Posts Tagged ‘health policy’

It’s Been Quite A Week — Here Are Some Things You Might Have Missed

Saturday, October 24th, 2020

From the Department of There’s No Accounting For Stupidity

Since 1980, the population of Idaho has grown from about one million to nearly 1.8 million, considerably outstripping the rate of growth of its neighbors Montana and Wyoming. Over the last 14 days, all three states have seen large spikes in Covid-19 cases, according to the New York Times’s Covid Map and Case Count. And they’re not alone. All the Midwest and Pacific region states are seeing similar surges. Their governors are faced with balancing increased restrictions with the personal freedom inherent in pioneering individualism.

Nowhere did this daunting task become more evident than Thursday in Idaho, a state that has seen a 55% rise in cases in the last two weeks and where, minutes after hearing local hospitals were approaching full capacity necessitating moving patients to Seattle, of all places, the regional health board voted to repeal the local mask mandate.

The regional board, composed of seven appointed members with no requirement to have any medical experience, voted 4-3 to end the mandate. Health District epidemiologist Jeff Lee had just finished describing how the state’s hospitals were becoming “overwhelmed” by the surge in cases. For example, even after doubling up patients in rooms and buying more hospital beds, the hospital in Coeur d’Alene had reached 99% capacity. But, not to worry, it’s just an eight hour, 493 mile ambulance ride from Boise to Seattle.

“We’re facing staff shortages, and we have a lot of physician fatigue. This has been going on for seven months — we’re tired,” Lee said.

He introduced several doctors who testified about the struggle COVID-19 patients face, the burden on hospitals and how masks reduce the spread of the virus. But that didn’t matter to the Board’s majority who just did not see the sense in masks, no matter what the experts said.

To put a period on the “Health” Board’s meeting, member Allen Banks got to the heart of the matter by denying the existence of Covid-19. Lecturing the medical professionals who testified, he said, “Something’s making these people sick, and I’m pretty sure that it’s not coronavirus, so the question that you should be asking is, ‘What’s making them sick?”

That penetrating question came from a gentleman with a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Colorado, who for 30 years has worked in medical research in biotechnology and pharmaceutical development.

Dr. Banks would make a wonderful addition to the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

How cold is cold enough?

Have you stopped to consider the logistics of delivering upwards of 200 million doses of a future Covid-19 vaccine? That’s a lot of syringes. If you laid them end to end they would stretch from the North Pole to the South Pole, about 13,000 miles.

And the vaccine would have to be kept cold, very cold. Just how cold you ask? Try minus 103 Fahrenheit. That’s nearly four times colder than your home freezer, colder even than Antarctica in the dead of winter.

This is a complex challenge. For months, manufacturers, federal and state governments, and large health care systems have been quietly planning how to navigate this ultra “cold chain” that stretches from vaccine manufacturers to hospitals, nursing homes, doctors’ offices, and many far-flung clinics. Now that Pfizer has announced it plans to apply for emergency-use authorization designation in late November for its vaccine currently in Phase 3 trials, solving the cold problem becomes more urgent.

The nation’s governors wrote the Trump Administration last Sunday expressing concerns about the supply of ultracold freezers and dry ice — already experiencing shortages. Pfizer says it has developed specially designed, temperature-controlled shipping packages, using dry ice, to keep its vials at roughly minus 103 below Fahrenheit for up to 10 days. But what happens if the doses are not used in ten days? This is what is confounding the governors.

This issue is even more difficult than it appears, because the vaccines of both Pfizer and Moderna, another leading vaccine developer in Phase 3 trials, require two shots within 21 and 28 days, respectively. The situation is eased somewhat, because Moderna’s vaccine, at around minus 4 Fahrenheit, does not require the same ultra-cold storage temperature as Pfizer’s.

Might be a good time to buy stock in a maker of dry ice.

High Deductibles: Another nail in the rural hospital coffin

Since 2010, more than 130 rural hospitals have closed, 15 thus far in 2020. One mostly overlooked reason is the health insurance deductible. Depending on the plan (employer-sponsored, ACA Marketplace, etc.) a family deductible can range from $0 (but the out-of-pockets are huge) to well over $8,000.

Families in rural communities often face deductibles in the $2,000 to $4,000 range. And when family members require hospitalization, it often happens they cannot pay the deductible. Rural hospitals are forced to eat this less than tasty bill, send it to a collections company, or set up a payment plan with the patient. They prefer the payment plan route, but this significantly delays getting the money, and the bill is often reduced because of the patient’s economic circumstances. So, the hospital goes further in the red and its patients go further in debt. The pandemic has only exacerbated this problem.

Just another example of our nation’s dysfunctional health care “system.”

How to get rid of an irritating federal employee

Despite a great swath of the public thinking otherwise, federal employees can be fired, although it is true that this happens rarely. Of the 2.1 million federal employees about 10,000 are terminated annually, according to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB).

Firing a federal worker is similar to what would occur in the private sector, with one twist. In both settings, best practice recommends, and the federal system requires, the three step verbal warning, written warning, termination process. The twist comes after that. Federal employees can appeal to the MSPB, and the appeals can take a long time to adjudicate.

