as broccoli is, it is dispensable in one’s diet. Former President George H. W. Bush famously claimed his right to refuse to eat broccoli any longer because he was now president and could do as he wished. He just didn’t like it. And as difficult as I find it to empathize with such a sentiment, I must say, it makes virtually no practical difference either to former president Bush, society and to the marketplace in which broccoli is sold. He will hopefully find other vegetables he finds more palatable or take vitamin supplements, or just hope that his genes help him get to a long life. There are countless market products and services just like broccoli, in terms of being really, really good for you, but if you don’t buy them, neither you nor the rest of society will be harmed.

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers a Master of Science in Bioethics, a Doctorate of Professional Studies in Bioethics, and Graduate Certificates in Clinical Ethics and Clinical Ethics Consultation. For more information on AMBI's online graduate programs, please visit our website.

The July 31, 2012, issue of the Chicago Tribune carried an article entitled “Chicago-Based Accretive Health Banned from Doing Business in Minnesota for 2 Years.”

Facts in the article are sketchy: (1) The Minnesota attorney general’s office began investigating possible privacy breaches when a hospital account collections company laptop was stolen two years ago. The laptop contained the names and protected health information of 23,000 patients treated at two Minnesota hospitals. (2) The company – Accretive Health – manages billing and collections for hospitals. One hospital in Minnesota accounted for 9.9% of Accretive’s first quarter revenue - $25 million out of $253.7 million.

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers a Master of Science in Bioethics, a Doctorate of Professional Studies in Bioethics, and Graduate Certificates in Clinical Ethics and Clinical Ethics Consultation. For more information on AMBI's online graduate programs, please visit our website.

With the Supreme Court upholding the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) constitutional but rejecting the notion that the states had to expand their Medicaid program to cover a significant percentage of the populations, some inequities in health care delivery will only grow.

One might use any number of examples to illustrate identified expected unfairness. For the relatively poor Southern states – Alabama (AL), Louisiana (LA), and Mississippi (MS) – patients covered by Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) is significantly higher than the national average now. With the proposed ACA expansion in these three states effected by 2019, the percentage of Medicaid & CHIP-eligible populations would swell from 20% to 27% (AL), 26% to 34% (LA), and 26% to 37% (MS). In Louisiana and Mississippi, these percentages are approaching the number of persons in the state who have traditional private health insurance. [The projected numbers used here are from the Kaiser Family Foundation Website.]

Moreover with the increased numbers of patients who will have Medicaid and CHIP coverage, proportionately more practitioners will be critical in providing the care in these states. Is it realistic to think that Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, will be able to grow their provider availability by 37%, 32%, and 41% in four years to meet the demand? The national average is 25.7 active physicians per 10,000 persons. Louisiana is very close to the US mean with 24.2 physicians per 10,000, but Alabama and Mississippi are will below the national average with 20.6 and 17.3 physicians per 10,000 respectfully. Is it reasonable to assume that these states will be able to multiply their physician populations to meet any increased demand?

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers a Master of Science in Bioethics, a Doctorate of Professional Studies in Bioethics, and Graduate Certificates in Clinical Ethics and Clinical Ethics Consultation. For more information on AMBI's online graduate programs, please visit our website.

Historically, palliative care has not been associated with pediatrics. In western societies children are expected to outlive their parents, and we prefer to avoid the sad reality that kids do sometimes die. This social dismay could, in part, explain why the development of palliative care programs for children has lagged behind the adult programs. Not to be confused with Hospice, palliative care is a medical specialty which focuses on symptom management for patients with serious, often life threatening, illnesses. Admission to most Hospice programs requires a six month maximum life expectancy, whereas palliative care may be offered alongside curative treatments to alleviate burdensome side effects and symptoms. In the US, the passage of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 has improved access to end of life care for children because the legislation permits concurrent coverage of medical treatment and Hospice services. Though a significant step forward, gaps in service may remain because children can live longer with serious illnesses and not meet the six month life expectancy criteria required for admission to a Hospice program. A better prognosis ironically leaves them without access to Hospice’s aggressive symptom management and compassionate, holistic care model. Pediatric palliative care services are emerging to meet the needs of children who have life limiting conditions, but are not expected to die in six months or less. Perhaps the most important feature is that palliative service can be provided alongside treatments for serious illnesses with very good prognoses. 

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers graduate online masters in bioethics programs. For more information on the AMBI master of bioethics online program, please visit the AMBI site.

The decision by the Supreme Court affirming the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) caused many who follow health care closely to breathe a sigh of relief. About 32 million more Americans will now have access to health care insurance. One sticking point that worried many of us was the mandate in the bill requiring everyone to purchase health care. It was frustrating this past March to hear in the oral arguments comparing a requirement for citizens to buy broccoli to a requirement to buy health care, as though both are the same type of market commodities. Many on the right, such as Judges Scalia, Thomas and Alito, expressed concerns that the mandate to require everyone to buy health care was a unconstitutional, a violation of the commerce clause; whereas, many others see health care as a basic public good, which unlike broccoli, everyone requires or will require sooner or later. Fortunately, a legal consensus was reached in the ruling, with Chief Justice John Roberts moving over into the majority in the 5-4 vote. In their ruling, the mandate was not viewed as an expansion of the commerce clause, but rather as a tax, which congress has a right to impose. Regardless of the final legal justification of the ruling, many of us are pleased that the most important piece of health care legislation since Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 is now the law of the land.

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers graduate online masters in bioethics programs. For more information on the AMBI master of bioethics online program, please visit the AMBI site.

There appears to be hope for America, as a society, a democracy, and a nation. On Thursday, 6/28/2012, as everyone knows, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) by a 5–4 vote. Much was at stake, not the least of which was the possibility of affordable health care for all Americans. But beyond this extremely important outcome, the very nature of our democracy was in play, as well as the potential success or failure of the American political enterprise.

For example, lack of affordable health care for every American diminishes our national enterprise in all sectors.

There are other important considerations involved in how the attack on the ACA played out, including the continuing degradation of our use of language. For example, the Supreme Court justices are consistently characterized as “conservative” or “liberal”. This is an immediate problem, as their individual identities are subsumed in the right vs. left dichotomy. But the meanings of the epithets are also lost. To be conservative means to uphold tradition. To be liberal means to uphold progress. However when justices hold their ideologies closely, neither tradition nor progress receive a fair evaluation. As Hannah Arendt states in Between Past and Future, “the very quality of an opinion, as of a judgment, depends upon the degree of its impartiality”. Ideology is not impartial, and Supreme Court opinions have long appeared to be based on politics rather than justice. Obviously, such a state of affairs is a major problem for a democratic society.

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers graduate online masters in bioethics programs. For more information on the AMBI master of bioethics online program, please visit the AMBI site.