As Medicaid Costs Soar, States Try A New Approach

KFF Health News, June 15, 2018

Nationwide, a dozen states are experimenting with Medicaid ACOs and 10 more are making plans for them.

This article first appeared June 15, 2018 on Kaiser Health News.

By Phil Galewitz

MINNEAPOLIS — Sandy Dowland has been to the emergency room 10 times in the past year and was hospitalized during four of those visits. She has had a toe amputated and suffers from uncontrolled diabetes, high blood pressure, major depression, obesity and back pain.

But her health is not high on the 41-year-old woman’s priority list.

“I have a lot going on,” said the unemployed mother of five who lives in a homeless shelter. She said it’s a struggle just to get herself and children through each day.

Her health bills are covered by Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for the poor. That’s a relief for her, she said. But state officials say Medicaid is busting Minnesota’s budget, particularly with patients like Dowland and its system of paying hospitals for each admission, ER visit and outpatient test.

To ease that financial strain, Minnesota is at the forefront of a growing number of states testing a Medicaid payment system. It rewards hospitals and physician groups holding down costs by keeping enrollees healthy.

Under this arrangement, those health care providers are asked to do more than just treat medical issues such as diabetes and heart disease. They are called on to address the underlying social issues — such as homelessness, lack of transportation and poor nutrition — that can cause and exacerbate health problems.

It’s why North Memorial arranged for a community health worker and paramedic to meet Dowland on a recent weekday at a day care center for homeless families. They advised her on how to take her insulin, prodded her to use a patch to quit smoking and helped her apply for Social Security disability payments and food stamps.

“This is nice to have someone who I can talk to about everything in my life and give me access to the community resources I need,” said Dowland, who added that she puts off her own health needs in order to care for her children and look for housing and a job. “I appreciate the help because, at the clinic, the doctor doesn’t have time for this.”

North Memorial is among 21 health systems in Minnesota participating in this new model of care, called accountable care organizations. ACOs get to share in money they save Medicaid by keeping spending under a budget and by reaching quality targets, such as averting hospital-acquired infections and controlling patients’ blood pressure and asthma.

The shift toward ACOs is occurring with Medicare and employer-sponsored insurance, too. But for Medicaid programs, it presents unique challenges. Medicaid enrollees, by definition, are low-income. Many have little experience navigating health systems and large numbers are homeless or dealing with mental health problems, conditions that can lead to difficulties in encouraging healthy behaviors.

“The goal [of ACOs] is really exciting to make health systems more responsive to what people need to be healthy,” said Ann Hwang, director of the center for consumer engagement and health innovation at Community Catalyst, a Boston-based consumer advocacy group. “But the jury is still out as to whether they are really moving the needle in addressing social services such as transportation, housing and food insecurity — the things we know affect people’s ability to be healthy.”

Nationwide, a dozen states are experimenting with Medicaid ACOs and 10 more are making plans for them.

About half of Minnesota’s 1 million Medicaid recipients are in ACOs, which officials said saved the state $213 million since 2013. Hospitals and doctors received $70 million of that.

In addition to North Memorial, other participating health systems include the Mayo Clinic and Hennepin Healthcare, the state’s largest safety-net provider based in Minneapolis.

‘Going To Where The Patient Is’

For giant health systems that for years have competed by adding the latest technology or building sleek facilities, the ACOs are a huge shift. In effect, the ACOs push hospitals to address patients’ problems before they end up in the ER or operating rooms.

“We are learning to have to do a better job of going to where the patient is … as we now realize we are responsible for the patient when they are engaged with us and when they are not here,” said Robert Stroebel, who helps leads the ACO effort at Mayo Clinic.

So far, the model isn’t proving to be a panacea.

In six states using ACOs, a March federal study in found, Medicaid enrollees received more primary care services — such as doctor visits — but the program did not reduce hospital visits in most states or lower costs.

“Changing provider and beneficiary behavior may take more time than the few years this report covers,” concluded the study.

Minnesota’s experience demonstrates the challenges of changing to a new Medicaid payment system. In 2016, the latest year for which data are available, only six of the 16 ACOs were eligible to share in cost savings.

But Marie Zimmerman, Minnesota’s Medicaid director, noted the state’s program has seen a 7 percent cut in ER visits and a 14 percent reduction in hospital stays in areas where health providers participate in an ACO.

“Medicaid is 20 percent of Minnesota’s population, and we have to care about getting the best deal and the long-term fiscal ability of the program and not cutting eligibility and provider rates and benefits to show sustainability,” she said.

Struggle To Change Behaviors

The switch to ACOs accelerated efforts by hospitals and physician groups to attack so-called social determinants of health, such as the lack of stable housing and poor nutrition. But providers still struggle to change patients’ behaviors, particularly helping those with addiction and mental health problems, according to interviews with officials at several ACOs.

Doctors, nurses and social workers at Hennepin dealt with that head-on during a recent routine review of their patients. When they came to a 58-year old man suffering from alcoholism, anxiety and heart problems and living in a homeless shelter, they noted how they couldn’t get him into a primary care clinic and saw him only during frequent hospital admissions.

“Best we can hope for him is if we can facilitate a safe ending,” said Dr. Rachel Silva, a Hennepin internist, acknowledging that despite their best intentions, health providers likely would not be able to prevent his early death.

Even with teams of nurses, social workers and community health workers, Hennepin officials say they struggle to keep up with many Medicaid enrollees who have addiction problems, and many patients still go to the ER out of habit or convenience rather than the organization’s primary care clinics, which are as close as across the street.

Yet, there are success stories, too. The Mayo Clinic has started a community health worker program to help at-risk patients connect to social services such as housing and transportation.

Nancy Zein, 47, a Medicaid recipient who uses the Mayo Clinic, said having weekly meetings with community health worker Tara Nelson has been life-changing for her and her mother, who is also on Medicaid.

“She’s been a godsend,” said Zein, who noted how Nelson helped her get Social Security disability payments and her mom find affordable housing for disabled adults, as well as get both enrolled for food stamps.

“It’s made such an impact on our health,” Zein said. “My mom has depression issues, and with Tara helping us with housing, it helped her depression.”

With the opportunity to share in financial savings, North Memorial has hired additional community paramedics to visit high-risk patients. Mayo Clinic has added community health workers to help patients find housing and transportation and nurses to make home visits to patients after leaving the hospital. Hennepin set up special clinics for the most challenging Medicaid patients and sends doctors to care for patients in homeless centers, jails and the county’s mental health center — to reach people who may need help even before they are likely to end up in their ER and on Medicaid.

Nearly 20 percent of Hennepin’s adult Medicaid ACO members are homeless. In the past four years, social workers and other staff have helped more than 500 of their Medicaid patients — including in the ACO — get into public housing.

Cuts For Managed-Care Companies

The ACO model has raised concerns among managed-care companies that Minnesota and other states have used for decades to control Medicaid spending. Those companies get a monthly fee from Medicaid for each enrollee and often require those patients to seek care with doctors and hospitals that have contracts with the managed-care firm. The companies profit if they spend less on care than they receive in the state allotment.