This past week, the Trump administration threw an interesting log on the fire when the President issued an Executive Order stripping long-held civil service protections from employees whose work involves policymaking. This will affect tens of thousands of workers, and will reduce them to being, for all practical purposes, “at will” employees, meaning they can be fired for cause or not for cause at a moment’s notice.

Under this order, federal scientists, attorneys, regulators, public health experts and many others in senior roles would lose rights to due process and in some cases, union representation, at agencies across the government.

These are not politically appointed employees who require confirmation to their positions, whom the president can terminate or have terminated by whim. Rather, they are professionals who serve as a cadre of subject-matter experts for every administration. I will let you consider the possible ramifications of this Executive Order, which to me seem profound. The Order, while not affecting a majority of the government, could upend the foundation of the career workforce by imposing political loyalty tests.

It is possible, with less than two weeks before election day, this may be more symbolic than real, because the Order requires agencies to indicate employees who would be affected by 19 January 2021, a day before the next inauguration. If Joe Biden wins the election he would be unlikely to follow through on the president’s order. But if Donald Trump is re-elected, this tectonic Order will monumentally reshape the federal service.

Think about that. Please.

 

 

 

 

Like BBs In A Boxcar

Monday, October 12th, 2020
Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world….
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.
          The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats

 

One thing COVID-19 has certainly done is to expose many of the foundational flaws in America’s healthcare house that Jack built, the house that “cannot hold.” From the Trump administration’s helter-skelter response, to the unequal treatment of Blacks and Latinos, to the near total reliance on China for PPE, to the exacerbating plight of rural hospitals, to jaw-dropping surprise bills, to something as granular as the price of insulin, and the list goes on.

To illuminate the dire situation even more, the Kaiser Family Foundation last week published its annual Employer Health Benefits Survey, which showed the average annual premium for a family of four has grown 4% over the last year, more than doubling the rate of inflation, and has now reached $21,342, with worker contributions averaging $5,588. Add in the average deductible of $4,000, along with copays of $40, and employees get their hair-raising, once-a-year healthcare sticker shock.

In 2020, the U.S. is spending 18% of GDP on healthcare, according the Office of the Actuary within the CMS. For years, I’ve been quoting Herb Stein’s Law: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” And for years, I’ve been wrong. This cannot be sustainable, but so far it has been.

A distant second-most-costly-country-in-the-world is Switzerland, at 12.1% (which is what the U.S. spent 30 years ago in 1990). The Swiss, as do many other OECD countries, have a decentralized system similar to ours, a blend of public and private-pay healthcare, with two important differences: First, since 1996, government, wanting to spread the pool, has required the Swiss people to purchase healthcare insurance, similar to the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate (which Congress eliminated when it passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, effective 1 January 2019). The result is for more than 20 years the Swiss have nearly 100% participation, but not the U.S.; our rate of the uninsured is going up, not down, made worse, much worse, by job, and consequently health insurance, losses due to the pandemic. Second, government plays a large role in establishing prices, especially for pharmaceuticals.

I think we can say with total certainty that, regardless of what you hear or read, nobody knows what healthcare in America will look like a year from now. If Trump wins reelection and republicans hold the senate, the ACA, or what’s left of it, could find itself buried deep beside Davy Jones’s locker at the bottom of the ocean, and what would come after that? Back to square one. People, our fellow citizens, our friends and relatives with chronic conditions, would once again find themselves walking down the edge of an economic razor blade.

There are four possible outcomes:

  1. Trump wins and republicans hold the senate, as above;
  2. Trump wins and democrats take the senate, resulting in stalemate, but the Trump reality show continues;
  3. Biden wins and democrats take the senate, in which case big changes are coming; and,
  4. Biden wins and republicans hold the senate, resulting in stalemate, but we’re saved from Trump’s histrionics (one hopes).

Options three and four spare us the president’s governing style, which is to say, chaos. For four years we have been subjected to his whipsawing and dangerous administration. His policies, personality and pronouncements seem to bounce around like BBs in a boxcar. Never more so than in the last few weeks. Things change by the hour. Nothing is predictable, except unpredictability.

We are moving inexorably into the winter of our continuing discontent. God help us all.

COVID-19 Update

Friday, September 18th, 2020

To close out your week we offer a few items that may have flown nap-of-the-earth under your radar.

The AstraZenica/Oxford vaccine bump in the road

On 8 September AstraZenica (AZ) halted its Phase 3 study, because one of its study participants came down with Transverse Myelitis, a neurological condition affecting the spine and caused by infection, immune system disorders or other disorders that can damage or destroy myelin, the fatty tissue that protects nerve cell fibers.

The UK has allowed AZ to restart its study there (AZ is a UK-based company), but as of this writing, the U.S. has not. In fact, in an interview with Kaiser Health News, the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke’s Avindra Nath said “the highest levels of NIH are very concerned.” According to Nath, the NIH has yet to access tissue or blood samples from the patient, who was part of the U.K. portion of AZ’s Phase 3 study. NIH believes AZ is being far too coy with its data. Nath called for the company “to be more forthcoming,” adding that “we would like to see how we can help, but the lack of information makes it difficult to do so.”

