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All items for March, 2016

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More ICD-10 Codes

Stanley Feld M.D., FACP, MACE

Everything the Obama administration’s healthcare administrators do, to increase their control over the healthcare system backfires.

The Obama administration has not admitted that the new coding system (ICD-10) has not worked out as well as it should have.

The fact that CMS has to add 5,500 codes in 2017 suggests that somehow the new system is being gamed.

The increase in codes from16,000 codes (in ICD-9) to 68,000 codes (in ICD-10) is a way to force providers to more fully document their diagnosis and treatment.

It is described as a way to improve patient care. I suspect it will be used as a weapon to decrease reimbursement.

The best way to improve patient care and decrease healthcare cost is to let the patients be responsible for their health and healthcare dollars.

A way needs to be developed to measure medical out as it relates to medical costs. These outcomes must be provided to patients.

The more codes there are the more the coding system can be gamed and abused by hospitals, physicians and other providers.

At this point the government is paying many other providers. These providers can also game the system. The increase in codes can result in a further increase in costs to the healthcare system.

Never the less the Obama administration seems to spin everything that backfires on it into a positive. The people are not accepting the spin anymore.

One example of the spin is the information paper CMS published about ICM-10.

One section is entitled;

How will my practice benefit from ICD-10?

ICD-10 provides an enhanced platform for physician practice. As of October 1, 2015, the ICD-10 coding classification became the new baseline for clinical data, clinical documentation, claims processing, and public health reporting.

The statement means physicians have to provide more documentation in order for the government and the healthcare insurance industry to have more control over physicians’ practices.

From proper observation and documentation to improved clinical documentation, progress notes, operative reports, and histories, the benefits of ICD-10 begin with enhanced clinical documentation enabling physicians to better capture patient visit details and lead to better care coordination and health outcomes.

It does not enable physicians to better capture patient visit details and lead to better care coordination and health outcome.

It enables government and the healthcare insurance industry to capture patient visit details. It does not necessarily lead to better care coordination and health outcomes.

Ultimately, better data paves the way for enhanced quality and greater effectiveness of patient care and safety. The benefits of ICD-10 will impact everything from patient care to each practice’s bottom line.

Better data might not lead to enhanced quality care or lead to better care coordination and health outcome. It can lead to more paperwork and more false data.

It also could conclude that the best physicians are the best documenters. It will not tell us which physicians have the best clinical judgment.

Reasons to prepare for ICD-10 can be broken down into four categories:

Clinical

  • Informs better clinical decisions as better data is documented, collected, and evaluated
  • Provides new insights into patients and clinical care due to greater specificity, laterality, and more detailed documentation of patient diseases
  • Enables patient segmentation to improve care for higher acuity patients
  • Improves design of protocols and clinical pathways for various health conditions
  • Improves tracking of illnesses and severity
  • Improves public health reporting and helps to track and evaluate the risk of adverse public health events
  • Drives greater opportunity for research, clinical trials, and epidemiological studies.
  • A lot of this is just word salad.

Operational

  • Enhances the definition of patient conditions, providing improved matching of professional resources and care teams and increasing communications between providers
  • Affords more targeted capital investment to meet practice needs through better specificity of patient conditions
  • Supports practice transition to risk-sharing models with more precise data for patients and populations.

Professional

  • Provides clear objective data for credentialing and privileges.
  • Captures more specific and objective data to support professional Maintenance of Certification reporting across specialties.
  • Improves specificity of measures for quality and efficiency reporting
  • Aids in the prevention and detection of healthcare fraud and abuse
  • Provides more specific data to support physician advocacy of health and public health policy

This section clearly defines the intention of the expanded ICD-10. It is an attempt to define physicians’ quality of care by computer and award or penalize physicians based on a potentially faulty definition of quality care. It could lead to quality care being defined by documentation, not by clinical judgment.

Financial

  • Allows better documentation of patient complexity and level of care, supporting reimbursement for care provided
  • Provides objective data for peer comparison and utilization benchmarking
  • May reduce audit risk exposure by encouraging the use of diagnosis codes with a greater degree of specificity as supported by the clinical documentation

Physicians can interpret this category as a threat to their reimbursement and their clinical judgment.

Physicians might conclude that they should do what the government tells them to do or they will lose their livelihood.

The government’s healthcare policy wonks. They are not practicing physicians. They do not understand physicians’ potential reactions. They do not consider the unintended consequences of this policy.

Once physicians understand the goal is let the government control physicians’ medical judgment there is no telling what will happen to the quality of medical care.

Quality medical care is not a science or a social science that can be managed by computer. It is a learned process by physicians integrating scientific knowledge an art of personal relationships.

The opinions expressed in the blog “Repairing The Healthcare System” are, mine and mine alone.

All Rights Reserved © 2006 – 2015 “Repairing The Healthcare System” Stanley Feld M.D.,FACP,MACE

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Obamacare Co-Op Folly

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The Obamacare Spin Goes On

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Social Engineering

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Obamacare Is Failing

Stanley Feld M.D.,FACP,MACE

The problems the Obama administration is having with Obamacare have not been in the news lately. They appear in government publications as minor policy changes or in press releases. They also appear in minor trade magazines. Little that is new has appeared in the mainstream media.