“We are aligned with the goals … to explore innovation and provide better delivery of care,” said Scott Keefer, vice president of Minnesota Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, which has 300,000 Medicaid members. But, he added, much of the ACO savings cited by state officials are dollars taken from managed-care company profits.

His health plan lost more than $200 million from Medicaid operations during the past two years, partly because it had to pay part of its state funding to ACOs.

“We are not magically saving money. … We are moving the financial deck chairs around,” he said.

medicaid patient with caregiver

5 Things To Know About Medicaid Work Requirements

KFF Health News, June 14, 2018

The Trump administration’s decision in January to give states the power to impose work requirements on Medicaid enrollees faces a federal court hearing Friday.

This article first appeared June 14, 2018 on Kaiser Health News.

By Phil Galewitz

The Trump administration’s decision in January to give states the power to impose work requirements on Medicaid enrollees faces a federal court hearing Friday.

The lawsuit before the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., will determine whether tens of thousands of low-income adults in Kentucky will have to find jobs or volunteer in order to retain their health coverage.

But the ruling could have far-reaching implications affecting millions of enrollees nationwide and determining how far the Trump administration can go in changing Medicaid without congressional action.

Kentucky was the first of four states, so far, to win federal approval to advance a work requirement. Indiana, Arkansas and New Hampshire are the others. Each is now in the early stages of implementation.

Arkansas, for instance, in June began having Medicaid enrollees inform the state about their work status. In September, the state could begin disenrolling members who fail to report or meet the work rules.

Seven more states — Arizona, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Ohio, Utah and Wisconsin — have applications pending and several others are poised to join them.

Kentucky’s legal challenge encapsulates a debate about two competing views of the role of Medicaid, the nation’s largest health program that covers nearly 75 million low-income Americans.

The Trump administration and many conservatives see it as a welfare program that should provide only temporary help and should prepare enrollees to gain employment and negotiate private health insurance.

Democrats, advocates for the poor and most legal experts see Medicaid as a health program meant to help the nation’s poorest citizens access health coverage. They say the administration’s approach of requiring enrollees to work to get health coverage is backward because enrollees need health coverage so they are healthy enough to work.

“There is zero evidence to suggest that depriving people of Medicaid will lead to greater levels of employer insurance,” 40 health policy scholars wrote in an amicus brief supporting the lawsuit filed on behalf of several Kentucky Medicaid enrollees.

“The CMS work ‘demonstration’ destroys, not improves, Kentucky’s substantial health care achievements and defeats, rather than promotes, Medicaid’s purpose as a safety net insurer,” according to the brief.

The 2010 Affordable Care Act spurred 33 states to expand Medicaid to nondisabled adults without children. Before that, the program mainly served children, pregnant women and people with disabilities.

That expansion, which provided billions in new federal funding to states, triggered an unprecedented drop in uninsured rates nationwide and tempted some Republican governors to pursue the additional health care dollars. But some of these GOP-controlled states also sought to add the new work requirement, in part to show conservative voters they weren’t simply providing a government handout to poor adults.

States that didn’t expand Medicaid and have some of the strictest eligibility limits in the country —including Kansas and Mississippi — also applied for work requirement waivers.

Here are five things to know as this court case unfolds:

1. Why do the Trump administration and states want to add the new work requirement?

Top Trump officials say the work requirement is meant to help enrollees find jobs. They say people who work or do volunteer service are healthier. Seema Verma, administrator of the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said Medicaid should be a “hand up” not a handout.

According to CMS, while the work requirement is a change in policy, it still fits within the agency’s long-standing missions of promoting health and improving health outcomes.

2. How does the work requirement work?

Kentucky’s program would require nondisabled adults each month to participate in 80 hours of work, job training, education or other qualified “community engagement.”

Those who are exempt include children and former foster care kids; pregnant women; seniors; people who are the primary caretakers for a child or a disabled adult; those who are deemed medically frail or diagnosed with an acute medical condition that would prevent them from working; and full-time students.

Adults in northern Kentucky would have to begin registering their work hours this summer, and the rest of the state would follow by the end of 2018.

State officials acknowledge the new requirement could be complicated for many enrollees. “We need to be careful and thoughtful how we roll out the ‘community engagement,’ recognizing this is a huge change,” said Kristi Putnam, deputy secretary for Kentucky’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services.

States have set up different rules on how many hours a month Medicaid enrollees must work or volunteer and who is exempt.

In Arkansas, everyone enrolled in Medicaid has to document their work hours through an online portal created by the state — with no option to submit information in person, over the phone or by mail. Critics of the work requirement fear that will be a barrier, considering the state has the second-lowest rate of home internet access in the nation.

3. What are the main objections to the work requirement from a legal and practical standpoint?

Critics say the requirement would lead many low-income people to lose their health coverage and, therefore, hinder their ability to get medical care. They note Kentucky’s own projections show that 95,000 Medicaid enrollees would lose coverage within five years.

The work-requirement approvals were based on the Health and Human Services secretary’s authority to test new ways of providing Medicaid coverage. The critics also argue, though, that the Trump administration is overstepping its statutory boundaries because the requirement would reduce eligibility rather than expand it.

Lastly, work requirement opponents note most people on Medicaid already work — or go to school, have a disability or care for relatives.

A June 12 Kaiser Family Foundation study concluded that only 6 percent of able-bodied adults on Medicaid who are targeted by states’ work requirements are not already working and unlikely to qualify for an exemption. In addition, 6 in 10 nondisabled adults on Medicaid work at least part time, although they often aren’t offered health benefits through those jobs or can’t afford them. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

Surveys show that many Medicaid enrollees who don’t work are in job training, go to school or are taking care of a child or an elderly relative, conditions that would make them exempt from the new mandate.

4. When is the court expected to rule, and could this issue go to the Supreme Court?

Both sides expect a quick decision, likely by late June. But an appeal is likely no matter who wins.

If the Trump administration wins, it’s uncertain if plaintiffs will be able to get a stay on the work requirement taking effect while an appeal is in process.

5. While the work requirement is getting most of the attention, what else is at stake in the court case Friday?

The lawsuit filed by advocates on behalf of Medicaid enrollees seeks to overturn the entire Kentucky Medicaid waiver approved by the Trump administration in January.

Kentucky’s waiver also sets precedent because it would become the first state to charge Medicaid premiums of up to 4 percent of an individual’s income. The current limit has been 2 percent. Moreover, Kentucky would become the first state to lock out Medicaid enrollees from coverage for up to six months for failure to timely renew their coverage or failure to alert the state if their income or family circumstances have changed.

That ‘Living Will’ You Signed? At The ER, It Could Be Open To Interpretation

KFF Health News, June 14, 2018

"Don’t resuscitate this patient; he has a living will," the nurse told Dr. Monica Williams-Murphy, handing her a document.

This article first appeared June 14, 2018 on Kaiser Health News.

