• direct clinical services
• activities that improve overall health care quality
• administrative costs (excluding State taxes)

These reports will be posted on the internet by the Dept of Health and Human Services

b) Each year, health plans must give a rebate to their enrollees if they spend more than 20% of their premiums on administrative costs, as described in the report.

Today I attended the Million Med March held in cities across the US and here in Chicago.  It was sponsored by Docs 4 Patient Care, a grassroots organization of physicians, healthcare professionals, and concerned citizens who want to reform health care while preserving the integrity of the patient-physician relationships we enjoy in this country.  I didn’t know much about the group before today.  There weren’t exactly 1 million doctors at Chicago’s rally today- maybe 200-300.  Even so, there were some important messages.  Here is a summary of what was said, and my reflections on the event.

2. Doctors are bad protestors/activists.
Today’s rally lacked the energy that I have experienced at other public events.  It was not because the doctors present do not believe strongly in sensible health care reform.  I think most physicians, in an effort to provide their patients with the best, evidence-based medical care, get used to just falling in line with the latest recommendations and “standard of care.”  Protests do not come naturally.  That, combined with the even-tempered personalities often found in physicians, makes us bad activists.  We are not a “rah-rah” crowd.

Most of the doctors I talk to are not in favor of the current health care bill.  Most of them also feel there is not much they can do to impact the health care reform efforts in Congress.  Part of that is due to the fact that very few doctors were actually invited to participate in the process.  The American Medical Association (AMA) supports the bill, but it represents less than 30% of doctors.  (Many AMA members are newly graduated physicians who have not taken time to cancel the free membership they received as a medical student.)  Another reason doctors don’t feel we can have an impact is that, for whatever reason, we tend not to rally together.  Perhaps it is the self-sufficiency we learned in medical school and residency training.  It may be that we are too busy to ask each other to participate in an event seen as an “extra” thing.  The laws prohibiting physicians from forming a union also prevent us from uniting around a cause.  I am proud of those physicians who attended today.  As one physician and speaker put it, “I wasn’t going to come today because I have a busy practice, a family, and few minutes to spare, but then I realized, that is why I needed to come today, because health care reform is going to affect all of those things.”

3. The introduction of a public option will lead to government-run health care.
Even if this is not the stated intention, offering a government-subsidized health insurance plan to all will eventually destroy private health insurance as we know it.  The argument for the “public option” says that health insurance companies need a competitor to “keep them honest” and the government needs to provide this competition to prevent abuse.  Sounds great, but since when did the US government compete with its own people?  One enters a competition for one reason: to win.  That means that the clandestine goal of the government-run plan is to make private insurance companies into losers.  Since a government plan does not have to remain profitable to stay in existence, it will play by different rules.  Since its inception in the 1960′s, Medicare has operated at a $37 trillion loss, yet it is bigger than ever.  No private company can “compete” against a beauracracy that bulletproof.

4. The “opt-out” provision in the Senate bill is a sham.
To create the impression that the public option is not being forced upon us, the Senate included language that will allow individual states to opt out of offering the public option.  What is not publicized is the fact that states who opt out will still pay the same taxes as states who opt in.  They will incur the same costs but no benefits.  It’s doubtful that any states will opt out of the plan, since they cannot opt out of the cost.

5. Estimates of the bill’s costs are grossly underestimated.
You have probably seen the CBO estimates of a $849 billion price tag for the current health reform bill.  The CBO numbers are based on a ten-year projection.  Since the changes to the health care system are slated to take place in 2013, the estimates only include 6-7 years of costs, but they include 10 years of increased taxes that will start immediately.  In other words, three of those ten years are income-only years for the program, with no costs.  Let’s say you move into a house in June and paying six months of mortgage payments of $1000 each.  Would you then assume that, since you paid $6000 for your mortgage this year, that you would pay $6000 again next year, and your payments would only be $500/month?  Of course not, because you failed to take the entire year into account, but that is essentially the way the CBO is projecting the costs of this health care plan.

Plenty more was talked about today, and I encourage you to read as much as you can and get as involved as you can.  To learn more about today’s event, visit Docs 4 Patient Care.

“Right now doctors a lot of times are forced to make decisions based on the fee payment schedule that’s out there. So if they’re looking — and you come in and you’ve got a bad sore throat, or your child has a bad sore throat or has repeated sore throats, the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, you know what, I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out….Now that may be the right thing to do, but I’d rather have that doctor making those decisions just based on whether you really need your kid’s tonsils out or whether it might make more sense just to change — maybe they have allergies, maybe they have something else that would make a difference.”

In my experience, this dynamic rarely happens in primary care. Sure, if you are seeing a specialist whose earnings are based on performing one or two highly specialized procedures, he or she is more likely to recommend that you have that procedure. In the vast majority of cases, however, doctors are not calculating what decision is going to earn them the most money. For one thing, repayment schedules are so complicated these days, that it is difficult for doctors and medical office managers to know if and when they will be reimbursed at all for a day’s work. Many insurance companies’ payment schedules, including Medicare and Medicaid, are designed to pay only a percentage of what the doctor actually bills, so even if a doctor wanted to figure out how much he or she would make based on a specific decision, it would be nearly impossible to do so in today’s system. (If you’ve ever seen a hospital bill that your insurance company paid, and you were shocked at the numbers, you should know that the hospital and doctor probably only received a percentage of what was actually billed, and they were forced to mark up the fees in the hopes that what they are actually paid would at least cover their costs for the hospitalization or procedure).

For President Obama to imply that doctors are performing unnecessary surgeries on children for their own financial gain is an insult to the medical profession. The very procedure that he referenced disproves his own theory. Tonsillectomies have dramatically decreased over the past 2 decades because doctors recognized that removing a child’s tonsils did not prevent infections like it was once thought. Therefore, ENT specialists and pediatricians stopped recommending tonsillectomy as often because it became clear that the risk of the surgery, though small, outweighed the potential benefit in most cases. Financial factors played no role in this trend. Practice guidelines published by doctor’s associations are always rooted in data about patient outcomes. If a procedure or treatment produces good outcomes, it is recommended. If it does little to help patients or is too risky, it is not recommended. The doctors I know and work with attempt to follow these guidelines as closely as possible, whether or not they will benefit financially. Practicing medicine is a lot different from practicing law, where lawyers can bill an hourly rate for just about everything they do. I hope President Obama is not relying on his background in law as he conjectures about what doctors think when they look in your throat. Your doctor is almost certainly thinking about what decision will help you the most, and not what will help his or her pocketbook.