Readers of the New York Times are under the impression that Obamacare is working and is successful. The readers’ impression is that President Obama has done a great thing for the nation by getting Obamacare passed into law.

If a lie is told enough times it becomes the truth. The media is the message. All one has to do is lie to the media and the message gets through whether it is true or not.

The public’s perception of reality is not more complicated than the information fed to it whether it is true or false.

A key element in getting the message through is trust. It is my opinion, President Obama and his administration have lied to the public so much that there is a lack of trust in him and his judgment. The Republican and Democratic parties have lied to the public so much that there is a lack of trust in both parties.

It has been shown over and over again that Hillary Clinton as lied to the public. Yet, she is gathering millions of votes in her primary contests while others who have told the same lies have ended up in prison.

Black people are figuring out that the Democratic party has lied to them. The war on poverty started in 1965 and little progress has been made to eradicate poverty since then.

Why is there so much poverty and unemployment in the black community?

Why can’t black kids have a choice of public schools or charter schools in New York City? Why can’t education be a top priority?

As Leonard Cohen says, “the deck is rigged.”

I think the reason Donald Trump is running the table on votes in the Republican primaries is people do not trust politicians.

He promises to unrig the deck and make America great again. The politicians, pundits and traditional media are confused about why the public is listening to him.

The public does not trust or believe them. The public trusts Donald Trump and his promises without having objective reason.

Two significant events have occurred in the Obamacare world in recent weeks which are contributing to Obamacares further failure.

  1. President Obama caving in on the “Cadillac tax”

As part of the budget deal President Obama agreed to sign another delay in the Cadillac tax until 2020.

An Obamacare law provision levies a hefty 40 percent tax on the most expensive employer-provided insurance plans: those costing above $10,200 for individuals and $27,500 for families.

The Obama administration predicts it will generate $87 million per year in new taxes.

“If a plan cost $11,200, it would face a $400 tax — 40 percent of the amount above the threshold.”

The Cadillac insurance premium was a 100% tax-deductible expense to an employer providing a high cost healthcare insurance policy to employees.

High paid executives and some unions or union executives enjoy this high cost insurance. President Obama’s goal has been to provide a disincentive to employers from providing this type insurance.

The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates 26 percent of current plans could get hit with the tax in 2018; Towers Watson pegs it at 42 percent. This is the result of healthcare insurance rate increases.

I think it is a trick by President Obama to discourage corporation from providing healthcare insurance for their employees. The Obama administration would like to force corporate employees to buy healthcare insurance from the federal health exchanges. When the federal health exchanges fail the government could take over everyone’s healthcare insurance and dictate the terms of that insurance.

The “Cadillac tax” was suppose to go into effect in 2017 but has been previously delayed until 2018.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agreed to delay Cadillac tax implementation even longer now until 2020. Some sort of political pressure has forced President Obama to sign the amendment to Obamacare. This new law will decrease the funding for Obamacare.

The traditional media has not emphasized this event leading to Obamacare’s demise.

  1. President Obama backs away from new Obamacare rules for 2017.

The execution of Obamacare by the Obama administration has not stabilized the healthcare insurance industry market as promised. In fact the federal exchange markets have become more chaotic. This is partly because of the inefficient bureaucratic structure and the lack of attraction to non-sick people, who would fund the federal health insurance plans. The healthcare insurance plans dictated by the federal government do not fit the needs of the people who would buy them. Instead, even though the health insurance plans are too expensive they attract people with pre-existing illnesses. These people have no choice.

The Obama administration’s typical response to fix unintended consequences is to create more rules and regulations. The new rules and regulations will lead to more unintended consequences.

The Obama administration just backed off of two big new. The Obama administration proposed tight physician and hospital network adequacy provisions and new standardized health plan options provisions.

The previous Obamacare rules and regulations resulted in the healthcare insurance industry’s adjusting to their loss of income by creating narrower networks of physicians and hospitals. Many of the healthcare exchange plans use HMOs only and narrow networks of hospitals and doctors as a way to keep premiums lower.

The result was a decrease patients’ access to care. CMS basically backed off of the strict network options it wanted to dictate. The Obama administration once again proved that it depends on the healthcare insurance industry to function. The healthcare industry is dictating the rules.

The goal of the Obama administration to standardize options was to make it easier for consumers to compare the various levels of healthcare plans offered in the health exchanges. The Obama administration also felt it was necessary to define the levels of basic benefits to make shopping for the most affordable plan easier.

The winner is the healthcare insurance industry. The loser is the Obama administration. The biggest losers are patients both in Obamacare and those who have private insurance.

As time goes on it is becoming clearer to everyone that Obamacare is not the success that President Obama and Paul Krugman are talking about.

The opinions expressed in the blog “Repairing The Healthcare System” are, mine and mine alone.

 All Rights Reserved © 2006 – 2016 “Repairing The Healthcare System” Stanley Feld M.D.,FACP,MACE

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