By Judith Graham

“Don’t resuscitate this patient; he has a living will,” the nurse told Dr. Monica Williams-Murphy, handing her a document.

Williams-Murphy looked at the sheet bearing the signature of the unconscious 78-year-old man, who’d been rushed from a nursing home to the emergency room. “Do everything possible,” it read, with a check approving cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

The nurse’s mistake was based on a misguided belief that living wills automatically include “do not resuscitate” (DNR) orders. Working quickly, Williams-Murphy revived the patient, who had a urinary tract infection and recovered after a few days in the hospital.

Unfortunately, misunderstandings involving documents meant to guide end-of-life decision-making are “surprisingly common,” said Williams-Murphy, medical director of advance-care planning and end-of-life education for Huntsville Hospital Health System in Alabama.

But health systems and state regulators don’t systematically track mix-ups of this kind, and they receive little attention amid the push to encourage older adults to document their end-of-life preferences, experts acknowledge. As a result, information about the potential for patient harm is scarce.

A new report out of Pennsylvania, which has the nation’s most robust system for monitoring patient safety events, treats mix-ups involving end-of-life documents as medical errors — a novel approach. It found that in 2016, Pennsylvania health care facilities reported nearly 100 events relating to patients’ “code status” — their wish to be resuscitated or not, should their hearts stop beating and they stop breathing. In 29 cases, patients were resuscitated against their wishes. In two cases, patients weren’t resuscitated despite making it clear they wanted this to happen.

The rest of the cases were “near misses” — problems caught before they had a chance to cause permanent harm.

Most likely, this is an undercount since reporting was voluntary, said Regina Hoffman, executive director of the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority, adding that she was unaware of similar data from any other state.

Asked to describe a near miss, Hoffman, co-author of the report, said: “Perhaps I’m a patient who’s come to the hospital for elective surgery and I have a DNR (do not resuscitate) order in my [medical] chart. After surgery, I develop a serious infection and a resident [physician] finds my DNR order. He assumes this means I’ve declined all kinds of treatment, until a colleague explains that this isn’t the case.”

The problem, Hoffman explained, is that doctors and nurses receive little, if any, training in understanding and interpreting living wills, DNR orders and Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) forms, either on the job or in medical or nursing school.

Communication breakdowns and a pressure-cooker environment in emergency departments, where life-or-death decisions often have to be made within minutes, also contribute to misunderstandings, other experts said.

Research by Dr. Ferdinando Mirarchi, medical director of the department of emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Hamot in Erie, Pa., suggests that the potential for confusion surrounding end-of-life documents is widespread. In various studies, he has asked medical providers how they would respond to hypothetical situations involving patients with critical and terminal illnesses.

In one study, for instance, he described a 46-year-old woman brought to the ER with a heart attack and suddenly goes into cardiac arrest. Although she’s otherwise healthy, she has a living will refusing all potentially lifesaving medical interventions. What would you do, he asked more than 700 physicians in an internet survey?

Only 43 percent of those doctors said they would intervene to save her life — a troubling figure, Mirarchi said. Since this patient didn’t have a terminal condition, her living will didn’t apply to the situation at hand and every physician should have been willing to offer aggressive treatment, he explained.

In another study, Mirarchi described a 70-year-old man with diabetes and cardiac disease who had a POLST form indicating he didn’t want cardiopulmonary resuscitation but agreeing to a limited set of other medical interventions, including defibrillation (shocking his heart with an electrical current). Yet 75 percent of 223 emergency physicians surveyed said they wouldn’t have pursued defibrillation if the patient had a cardiac arrest.

One issue here: Physicians assumed that defibrillation is part of cardiopulmonary resuscitation. That’s a mistake: They’re separate interventions. Another issue: Physicians are often unsure what patients really want when one part of a POLST form says “do nothing” (declining CPR) and another part says “do something” (permitting other interventions).

Mirarchi’s work involves hypotheticals, not real-life situations. But it highlights significant practical confusion about end-of-life documents, said Dr. Scott Halpern, director of the Palliative and Advanced Illness Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.

Attention to these problems is important, but shouldn’t be overblown, cautioned Dr. Arthur Derse, director of the center for bioethics and medical humanities at the Medical College of Wisconsin. “Are there errors of misunderstanding or miscommunication? Yes. But you’re more likely to have your wishes followed with one of these documents than without one,” he said.

Make sure you have ongoing discussions about your end-of-life preferences with your physician, surrogate decision-maker, if you have one, and family, especially when your health status changes, Derse advised. Without these conversations, documents can be difficult to interpret.

Here are some basics about end-of-life documents:

Living wills. A living will expresses your preferences for end-of-life care but is not a binding medical order. Instead, medical staff will interpret it based on the situation at hand, with input from your family and your surrogate decision-maker.

Living wills become activated only when a person is terminally ill and unconscious or in a permanent vegetative state. A terminal illness is one from which a person is not expected to recover, even with treatment — for instance, advanced metastatic cancer.

Bouts of illness that can be treated — such as an exacerbation of heart failure — are “critical” not “terminal” illness and should not activate a living will. To be activated, one or two physicians have to certify that your living will should go into effect, depending on the state where you live.

DNRs. Do-not-resuscitate orders are binding medical orders, signed by a physician. A DNR order applies specifically to cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and directs medical personnel not to administer chest compressions, usually accompanied by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, if someone stops breathing or their heart stops beating.

The section of a living will specifying that you don’t want CPR is a statement of a preference, not a DNR order.

A DNR order applies only to a person who has gone into cardiac arrest. It does not mean that this person has refused other types of medical assistance, such as mechanical ventilation, defibrillation following CPR, intubation (the insertion of a breathing tube down a patient’s throat), medical tests or intravenous antibiotics, among other measures.

Even so, DNR orders are often wrongly equated with “do not treat” at all, according to a 2011 review in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

POLST forms. A POLST form is a set of medical orders for a patient expected to die within a year, signed by a physician, physician assistant or nurse practitioner.

These forms, which vary by state, are meant to be prepared after a detailed conversation about a patient’s prognosis, goals and values, and the potential benefits and harms of various treatment options.

Problems have emerged with POLST’s increased use. Some nursing homes are asking all patients to sign POLST forms, even those admitted for short-term rehabilitation or whose probable life expectancy exceeds a year, according to a recent article authored by Charlie Sabatino, director of the American Bar Association Commission on Law and Aging. Also, medical providers’ conversations with patients can be cursory, not comprehensive, and forms often aren’t updated when a patient’s medical condition changes, as recommended.

“The POLST form is still relatively new and there’s education that needs to be done,” said Amy Vandenbroucke, executive director of the National POLST Paradigm, an organization that promotes the use of POLST forms across the U.S. In a policy statement issued last year and updated in April, it stated that completion of POLST forms should always be voluntary, made with a patient’s or surrogate decision-maker’s knowledge and consent, and offered only to people not expected to live beyond a year.