Given this halt in the U.S. study, it is not inconceivable that, if the AZ vaccine, known as AZD1222, proves efficacious and safe in the UK, regulators there could approve it for general use well before the U.S. does. This would not make our Commandeer in Chief happy.

The Mask versus Vaccine dust up

Speaking of the Commander in Chief, he recently took CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield for a quick walk to the woodshed for suggesting during testimony to a Senate subcommittee, “Masks are more guaranteed to protect me against COVID-19 than a vaccine.”

President Trump, who is not a doctor, but repeatedly plays one on TV, took exception to this. He publicly chastised Redfield for his comments and said a vaccine could be available in weeks and go “immediately” to the general public. Diminishing the usefulness of masks, despite a wealth of scientific evidence to the contrary, he said his CDC chief was “confused.”

Well, no, he wasn’t. Redfield told subcommittee members that if everyone in the U.S. would wear masks in public the pandemic could be under control within 12 weeks. His issue with a vaccine lies in its degree of immunogenicity, which he suggested would be in the area of 70%, meaning if 100 vaccinated people are exposed to the virus, 30 of them will have insufficient protection to ward it off. Those 30 will probably be comprised of groups who are most susceptible to the vaccine now, like the elderly.

People, masks will be with us for a long time.

Health insurance losses

Before the pandemic, 49% of Americans got health insurance through employer sponsored insurance (ESI). COVID-19 has reduced that percentage, because 6.2 million of our neighbors have lost their jobs and, consequently, their health insurance. When you factor in spouses and children, the number of people who have been shoved out the door into the COVID cold becomes 12 million.

Researchers at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) have recently documented the losses in a new study. Researchers Josh Bivens and Ben Zipperer write:

  • Extreme churn after February 2020 has led to very large losses in ESI coverage. In March and April, for example, new hiring led to 2.4 million workers gaining ESI coverage each month, but historically large layoffs led to 5.6 million workers losing coverage each month. This rate of lost coverage—over 3 million workers—dwarfs a similar calculation for the number of workers losing coverage each month during the biggest job-losing period of the Great Recession (September 2008–March 2009). Our analysis using the monthly, high-quality measure of the total number of jobs in the economy from the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is consistent with 9 million workers having lost access to ESI in March and April 2020 but 2.9 million workers having gained coverage between April and July 2020.

Bivens and Zipperer say about 85% of those who lost ESI coverage were able to gain at least some coverage either through a spouse’s plan, the Affordable Care Act or state Medicaid programs, but that still leaves about a million laid off workers and their familes with nothing. Bivens, Zipperer and others argue the job losses have only worsened the public health crisis created by COVID-19.

Of course, recognizing that millions of people losing employer sponsored health insurance is a public health crisis is not the same as fixing the system to prevent it from happening again. However, as I have written before, having exposed gross inadequacies in the nation’s health care system, COVID-19 also provides opportunities for improvement. What is needed now is the determined motivation and will to make that happen. That is a Herculean task about which I wish I were more optimistic.

Sisyphus Must Have Felt Like This

Wednesday, September 16th, 2020

The COVID-19 boulder, full of facts, lies, information, misinformation, disinformation, and just plain delusional thinking keeps rolling back down the mountain. Try as we might, it’s certainly difficult to make sense of COVID-19. But we keep trying, anyway. As in:

Unions during COVID-19

I have written previously about the perplexing case of union participation in America. In 1960, about a third of hourly workers belonged to unions. In January of this year, the BLS reported that number had dropped to 10.3%. Yet, in the same press release, the BLS reports:

Nonunion workers had median weekly earnings that were 81 percent of earnings for workers who were union members ($892 versus $1,095).

Right now we won’t get into why this puzzling paradox exists, except to say we now have another log to throw on the pyre.

A new study authored by researchers at George Washington University, the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and the Boston University School of Medicine, published in Health Affairs, found that having a unionized workforce at a nursing home greatly reduces the likelihood that residents or staff will die from COVID-19. From the study’s Abstract:

Health care worker unions were associated with a 1.29 percentage point mortality reduction, which represents a 30% relative decrease in the COVID-19 mortality rate compared to facilities without health care worker unions.

The study analyzed data from more than 300 nursing homes in New York from March 1 through May 31. The authors conclude the unionized health care workers in the nursing homes were able to negotiate for more PPE, higher pay, and better working conditions.

During the pandemic, New York has suffered nearly 7,000 nursing home deaths, more than any other state except New Jersey.

My take on this? If you have loved ones who may be headed for a nursing home, it might be a good idea to ask if the staff is unionized.

Avoiding medical care during COVID-19

Since early in COVID-19, we’ve known that many people, fearful of the disease, have put off getting routine, or, in some cases, emergency medical care. What we have not known is what demographic groups are doing that and to what degree. Now, the CDC has put a full stop period to that issue.