Medicare Takes Aim At Boomerang Hospitalizations Of Nursing Home Patients

KFF Health News, June 13, 2018

“Oh my God, we dropped her!” Sandra Snipes said she heard the nursing home aides yell as she fell to the floor. She landed on her right side where her hip had recently been replaced. She cried out in pain. A hospital clinician later discovered her hip was dislocated.

This article first appeared June 13, 2018 on Kaiser Health News.

By Jordan Rau

Deborah Ann Favorite sits in her Los Angeles apartment last month. Favorite’s mother died after a lapse in communication about the need to resume her thyroid medication. (Heidi de Marco/KHN)

“Oh my God, we dropped her!” Sandra Snipes said she heard the nursing home aides yell as she fell to the floor. She landed on her right side where her hip had recently been replaced.

She cried out in pain. A hospital clinician later discovered her hip was dislocated.

That was not the only injury Snipes, then 61, said she suffered in 2011 at Richmond Pines Healthcare & Rehabilitation Center in Hamlet, N.C. Nurses allegedly had been injecting her twice a day with a potent blood thinner despite written instructions to stop.

“She said, ‘I just feel so tired,’” her daughter, Laura Clark, said in an interview. “The nurses were saying she’s depressed and wasn’t doing her exercises. I said no, something is wrong.”

Her children also discovered that Snipes’ surgical wound had become infected and infested with insects. Just 11 days after she arrived at the nursing home to heal from her hip surgery, she was back in the hospital.

The fall and these other alleged lapses in care led Clark and the family to file a lawsuit against the nursing home. Richmond Pines declined to discuss the case beyond saying it disputed the allegations at the time. The home agreed in 2017 to pay Snipes’ family $1.4 million to settle their lawsuit.

While the confluence of complications in Snipes’ case was extreme, return trips from nursing homes to hospitals are far from unusual.

With hospitals pushing patients out the door earlier, nursing homes are deluged with increasingly frail patients. But many homes, with their sometimes-skeletal medical staffing, often fail to handle post-hospital complications — or create new problems by not heeding or receiving accurate hospital and physician instructions.

Patients, caught in the middle, may suffer. One in 5 Medicare patients sent from the hospital to a nursing home boomerang back within 30 days, often for potentially preventable conditions such as dehydration, infections and medication errors, federal records show. Such rehospitalizations occur 27 percent more frequently than for the Medicare population at large.

Nursing homes have been unintentionally rewarded by decades of colliding government payment policies, which gave both hospitals and nursing homes financial incentives for the transfers. That has left the most vulnerable patients often ping-ponging between institutions, wreaking havoc with patients’ care.

“There’s this saying in nursing homes, and it’s really unfortunate: ‘When in doubt, ship them out,’” said David Grabowski, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. “It’s a short-run, cost-minimizing strategy, but it ends up costing the system and the individual a lot more.”

In recent years, the government has begun to tackle the problem. In 2013, Medicare began fining hospitals for high readmission rates in an attempt to curtail premature discharges and to encourage hospitals to refer patients to nursing homes with good track records.

Starting this October, the government will address the other side of the equation, giving nursing homes bonuses or penalties based on their Medicare rehospitalization rates. The goal is to accelerate early signs of progress: The rate of potentially avoidable readmissions dropped to 10.8 percent in 2016 from 12.4 percent in 2011, according to Congress’ Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.

“We’re better, but not well,” Grabowski said. “There’s still a high rate of inappropriate readmissions.”

The revolving door is an unintended byproduct of long-standing payment policies. Medicare pays hospitals a set rate to care for a patient depending on the average time it takes to treat a patient with a given diagnosis. That means that hospitals effectively profit by earlier discharge and lose money by keeping patients longer, even though an elderly patient may require a few extra days.

But nursing homes have to hospitalize patients. For one thing, keeping patients out of hospitals requires frequent examinations and speedy laboratory tests — all of which add costs to nursing homes.

Plus, most nursing home residents are covered by Medicaid, the state-federal program for the poor that is usually the lowest-paying form of insurance. If a nursing home sends a Medicaid resident to the hospital, she usually returns with up to 100 days covered by Medicare, which pays more. On top of all that, in some states, Medicaid pays a “bed-hold” fee when a patient is hospitalized.

None of this is good for the patients. Nursing home residents often return from the hospital more confused or with a new infection, said Dr. David Gifford, a senior vice president of quality and regulatory affairs at the American Health Care Association, a nursing home trade group.

“And they never quite get back to normal,” he said.

‘She Looked Like A Wet Washcloth’

Communication lapses between physicians and nursing homes is one recurring cause of rehospitalizations. Elaine Essa had been taking thyroid medication ever since that gland was removed when she was a teenager. Essa, 82, was living at a nursing home in Lancaster, Calif., in 2013 when a bout of pneumonia sent her to the hospital.

When she returned to the nursing home — now named Wellsprings Post-Acute Care Center — her doctor omitted a crucial instruction from her admission order: to resume the thyroid medication, according to a lawsuit filed by her family. The nursing home telephoned Essa’s doctor to order the medication, but he never called them back, the suit said.

Deborah Ann Favorite holds a photograph of her mother, Elaine Essa. The nursing home and Essa’s primary care practice settled a lawsuit brought by the family. (Heidi de Marco/KHN)

Without the medication, Essa’s appetite diminished, her weight increased and her energy vanished — all indications of a thyroid imbalance, said the family’s attorney, Ben Yeroushalmi, discussing the lawsuit. Her doctors from Garrison Family Medical Group never visited her, sending instead their nurse practitioner. He, like the nursing home employees, did not grasp the cause of her decline, although her thyroid condition was prominently noted in her medical records, the lawsuit said.

Three months after her return from the hospital, “she looked like a wet washcloth. She had no color in her face,” said Donna Jo Duncan, a daughter, in a deposition. Duncan said she demanded the home’s nurses check her mother’s blood pressure. When they did, a supervisor ran over and said, “Call an ambulance right away,” Duncan said in the deposition.

At the hospital, a physician said tests showed “zero” thyroid hormone levels, Deborah Ann Favorite, a daughter, recalled in an interview. She testified in her deposition that the doctor told her, “I can’t believe that this woman is still alive.”

Essa died the next month. The nursing home and the medical practice settled the case for confidential amounts. Cynthia Schein, an attorney for the home, declined to discuss the case beyond saying it was “settled to everyone’s satisfaction.” The suit is still ongoing against one other doctor, who did not respond to requests for comment.

Dangers In Discouraging Hospitalization

Out of the nation’s 15,630 nursing homes, one-fifth send 25 percent or more of their patients back to the hospital, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis of data on Medicare’s Nursing Home Compare website. On the other end of the spectrum, the fifth of homes with the lowest readmission rates return fewer than 17 percent of residents to the hospital.

Many health policy experts say that spread shows how much improvement is possible. But patient advocates fear the campaign against hospitalizing nursing home patients may backfire, especially when Medicare begins linking readmission rates to its payments.

“We’re always worried the bad nursing homes are going to get the message ‘Don’t send anyone to the hospital,’” said Tony Chicotel, a staff attorney at California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, a nonprofit based in San Francisco.

Richmond Pines, where Sandra Snipes stayed, has a higher-than-average rehospitalization rate of 25 percent, according to federal records. But the family’s lawyer, Kyle Nutt, said the lawsuit claimed the nurses initially resisted sending Snipes back, insisting she was “just drowsy.”

After Snipes was rehospitalized, her blood thinner was discontinued, her hip was reset, and she was discharged to a different nursing home, according to the family’s lawsuit. But her hospital trips were not over: When she showed signs of recurrent infection, the second home sent her to yet another hospital, the lawsuit alleged.

Ultimately, the lawsuit claimed that doctors removed her prosthetic hip and more than a liter of infected blood clots and tissues. Nutt said if Richmond Pines’ nurses had “caught the over-administration of the blood thinner right off the bat, we don’t think any of this would have happened.”

Snipes returned home but was never able to walk again, according to the lawsuit. Her husband, William, cared for her until she died in 2015, her daughter, Clark, said.

“She didn’t want to go back into the nursing home,” Clark said. “She was terrified.”

California's Attorney General Vows National Fight To Defend The ACA

KFF Health News, June 11, 2018

The state has been at the forefront in resisting many Trump Administration policies, including on health care and immigration.

This article first appeared June 11, 2018, on Kaiser Health News.

By Pauline Bartolone, Kaiser Health News

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra pledged Friday to redouble his efforts as the Affordable Care Act’s leading defender, saying attacks by the Trump Administration threaten health care for millions of Americans.

Becerra’s pledge came in response to an announcement from the administration Thursday that it would not defend key parts of the Affordable Care Act in court. The administration instead called on federal courts to scuttle the health law’s protection for people with preexisting medical conditions and its requirement that people buy health coverage.

Becerra accused the administration of going “AWOL.” It “has decided to abandon the hundreds of millions of people who depend on” the law, he said in an interview with Kaiser Health News.

“It’s, simply put, an attack on the health care that millions of Americans have come to count on, and California, being the most successful state in implementing the Affordable Care Act, stands to lose perhaps more than anyone else.”

About 1.5 million Californians buy coverage through the state’s ACA exchange, Covered California, and nearly 4 million have joined Medicaid as a result of the program’s expansion under the law.

The state has been at the forefront in resisting many Trump Administration policies, including on health care and immigration.

“This is not a new experience for us under this new Trump era of having to defend Californians,” Becerra said. In the case of health care, “fortunately we have 16 other [Democratic attorneys general] who are prepared to do it with us. ”

At issue is a lawsuit filed by 20 Republican state attorneys general on Feb. 26, which charged that Congress’ changes to the law in last year’s tax bill rendered the entire ACA unconstitutional. In the tax law, Congress repealed the penalty for people who fail to have health insurance starting in 2019.

Becerra is leading an effort by Democratic attorney generals from others states and the District of Columbia to defend the ACA against that lawsuit. In May, the court allowed them to “intervene” in the case.

The Trump administration filed a brief in the case on Thursday, arguing that without the tax to encourage healthy people to sign up, the parts of the law guaranteeing coverage to people with previous health conditions — without charging them higher rates — should be struck down as well.

In a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan explaining the administration’s decision, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions cited the Justice Department’s “longstanding tradition” of defending the constitutionality of federal laws “if reasonable arguments can be made in their defense.”

But in this case, he wrote, he could not find those arguments to defend the constitutionality of the provisions and “concluded that this is a rare case where the proper course is to forgo defense.”

The administration called on the court to declare the provisions that guarantee coverage to be invalid beginning on January 1, 2019, when the mandate penalty goes away.

Because the lawsuit could easily go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, a process that could take years, the protections for people with preexisting conditions are likely to stay in place during that period.

Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, the Democratic front-runner in the race for California’s next governor, breathed the same fire as Becerra against the federal government on Friday.

“Trump and his cronies can’t unilaterally roll back preexisting protections for millions of Californians,” Newsom said. “California will fight like hell to protect our families and their healthcare.”

A spokesman for his opponent in the race, Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox, declined to comment.

If the court ultimately declared the provisions targeted by the Trump Administration unconstitutional, California would be temporarily cushioned from the effects because there are laws already on the books should the ACA – or its provisions – go away.

For instance, existing rules would protect people with pre-existing conditions for twelve months if the ACA were struck down.

During that time, “policymakers in California would look really hard at being able to try to do something so we don’t lose those gains,” said Deborah Kelch, director of the Insure the Uninsured Project in Sacramento.

“It’s hard to look at California and imagine just folding it up and starting over.”

Some critics of the administration’s decision said California should go forward with enacting its own mandate for individual coverage, as a few other states have done. No one has pushed that issue forward in the Legislature.

Since he took office in January 2017, Becerra has emerged as a top opponent of the Trump administration, filing more than 30 lawsuits on health care and other issues.

In California’s primary election Tuesday, Becerra, a Democrat, dominated the race with 45 percent of the vote. He will face retired judge Steven Bailey, a Republican, in the November general election.

Bailey’s spokesman Corey Uhden said Friday that he wouldn’t comment on the constitutionality of the ACA provisions. However, he said, Bailey opposes the individual mandate and wants less government regulation of health insurance.

Alex Leeds Matthews contributed to this report.

This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, which publishes California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

HHS To Allow Insurers’ Workaround On 2019 Prices

KFF Health News, June 7, 2018

Federal officials will not block insurance companies from again using a workaround to cushion a steep rise in health premiums caused by President Donald Trump’s cancellation of a program established under the Affordable Care Act, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced Wednesday.

This article first appeared June 07, 2018 on Kaiser Health News.

By Julie Rovner

Federal officials will not block insurance companies from again using a workaround to cushion a steep rise in health premiums caused by President Donald Trump’s cancellation of a program established under the Affordable Care Act, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced Wednesday.

The technique — called “silver loading” because it pushed price increases onto the silver-level plans in the ACA marketplaces — was used by many states for 2018 policies. But federal officials had hinted they might bar the practice next year.

At a hearing Wednesday before the House Education and Workforce Committee, Azar said stopping this practice “would require regulations, which simply couldn’t be done in time for the 2019 plan period.”

States moved to silver loading after Trump in October cut off federal reimbursement for so-called cost-sharing reduction subsidies that the ACA guaranteed to insurance companies. Those payments offset the cost of discounts that insurers are required by the law to provide to some low-income people to help cover their deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs.

States scrambled to let insurers raise rates so they would stay in the market. And many let them use this technique to recoup the lost funding by adding to the premium costs of midlevel silver plans in the health exchanges.

Because the formula for federal premium subsidies offered to people who purchase through the marketplaces is based on the prices of those silver plans, as those premiums rose so did the subsidies to help people afford them. That meant the federal government ended up paying much of the increase in prices.

At the committee hearing Wednesday, under questioning from Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.), Azar declined to say if the department was considering a future ban.

“It’s not an easy question,” Azar said.