In its 11 September weekly Morbidity and Mortality Report, the CDC published a comprehensive analysis concluding 40.9% of U.S. adults delayed or avoided medical care as of June 30. This includes urgent or emergency care (12%) and routine care (32%). Regarding what population segments are doing this, the study had this to say:

The estimated prevalence of urgent or emergency care avoidance was significantly higher among the following groups: unpaid caregivers for adults versus non-caregivers (adjusted prevalence ratio [aPR] = 2.9); persons with two or more selected underlying medical conditions† versus those without those conditions (aPR = 1.9); persons with health insurance versus those without health insurance (aPR = 1.8); non-Hispanic Black (Black) adults (aPR = 1.6) and Hispanic or Latino (Hispanic) adults (aPR = 1.5) versus non-Hispanic White (White) adults; young adults aged 18–24 years versus adults aged 25–44 years (aPR = 1.5); and persons with disabilities§ versus those without disabilities (aPR = 1.3).*

So, Mary, taking care of her aged mother at home, foregoes either emergency or routine care at nearly three times the rate of Sarah, her next door neighbor who is not burdened with an aged relative, because she doesn’t want to bring COVID-19 home to Mom. Even more troubling is that people with two or more co-morbidities forego care at nearly two times the rate of people without such underlying conditions.

The CDC’s paper advises that, “… urgent efforts are warranted to ensure delivery of services that, if deferred, could result in patient harm.”

Enough said.

*By way of example for the statistically challenged, an adjusted prevalence ratio of 2 means that the prevalence of cases among a study group is 2 times higher than among the control subjects. It’s calculated through a series of regression analyses. There. Now you know.

U. S. life expectancy

COVID-19 has sucked all the air out of any national attempt at healthcare reform, while revealing in sharp detail the foundational flaws in the current system. Eventually, however, America is going to have to confront this issue in a meaningful manner. Healthcare cost in America is still twice the average of all 37 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and Americans still have poorer health and lower life expectancy than the average of the member countries (78.7 versus 79.5)

In its latest Health At A Glance publication, the OECD updated its life expectancy data, as shown here:

There are many cracks in our healthcare house that Jack built. Ignoring them is not a strategically viable plan for improvement, improvement that all citizens deserve.

To quote the venerable A. E. Housman, “Terrence, this is stupid stuff.” Another example of our woebegone healthcare system.

Trump’s Nevada rally

Last night, during an ABC-TV Town Hall Meeting President Trump once again pilloried cities and states run by Democrats and blamed their leaders for any problems with the response to COVID-19.

A little contextual background is required here. On 14 April, Trump asserted “absolute authority” to control the nation’s response to the pandemic, saying, “When somebody is president of the United States, your authority is total.” He made it clear he would be in charge and the states would have to fall in line.

Two days later, he reversed himself on a call with all the governors, telling them, “I’ve gotten to know almost all of you, most of you I’ve known and some very well. You are all very capable people, I think in all cases, very capable people. And you’re going to be calling your shots.”

Since then, he has repeatedly repeated the “You’re on your own” line. The result, of course, has been that we have seen 51 different plans and approaches  with varying degrees of success.

Nevada, one of the “you’re on your own” states, is still in the midst of a tough fight against the disease with a Daily Positivity Rate of 7.1% and a Cumulative Positivity Rate of 10.2% as of 10 September.

On 24 June, Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak imposed certain restrictions, among them the requirements that all Nevada residents wear masks when in public and that no more than 50 people, socially distanced, congregate in one place.

Enter Donald Trump and his the-sky-is-the-limit indoor rally of last Sunday evening at Xtreme Manufacturing in Henderson, Nevada. Fire officials estimated the size of the crowd was 5,600 people, nearly all of whom were maskless (except for the people right behind Trump who were constantly on full TV view).

Just as we saw in Tulsa after his previous rally, we’ll probably see a spike in cases in Nevada in two to three weeks.

Beyond the nonchalant and willful endangerment to peoples’ lives, what bothers me most of all about this event is Donald Trump’s cavalier and metaphorical raising high of his two middle fingers to Nevada’s scientifically-based efforts to keep its citizens alive. After repeatedly telling the nation’s governors they should do what they think they need to do to combat COVID-19, this “law and order” president, without compunction of any kind, imperiously violates the law while telling his large crowd Nevada’s Governor Sisolak is “a hack” and “weak.”

Allow me to close with Joseph Welsh’s question to Senator Joe McCarthy on 9 June 1954: “Have you no decency, sir?”

 

The Pledge, AstraZenica’s Hiccup, An Important WCRI Study, And An Homage To Bourbon!

Wednesday, September 9th, 2020

Having put The Insider on pause for a few weeks to have some fun researching pandemics in earlier times (they were awful) and to improving my tennis game (it’s pretty good), we now dive back into the blogging fray. Today, we get a running start.

The Pledge

At a press conference on 24 August, President Trump and FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn trumpeted (pun very much intended) the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of blood plasma to treat COVID-19 patients.  The Trump/Hahn announcement came less than a week after officials at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had put a hold on releasing the EUA, saying randomized trials were needed before such an action could occur. The President disagreed, saying, “There are people in the FDA and actually in your larger department [HHS] that can see things being held up and wouldn’t mind so much — its my opinion, a very strong opinion — and that’s for political reasons. We are being very strong and we are being very forthright, and we have some incredible answers, and we’re not going to be held up.”