The fact that the federal government ended up effectively making the payments aggravated many Republicans, and there have been rumors over the past several months that HHS might require the premium increases to be applied across all plans, boosting costs for all buyers in the individual market.

Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, told reporters in April that the department was examining the possibility.

Apparently that will not happen, at least not for plan year 2019.

Californians Face ‘Real Choice’ On Health Care In November

KFF Health News, June 7, 2018

In the state that’s leading the opposition to many of President Donald Trump’s health policies, California voters will face a stark choice on the November ballot: keep up the resistance or fall in line.

This article first appeared June 07, 2018 on Kaiser Health News.

By Chad Terhune and Pauline Bartolone and Ana B. Ibarra and Alex Leeds Matthews

In the state that’s leading the opposition to many of President Donald Trump’s health policies, California voters will face a stark choice on the November ballot: keep up the resistance or fall in line.

The results of Tuesday’s primary have set up general-election contests between candidates — for governor, attorney general, insurance commissioner and some congressional seats — with sharply differing views on government’s role in health care.

The outcome in the Golden State could help shape the fate of the Affordable Care Act and influence whether Republicans in Washington take another shot at dismantling the landmark law.

“For the Affordable Care Act, California is a bellwether state,” said David Blumenthal, president of the Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based health policy research organization. If California voters don’t elect more Democrats to Congress, it will be harder for the party to gain legislative control and “the Affordable Care Act will continue, as it has been, to be under attack from an empowered Republican majority,” he said.

Despite being targeted for voting last year to repeal the ACA and cut Medicaid funding, several Republican incumbents performed well at the polls in California.

“California was supposed to lead the blue wave, but that’s not what we saw” in the primary, said Ivy Cargile, an assistant professor of political science at California State University-Bakersfield.

In the California governor’s race, Democratic front-runner Gavin Newsom quickly sought to cast the November contest as a referendum on Trump and his effort to undo much of President Barack Obama’s legacy, particularly on health care.

A series of Trump tweets endorsing Republican candidate John Cox, a multimillionaire real estate investor, helped propel the political outsider to the general election.

“It looks like voters will have a real choice — between a governor who will stand up to Donald Trump and a foot soldier in his war on California,” Newsom said Tuesday night to supporters in San Francisco.

California has embraced the federal health law enthusiastically and stands to lose more than any other state if the ACA is gutted. About 1.5 million Californians buy coverage through the state’s Obamacare exchange, Covered California, and nearly 4 million have joined Medicaid as a result of the program’s expansion under the law.

Newsom, a former San Francisco mayor and the current lieutenant governor, has pledged to defend the coverage gains made under the ACA. He has vowed to go even further by pursuing a state-run, single-payer system for all Californians.

Newsom won the primary with 33 percent of the vote and Cox placed second with 26 percent. Some mail-in votes and provisional ballots continue to be counted.

Cox has slammed Newsom and fellow Democrats for imposing government controls on health care that he says make coverage too expensive for families. He said he isn’t interested in defending the Affordable Care Act and that, if the law is scrapped, millions of Californians can go into high-risk insurance pools — an idea that predates the health law.

Andrew Busch, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College, said the political divide over health care has grown even wider this year as single-payer has gained support from mainstream Democrats in California.

“I’d say the Republican candidates are pretty much where the Republicans have been, but the Democratic candidates have shifted to the left, so the choice is starker than it has been,” Busch said.

Heading into Tuesday’s primary, it wasn’t clear that California voters would face such drastically different choices on the November ballot. Under the state’s primary system, the top two vote-getters, regardless of party affiliation, advance to the gener<aal election. That left many experts predicting single-party matchups across the state.

But that scenario also didn’t pan out in the race for attorney general, a position that has played a key role in California’s resistance politics since Trump was elected. Democratic incumbent Xavier Becerra, who has become a national leader against Trump’s agenda, will face off against Republican Steven Bailey in the fall.

Becerra has filed more than 30 lawsuits on health care and other issues since taking office in January 2017.

Bailey, a criminal attorney and former judge, has blamed the Affordable Care Act for driving up health care costs, and he favors less industry regulation. He also has criticized Becerra for fixating too much on Trump.

“Just because a tweet comes out of Washington, it doesn’t require a lawsuit to be filed the next day,” Bailey said.

Health care could also play a role in several of California’s congressional races. Democrats are trying to win back control of the House, in part to better block Republican efforts to roll back the ACA.

“The actions of the Trump administration, the elimination of the individual mandate and its impact on markets will become more of an issue,” said Chris Jennings, a former health care adviser in the Obama administration. “The conservative caucus has been forcefully advocating for another aggressive return to the repeal effort.”

One of the most-watched races nationally is in a district of California’s San Joaquin Valley where Republican incumbent Jeff Denham drew several Democratic opponents after voting to repeal the health law last year — as did all of California’s Republican House members.

Denham led a crowded primary field with 38 percent of the vote Tuesday. Democrat Josh Harder is holding on to second place with nearly 16 percent, just ahead of a Republican challenger. The results are pending until late-arriving ballots are counted.

Harder said the Republicans’ repeal-and-replace effort on health care was a major reason he decided to run. He made it a centerpiece of his campaign and ran ads criticizing Denham for voting to take away coverage from thousands of his constituents. About 40 percent of residents in this Modesto-area district are enrolled in Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor and disabled.

Denham has defended his repeal vote, saying that patients’ access to doctors has only gotten worse since coverage was expanded under the ACA. In a statement last year, Denham said, “coverage does not necessarily equal care and families must resort to overflowing emergency rooms to be seen.”

But Dan Schnur, a Republican political strategist who teaches at the University of Southern California and the University of California-Berkeley, said health care has gone from a negative to a positive for Democratic candidates, who have spent the past several elections defending Obamacare.

“As a result, they’re doing everything they can to emphasize the health care debate rather than run away from it,” he said.

Price Check On Drug Ads: Would Revealing Costs Help Patients Control Spending?

KFF Health News, June 6, 2018

As part of his plan to tamp down drug pricing, President Donald Trump wants pharmaceutical companies to provide cost information in drug ads — just like side effects.

This article first appeared June 06, 2018 on Kaiser Health News.

By Julie Appleby and Sydney Lupkin

President Donald Trump wants to control spending on drugs. One of his big ideas: include prices in advertisements, just like warnings about side effects.

That’s not as simple as it sounds.

Apart from legal questions about whether the Food and Drug Administration has the authority to require pricing in ads, other uncertainties arise.

For example, what is the right number to use?

There is a dizzying array of ways to look at drug prices, including average wholesale and average sales prices.

And dosage factors in. Would the price be pegged to a monthly cost? A per-dose cost? Or, even more inscrutable, a “unit cost,” which may not equal a single dose?

A final complication: The prices likely would not be what most consumers actually pay.

Most patients with insurance typically shell out either a flat-dollar copayment or a percentage of the drug’s cost. Some patients get coupons that can reduce their cost to zero.

An FDA working group is currently studying these issues.

Still, we wondered how drug prices pinned to ads might look, hypothetically.