In yet another example of Olympian Hyperbole, a disease to which Mr. Trump seems to be terminally infected, he also called the EUA a “truly historic announcement,” which puts it alongside something like the Emancipation Proclamation.

Like most of Trump’s hyperbolic pronouncements, the blood plasma EUA created quite the controversy, especially when the FDA released the comments of one of its own scientists tasked with reviewing the appropriateness of the same blood plasma EUA. That scientist— displaying far less enthusiasm than Trump and Hahn, and whose name was redacted from a memo released by the agency — wrote that the data:

 “…support the conclusion that [convalescent plasma] to treat hospitalized patients with COVID-19 meets the ‘may be effective’ criteria for issuance of an EUA. Adequate and well-controlled randomized trials remain nonetheless necessary for a definitive demonstration of … efficacy and to determine the optimal product attributes and the appropriate patient populations for its use.”

After the 24 August press conference, it took about 1.5 nanoseconds for Joe Biden and many media pundits to accuse Trump and Hahn of politicizing the EUA to influence the coming election.

Which brings us to The Pledge.

On 8 September, wanting to get out of firing range, the CEOs of all the leading Western developers of COVID-19 vaccines vowed to only file for FDA approval after demonstrating safety and efficacy in their Phase 3 trials. Their Pledge and descriptions of all nine trials can be found here.

The Pledge also promises all the developers will share some, but not all, of their data to propel their vaccines to the finish line. However, although every CEO wants their vaccine to be the first approved, not one of them wants to get there only for the world  to discover they’ve cut corners and now endanger humanity. These are people who want to go down in history for the right reason.

Mr. Trump will push, prod and kick these vaccine developers to get one of their efforts approved before 3 November. But I have a 95% confidence level none of them will buckle under that pressure. I sure hope I’m right.

AstraZenica’s Hiccup

In an example of the caution just described, yesterday AstraZenica announced  it was putting its Phase 3 vaccine trial on hold, due to a suspected serious adverse reaction in a participant in the United Kingdom.

This is not an uncommon happening in vaccine development, but it does show how fraught with uncertainties these trials can be. It proves that AZ’s data and safety monitoring group is doing its job, and that’s what is supposed to happen. I previously wrote about all the leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates, as well as ChAdOx1, the one being tested by AstraZenica in partnership with the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute.

It is entirely possible we will experience more bumps in the road before one of the developers wins FDA approval.

An Important, New WCRI Study Is Released

Low back pain (LBP) is something that has afflicted humanity since Homo Sapiens decided to stand straight and walk upright. And it’s been the bane of claims adjusters since Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s Iron Chancellor, created the first workers’ compensation program in the 1880s.

Back injuries are the leading cause of all musculoskeletal claims, which are the leading cause of all workers’ compensation claims, and have been since it seems forever. If you’ve ever looked at a workers’ compensation loss run for any hospital in America, you’ll know what I mean.

One of the myriad treatment modalities for these claims is physical therapy (PT). However, it’s always been a bit of a crap shoot as to when to prescribe PT for a patient beset by a work injury resulting in low back pain.

Now, the Workers’ Compensation Research Institute (WCRI) has produced a study that convincingly puts the matter to rest. The study’s conclusion: the earlier PT is begun, the better.

The study, The Timing of Physical Therapy for Low Back Pain: Does It Matter in Workers’ Compensation?, is based on a review of  nearly 26,000 LBP-only claims with more than seven days of lost time from 27 states, with injuries from 1 October 2015, through 31 March 2017, and detailed medical transactions up through 31 March 2018.

One of the many reasons this study is important is that PT can sometimes be the last resort, not the first, in many cases being recommended only after opioids and other invasive procedures have been tried.

The WCRI study found:

  • Later timing of PT initiation is associated with longer temporary disability (TD) duration. On average, the number of TD weeks per claim was 58 percent longer for those with PT initiated more than 30 days post-injury and 24 percent longer for those with PT starting 15 to 30 days post-injury, compared with claims with PT within 3 days post-injury.
  • Workers whose PT treatment started more than 30 days post-injury were 46 and 47 percent more likely to receive opioid prescriptions and MRI, respectively, compared with those who had PT treatment initiated within 3 days of injury. The differences between PT after 30 days post-injury and PT within 3 days post-injury were 29 percent for pain management injections and 89 percent for low back surgeries.
  • The average payment for all medical services received during the first year of treatment was lower for workers with early PT compared with those with late PT. For example, the average medical cost per claim for workers who had PT more than 30 days post-injury was 24 percent higher than for those who had PT within 3 days post-injury.
  • Among claims with PT treatment starting more than 30 days post-injury, the percentage with attorney involvement was considerably higher (27 percent compared with 13–15 percent among those in the early PT groups) and workers received initial medical care much later (on average 18 days compared with 2–3 days in the early PT groups).

If you’re a claims adjuster wary of incurring the cost of sending injured workers with resultant low back pain to PT, this study should make you press the “Reset” button in your mind.

And, finally, an homage to bourbon (which is also good for low back pain)

In the constant sea of terrible, divisive, set-your-hair-on-fire news, we now row to a bipartisan safe harbor: Bourbon.

In the halls of Congress, bipartisanship seems to have gone the way of the Woolly Mammoth. But, reader, that is not the case in the case of Bourbon! That’s because on 2 August 2007, Congress ratified a bill designating September as National Bourbon Heritage Month. More notable, however, is that it passed unanimously. Thus, history shows that amid the countless issues and places and opinions that divide us, nothing unites Americans like bourbon.

And that aint all. A 1964 act declared bourbon “America’s Native Spirit,” making it the only spirit distinctive to the United States, if you don’t count the “spirits” the QAnon folks are worried about.

So, although I can’t stand the stuff, on this first day after 2020’s Labor Day as we all get sucked along the giant tube of political rigarmarole, you might want to consider the nationally endorsed benefits of America’s Native Spirit. Things will still be dire, the President will continue his hyperbolic rants, many of your fellow Americans will continue to “choose liberty” over masks, but you? You’ll hardly notice any of it.

 

 

When This Is Over, We Must Do Better!

Thursday, August 6th, 2020

For decades, we have swept our health care problems under the rug for posterity to trip over.    And right now, posterity is flat on its face.

Let me ask you this: Whether you believe high quality health care is a basic human right or just a privilege to be earned (I argued the former here), what do you think about 5.4 million Americans losing health insurance in the middle of the worst health care crisis in more than 100 years, because they lost their jobs?

One of the many terrible things COVID-19 has done is to expose our health care foundational flaws for all the world to see. For example, if there is ever a time not to lose health insurance it is during a pandemic. Another deep and open wound suddenly exposed to bright light is the abominable, even obscene, way in which COVID-19 has been allowed to impact the African American, Native American and LatinX communities. Health care is neither universal nor applied equally throughout the country.

As far back as 2008, I, along with others, documented the many ways our health care system, if you can call it that, lags behind the rest of the developed world*, in some case far behind. This, despite costing twice as much as the average of the other 36 member countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 25 of whom are members of the European Union. Since then, except for the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), things have only gotten worse, and the ACA has been flayed, gutted and nearly beaten to death more than once. It should not, but it does to many, come as any surprise that the EU countries are performing significantly better in the battle against COVID-19 than we are, despite having a total population that is 27% greater than America’s. These two charts prove the point:

First, Population – From the World Bank:

Second, COVID-19 cases – from Johns Hopkins University and Statista as of 30 July, seven days ago:

What more does one need to see to conclude America’s response to COVID-19 has been tragically woeful?

Yesterday, I was speaking with a friend, a pulmonologist who has been on COVID-19’s front lines in Massachusetts since March. He and his patients, a number of whom are no longer with us, have been through a lot. His biggest complaint? The lack of “consistent, cohesive and comprehensive leadership from the federal government.” He said, “I’m a God-fearing man, but right now my God is science.”

The rug under which we swept our problems has been pulled up, and bad things have crept out into the light of day. But COVID-19, for all its horror and misery, has presented us with an opportunity. When this is over, and someday it will be, we will have an opportunity, nay, an imperative, to build a better American health care program, less fragmented, less costly, less complicated, and universally provided to every person within the confines of our nation’s borders. If the leaders we elect have even a modicum of courage, if they have entered public service to actually serve the public – all of it – we and they may be able to take the iniquity of this virus and leverage it to the point where health care in this nation, rather than having to be earned as a privilege, available only to people who can afford it, becomes a basic human right for all of us.

* The link is to the conclusion of a 5-part series. For the first four parts, enter “The best health care in the world” in the search box on the right sidebar

 

AstraZeneca And Oxford Surge To The Lead

Monday, July 20th, 2020

Lord knows, good news is hard to come by these days, but, H’Alleluia, we got some this morning.

Researchers from pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca* and Oxford University’s Edward Jenner Institute for Vaccine Research announced promising results from a Phase 1/2 study of their COVID-19 vaccine candidate, known as AZD1222.

Researchers gave AZD1222 to about 500 volunteers and compared the results to those from around the same number getting a meningococcal vaccine.

For the AZD1222 vaccine, antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein peaked by day 28 and remained elevated to day 56, the end of the study, indicating an immune response against the virus. Much has recently also been made of T cells, a type of white blood cell: Here, the vaccine levels of T cells peaked 14 days after vaccination and were still present two months later.

Ages in the study group ran from 18 to 55; the median was 35. This is much younger than the median age of the group that will need it the most: the elderly. Also, nobody in the study group had co-morbidities associated with heightened risk of bad outcomes.

There were side effects, but they were relatively minor: fevers, aches, headaches and fatigue, but acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, alleviated these.

Phase 3 trials are now underway in the U.K., Brazil and South Africa and are due to start in the U.S.

The UK has already ordered 100 million doses of the unproven vaccine, which scientists from Oxford’s Jenner Institute have said could be ready for approval in September.

A word or two about the light speed of this vaccine’s development, as well as the roughly 100 others being developed around the world.

First, Oxford has been working toward developing a novel coronavirus vaccine for two or three years. After the 2014 Ebola epidemic, the British government invested  £120 million (about $149 million at the time) to create vaccines aimed at protecting against the 10 or 11 health threats deemed to be the most likely to threaten the country. Coronaviruses were on that list, and the government gave the Jenner Institute some of the money.