We picked the top 10 most-advertised drugs by spending, courtesy of a list from Kantar Media, which advises clients on advertising and tracks spending, and showed how much each drug company spent last year on those ads. Another consulting group, Connecture, then figured the typical monthly costs, based on average wholesale prices. Those costs are based on typical dosages.

Here’s what we found:

 

Drug: Humira

Company: AbbVie

Monthly cost: $5,846.44

Typical regimen: 40 mg every other week by injection

2017 advertising: $429 million

Treats: Rheumatoid arthritis, chronic plaque psoriasis, Crohn’s disease

 
 

Drug: Lyrica

Company: Pfizer

Monthly cost: $1,070.15

Typical regimen: 300 mg per day in pill form

2017 advertising: $350 million

Treats: Fibromyalgia, diabetic nerve pain, spinal cord injury nerve pain and pain after shingles

 
 

Drug: Xeljanz

Company: Pfizer

Monthly cost: $4,914.77

Typical regimen: 5 mg twice daily in pill form

2017 advertising: $273 million

Treats: Rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis

 
 

Drug: Eliquis

Company: Bristol-Myers Squibb

Monthly cost: $502.84

Typical regimen: 5 mg twice daily in pill form

2017 advertising: $227 million

Treats: Prevention of stroke and blood clots

 
 

Drug: Keytruda

Company: Merck

Monthly cost: $8,369.36

Typical regimen: 200 mg every three weeks by infusion

2017 advertising: $209 million

Treats: Melanoma, non-small cell lung cancer and other cancers

 
 

Drug: Taltz

Company: Eli Lilly

Monthly cost: $6,193.92

Typical regimen: 80 mg every four weeks by injection

2017 advertising: $207 million

Treats: Plaque psoriasis, active psoriatic arthritis

 
 

Drug: Chantix

Company: Pfizer

Monthly cost: $515.89

Typical regimen: 1 mg twice daily in pill form

2017 advertising: $207 million

Treats: Aid in smoking cessation

 
 

Drug: Trulicity

Company: Eli Lilly

Monthly cost: $876.24

Typical regimen: 0.75 mg once weekly by injection

2017 advertising: $195 million

Treats: Type 2 diabetes

 
 

Drug: Cosentyx

Company: Novartis

Monthly cost: $11,309.72

Typical regimen: 300 mg every four weeks by injection

2017 advertising: $174 million

Treats: Plaque psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis

 
 

Drug: Entresto

Company: Novartis

Monthly cost: $555.91

Typical regimen: 97 mg/103 mg twice daily in pill form

2017 advertising: $159 million

Treats: Chronic heart failure

 
Sources: Kantar Media, Connecture

Graphic presentation by producer Lydia Zuraw.

A Hospital ER Charges An ‘After-Hours’ Fee. Who Has To Pay It?

KFF Health News, June 5, 2018

This week, Michelle Andrews of Kaiser Health News responded to readers who were unhappy with their health plan’s decision not to pay an emergency department surcharge for after-hours care and concerned about difficulties getting Medicare to cover claims unrelated to a workers’ compensation injury.

This article first appeared June 05, 2018 on Kaiser Health News.

By Michelle Andrews

This week, I responded to readers who were unhappy with their health plan’s decision not to pay an emergency department surcharge for after-hours care and concerned about difficulties getting Medicare to cover claims unrelated to a workers’ compensation injury. Another reader asked about a recently announced hardship exemption from the requirement to have health insurance.

Q: I visited a local emergency room one night after I had a severe allergic reaction that caused intense itching, hives, swelling and blistering. Now I received an “explanation of benefits” notice from my insurer that I will be billed by the in-network hospital for “after-hours” service. My insurer does not cover that charge. I am so enraged. Is there anything I can do to get the hospital to remove the charge?

Tacking on an after-hours surcharge to an emergency department bill strikes some consumers as unfair, since the facilities are open 24 hours a day.

The practice is “pretty rare” but defensible, said Dr. Paul Kivela, an emergency physician in Napa, Calif., who is president of the American College of Emergency Physicians. He noted that the cost to staff an emergency department at night is higher than by day. The surcharge is typically modest, often less than $100, experts say.

But that’s neither here nor there. The extra charge should have been built into the overall rate, said Betsy Imholz, special projects director for Consumers Union, an advocacy group. “It’s infuriating,” she said. “I don’t blame [the patient] for being annoyed.”

Just because your health plan is balking now at paying the surcharge, that may not be the final word. Hospitals and insurers frequently sort out these surcharges between themselves, without holding patients responsible, said Richard Gundling, a senior vice president at the Healthcare Financial Management Association, an industry group.

“If it’s an in-network provider, an insurer is generally responsible for addressing the billing of that code under its negotiated contract with the providers,” Gundling said.

Medicare beneficiaries are not responsible for paying the surcharge.

If the hospital pursues the patient to pay the charge, Imholz recommended that consumers file an appeal with their health plan, noting that appeals on many issues are frequently successful.

Q: I fell in 2015 and my injuries are being covered by the workers’ compensation program. It pays only the claims that are related to my back and neck injuries. But Medicare has been refusing all the claims it receives, including a hospital stay for an acute asthma attack as well as routine visits to my primary care physician. The program states that these claims are the responsibility of workers’ comp. What can I do?

Your workers’ compensation insurer is the “primary payer” for medical bills that are related to your work-related injury. Medicare is responsible for your other medical care.

Without more information, it’s impossible to know exactly why Medicare is denying your claims for medical care that’s not related to your work injury.

However, the problem may be rooted in the mandatory data-reporting requirements that the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services put in place about a decade ago, said Darrell Brown, an executive vice president and chief claims officer at Sedgwick Claims Management Services.

Under the federal rules, insurers and plan administrators have to report claims data about Medicare beneficiaries who are also covered by a group health plan or who receive payments under workers’ compensation, among other things. The aim is to ensure that the Medicare program isn’t acting as a primary payer on some claims when another health plan or program should be doing so.

“My guess is that there’s something that went wrong with that reporting,” Brown said. “There’s so much data that they’re getting, and there’s so much room for error as well.”

Start by contacting the number or person on the notice you received from the Medicare program denying your claim, Brown said. You may also have to contact the workers’ compensation carrier. But your first step should be to find out why the Medicare program mistakenly believes that your asthma hospitalization and other care is related to your workers’ comp injury.

Q: Why is there a new exemption from the penalty for not having health insurance if you live in a bare county with no marketplace insurers? There aren’t any of those and next year there’s no penalty, so what’s the point?

As you note, starting next year, people will no longer owe a penalty for not meeting the Affordable Care Act’s requirement of having health insurance.

People will, however, be able to apply to the marketplace for a hardship exemption if they live somewhere where there are no marketplace insurers. That may give them another option for coverage.

People who qualify for a hardship or affordability exemption can receive an “exemption certificate number,” often referred to as an ECN, which will allow them to buy a catastrophic plan that meets health law standards and is typically available only to people under age 30, said Tara Straw, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

These ACA-compliant plans may be purchased off the exchange, even if no insurers are selling marketplace plans in a particular area.