Once that happened, Oxford doctors Sarah Gilbert and Adrian Hill pioneered a way to put a bit of a novel coronavirus in a vaccine, but without the part that makes it replicate in humans. At that point it would be safe to inject in people. What Gilbert and Hill created was a platform that theoretically should work for many viruses and has been proven to be safe in vaccines for other diseases. And that methodology, called recombinant adenovirus vector, is what AstraZeneca and Oxford are making the foundation of their COVID-19 vaccine candidate.

So, because of the work of Gilbert, Hill and their Oxford team, Oxford and AstraZeneca had a head start on the COVID-19 vaccine derby. But still, AZD1222 entered its Phase 1 clinical trial the last week in March, 2020. If they succeed and have a vaccine ready for humanity by September, that will be six months from start to finish. This is way beyond unheard of!

Don’t believe me? Typically, and this is anything but, clinical trials go through four phases according to the FDA:

Phase 1: 

Study Participants: 20 to 100 healthy volunteers

Length of Study: Several months (For this example, let’s say 4)

Purpose: Safety and dosage

Result: Approximately 70% of drugs move to the next phase

Phase 2: (AZD1222’s Phase 1 and 2 were done in two months)

Study Participants: Up to several hundred people

Length of Study: Several months to 2 years (Let’s say 4 months to two years)

Purpose: Efficacy and side effects

Result: Approximately 33% of drugs move to the next phase

Phase 3: (This is what AZD1222 is beginning now)

Study Participants: 300 to 3,000 volunteers

Length of Study: 1 to 4 years

Purpose: Efficacy and monitoring of adverse reactions

Result: Approximately 25-30% of drugs move to the next phase

There is a Phase 4 with several thousand volunteers, but it appears the government may be combining Phase 3 and 4 as it did Phase 1 and 2.

If there is one thing Donald Trump and I can agree about it is that this is being done at Warp speed. If you do the math from above, you’ll see the fastest a drug typically makes it through the first three trials is 20 months, not six. Also, by rapid calculus, you’ll note that if we start with 100 drugs going into trials, five make it through Phase 3. We’re dealing with long odds here.

A couple of other things to think about.

First, drug discovery and development involves pre-clinical work that begins with mice, moves on to rats, guinea pigs, rabbits, pigs and non-human primates. Yes, monkeys. After all that, scientists apply for what’s called an Investigational New Drug Award, an NDI. If the FDA approves that, one can move into a Phase 1 trial. None of that has happened here, at least it hasn’t been reported as happening.

Second, even if good results happen from AZD1222’s Phase 3 trial, or one of the other vaccines under development, with such little longitudinal study how certain will we be that long-term immunity will result?

Finally, there are the old folks. One presumes they represent a cohort in the Phase 3 study. What happens if the vaccine succeeds beautifully in young people, but fails miserably in the elderly?

John Milton famously wrote, “Hope springs eternal.” But, frankly, I prefer the advice of my old commanding general in the mountains of Vietnam: “Hope for the best; prepare for the worst.”

 

* AstraZeneca is a British/Swedish company formed from the merger of Astra Pharmaceuticals, a British firm, and Zeneca, a Swedish one, in 1999. It’s headquarters are in Cambridge, England.

 

 

The “K” Factor and EU and USA Cases

Friday, June 26th, 2020

The K Factor

Ever heard of the “K” factor? Neither had I. But in yesterday’s Work Fitness and Disability Roundtable, Dr. Jennifer Christian’s long-running and valuable daily roundup of workers’ compensation medical news and musings, we were introduced.

Turns out the “K” factor could be tremendously important in helping leaders figure out how reopening the economy should proceed.

I thought Jennifer’s Roundtable post was so important I asked her if we could reprint it in the Insider. She gave permission, for which I’m grateful. So, here it is:

Hey, nothing like a fact-based “aha” to sharpen the mind and help point the way forward. A thought provoking article in New York Magazine (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/coronavirus-meatpacking-plants-america-labor.html?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=nym&utm_medium=s1&fbclid=IwAR0jnJXCeUx_zYVQuayha1XSMpMtjT-TSXIv7-RfIFNCDtlrz1hn558Da2w) on the reason for major differences between the COVID-19 experience in meatpacking industries in the USA and Europe brought up the “k” factor in the COVID-19 pandemic.  Ever heard of “k”?

Until yesterday, I hadn’t noticed (or paid attention to) any discussion about the implications for action of SARS-CoV-2’s  “k” factor. The “k” factor is an infecting organism’s observed dispersion behavior. Now is the time to start paying attention to the “k” factor because it points us straight to the main cause of the majority of COVID-19 cases: superspreading events in crowded indoor settings. We’ve all known that a lot of the cases have occurred due to spread on board ships, in prisons, hospitals, nursing homes, nightclubs and meatpacking plants – but to be truthful, I’m not sure we’d gotten the take-home message: SARS-CoV-2 is heavily dependent on crowded indoor spaces for its spread.