Catastrophic plans cover the essential health benefits. They often have lower premiums than plans on the health law’s marketplace, but their deductibles are comparatively very high and people can’t receive premium tax credits to pay for them. The high out-of-pocket costs may explain why they haven’t been popular. Fewer than 1 percent of marketplace enrollees picked one in 2018.

Health Care Simmers On Back Burner In California Heartland’s Hot House Races

KFF Health News, June 5, 2018

About a dozen mostly retired locals took over a corner of a busy intersection on a recent Saturday afternoon in this San Joaquin Valley city, toting signs that read “Dump Denham 2018.

This article first appeared June 04, 2018 on Kaiser Health News.

By Ana B. Ibarra

MODESTO, Calif. — About a dozen mostly retired locals took over a corner of a busy intersection on a recent Saturday afternoon in this San Joaquin Valley city, toting signs that read “Dump Denham 2018.”

Several cars zooming by honked in support. Buda Kajer-Crain, 69, paced up and down the sidewalk waving a large American flag. She said she wanted U.S. Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Turlock) gone, in part because of his vote one year ago to dismantle the Affordable Care Act.

“We had a big formal town hall meeting where he said he would not support taking away the ACA,” said the retired clinical-lab scientist. “He lied.”

Kajer-Crain, a Democrat, said Denham’s vote to take apart the national health law and curtail the Medicaid program betrayed his constituents, who rely heavily on both. Other activists and pundits have in the past year identified assaults on the ACA as a potentially pivotal issue in the 2018 midterm elections in California’s traditionally red — but increasingly purple and blue — heartland.

On the cusp of Tuesday’s primaries, however, it is far from clear that health care is the wedge issue in California congressional races that pundits once envisioned. After all the rallies and protests in San Joaquin Valley districts and around the state last year, the urgency on health care seems to have waned — at least for now.

All four Republican House members in the Valley voted, along with the rest of California’s Republican delegation, to dismantle and replace the Affordable Care Act last year. But at this point, three of the four appear likely to win re-election.

Denham’s seat is considered the most vulnerable, according to several political forecasters. Even if it flips, however, it’s not certain health care will be the defining issue. Denham faces five Democratic opponents and most list health care as a priority. At least as important, however, is the district’s general political bent — it now has a slight Democratic majority and voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Meanwhile, the seat of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) is considered safe, and the districts of U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Visalia) and U.S. Rep David Valadao (R-Hanford) could be competitive but are likely to remain red, forecasters said.

Polls on congressional candidates are hard to come by until the general election, but the vulnerability of House seats can be roughly measured by the general political environment, campaign financing and the apparent strength of challengers, experts say.

Nationally, health care is one of the top issues for Democrats in the midterms but ranks further down for Republicans, behind the economy, immigration and gun policy, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll. In general, the election centers on attitudes toward President Donald Trump, the poll found. (Kaiser Health News, which produces California Healthline, is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

“Most voters may not necessarily be concerned about who voted for the [Republican] health care bill,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a political forecasting site run by the University of Virginia Center for Politics. They’re just voting the party, he said.

The Republican bill that would have replaced key parts of Obamacare — known as the American Health Care Act — passed the House last May and failed by one vote in the Senate. It would have widely reduced the tax credits that help many people buy insurance from ACA marketplaces, eliminated the tax penalty for people who don’t have insurance, and phased out the Medicaid expansion that has covered 15 million people. Congress ultimately repealed the tax penalty for being uninsured, effective as of 2019.

At the time, some advocates and residents of the San Joaquin Valley said the “yes” votes of Republican House members undermined their own constituents. They noted that the region has the some of the biggest gaps in access to health care in the state, if not the country, and that it is plagued with dirty air and high rates of chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes.

The UC Berkeley Labor Center estimated in 2017 that if the ACA were repealed, more than 465,000 people in the San Joaquin Valley would lose their Medi-Cal coverage in 2027 and the local health care system would lose more than $3 billion in annual Medi-Cal funding.

It’s not entirely clear why health care seems to have taken a back seat in the run-up to the primaries. Some experts predict it will probably play a bigger role in the general election in November; others say it’s no longer the hot topic it was, and voters have moved on to other issues.

As is often the case, poor people who face obstacles to care may be less inclined to go to the polls or unable to vote because they are in the country illegally. And though the region increasingly is voting Democratic, it still has many true-red voters who oppose the ACA and are fiercely loyal to their incumbent Congress members.

Stephen Tootle, a Republican in Nunes’ district and a history professor at the College of the Sequoias in Visalia, said Obamacare hasn’t really helped the people in his district, who still struggle with poor access to providers and hospital closures. “It’s a joke,” he said.

He supports Nunes because he says the congressman is a champion for water allocation. For Tootle, it’s the No. 1 issue “that really affects how people live here.”

Stephen Routh, a political science professor at California State University-Stanislaus, said he expects health care to play a bigger role in the general election, when incumbent Republicans will have only one challenger.

On Nov. 6, the races in each district will be between the two top vote-getters from Tuesday’s primary contests. As that date approaches, Routh said, Democrats are “going to mention Obamacare repeal endlessly. That’s going to be a major hammering point.”

But Vito Chiesa, a Republican and a member of the Stanislaus County Board of Supervisors, said voters are not as concerned about health care, because it “seems people believe the ACA is here to stay in some form.

”Immigration … is the hotter issue right now. That’s the soup du jour,” he said.

Mary Borbon, 36, who lives in Lemoore, a town of about 26,000 people in Valadao’s district, said she cares about health care, especially its affordability. She’s been on and off Medi-Cal as her income from seasonal jobs fluctuates. But, like Chiesa, she said that’s not all she or other voters are thinking about. “Right now I’d say the economy and immigration are big,” she said.

Valadao is likely to win re-election, according to Sabato’s Crystal Ball, even though registered Democrats significantly outnumber Republicans in his district and more than half of his constituents are on Medi-Cal. Many residents remain loyal to Valadao, a local dairy farmer and businessman who has represented the district since 2013. Some say he’s likable and relatable. Others don’t think the Democrats have a strong enough candidate to represent their district, which includes all of Kings County and parts of Fresno, Kern and Tulare counties.

If “the blue wave” can flip any House seat in the San Joaquin Valley, bets are on Denham’s district, experts say. Some longtime voters like Kajer-Crain, the street protester, think it can be done.

Denham is not only facing another Republican — Ted Howze, a veterinarian and former council member in the city of Turlock. He is also up against Democrat Sue Zwhalen, who has 40 years of experience as an emergency room nurse and says she has received strong support from her Republican friends and neighbors.

Political newcomer Josh Harder, also a Democratic candidate focusing on health care, has already released advertisements directly attacking Denham’s vote to roll back the ACA.

“Health care,” he said during a canvassing event in Turlock, “is the reason I’m running for Congress.”

Tuesday’s election could be an important gauge of whether that’s a winning strategy.

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