So, I did a bit more Googling and found a good Science Magazine article (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/why-do-some-covid-19-patients-infect-many-others-whereas-most-don-t-spread-virus-all) that lays it all out quite clearly.  In addition to the R value (the mean number of subsequent new infections resulting from each infected individual), epidemiologists calculate how much a disease clusters. The lower k is, the more transmission is coming from a small number of people. The k value for the 1918 influenza pandemic was estimated at 1.0 – clusters weren’t too important. But during the 2003 SARS and 2012 MERS epidemics the vast majority of cases occurred in clusters, and their calculated k values were therefore low: 0.16 and 0.25 respectively.

In COVID-19, most infected people are not creating any additional cases. Adam Kurcharski from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine has conducted an analysis of COVID-19 dispersion and says, “Probably about 10% of cases lead to 80% of the spread.” A pre-print of his paper (https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-67) has a calculated k value of COVID-19 at 0.1. Previous studies have pegged it just a tad higher than SARS or MERS.

There’s no point in trying to figure out which people are shedding the most viruses – though some of us clearly do disperse more bugs than others.  We professionals need to focus most of our attention on the places and types of events that SARS-CoV-2 needs in order to spread efficiently: loud and crowded indoor spaces, where people are cheek by jowl and raising their voices or breathing deeply: talking, singing, or shouting or aerobically exerting themselves. Ventilation and air flow in these settings also plays an important role.

Almost none of the clusters have resulted from outdoor crowded events.  Chinese studies of the early spread of COVID-19 outside Hubei province identified only one cluster among a total of 318 that originated outdoors. A Japanese study found that the risk of infection indoors is almost 19 times higher than outdoors. And here in the USA people who participated in (largely outdoor) Black Lives Matter protests have not been getting sick. (I also saw some data earlier saying that the virus is almost immediately disabled by sunlight.)

As the Science Magazine article says, the low k factor is …..”an encouraging finding, scientists say, because it suggests that restricting gatherings where superspreading is likely to occur will have a major impact on transmission, and that other restrictions—on outdoor activity, for example—might be eased.” So duh, let’s make the hierarchy of risk much more explicit. We need to make it crystal clear to the public (and patients and workers and employers) that the worst thing a person can do is participate in events in loud, crowded, and  indoor settings without rapid air turnover.

HOWEVER:  Many people are stuck. They live in crowded housing or congregate housing. The places where they live and work (ships, factories, office buildings, and medical facilities) already exist. People need to work, and winter is coming when we have to be inside.

I see this call to action: Are you, personally, confident that you are collaborating with all of the professionals whose input, cooperation, and contributions will be required? Think outside your silo. All of the various types of professionals who do event planning & commercial building design & engineering, industrial hygiene, HVAC, public health, and occupational health & safety need to join up and get deeply and rapidly involved in adapting / redesigning / re-configuring / re-engineering existing places and events to reduce the potential for superspreading.

A look at European Union and U.S. case statistics: Stunning

The following chart from the Johns Hopkins Tracker Project, printed in yesterday’s Statista Daily Alert needs no introduction or even analysis. It puts the period to Dr. Christian’s words.

 

The Continuing Saga Of COVID-19 In Long Term Care Facilities And New Research

Thursday, May 21st, 2020

We have written about the ongoing death spiral in LTCFs four times – herehere, here, and here.

We’ve done this, because for three months authorities have known that LTCF’s were lethal hot spots, the most lethal in the country, actually. And to this day the federal government has devoted nothing more than lip service to it. Don’t believe me? Read on.

Last Thursday, OSHA issued COVID-19 Guidelines, not Requirements, for nursing homes. The Guidelines recommend screening residents and staff for symptoms, keeping everyone six feet apart and creating alternatives to group activities. I challenge anyone to read the Guidelines and find the word, “must.” OSHA has become the quintessential paper tiger. Remember, it only took three months to produce these groundbreaking recommendations.

And it is now exactly one month since CMS Administrator Seema Verma, to much ballyhoo, announced new COVID-19 reporting requirements for nursing homes. Specifically, CMS was requiring:

…nursing homes to inform residents, their families and representatives of COVID-19 cases in their facilities. In addition, as part of President Trump’s Opening Up America, CMS will now require nursing homes to report cases of COVID-19 directly to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  This information must be reported in accordance with existing privacy regulations and statute. This measure augments longstanding requirements for reporting infectious disease to State and local health departments. Finally, CMS will also require nursing homes to fully cooperate with CDC surveillance efforts around COVID-19 spread.

So, how has that worked out? Keep in mind that, as reported by the New York Times, “While just 11 percent of the country’s cases have occurred in long-term care facilities, deaths related to Covid-19 in these facilities account for more than a third of the country’s pandemic fatalities.” As of 9 May, the Times reported the death toll in Long Term Care Facilitites (LTCF) was 28,100. Those are the ones we know of.

Unfortunately, that number is probably low, because we are still waiting for the CMS reporting requirement to produce anything. And now, it appears CMS’s plan has changed. On 14 May, one week ago, Administrator Verma said data from LTCFs would not be posted on the CDC website. Rather, it will be reported by the end of this month somewhere on Medicare’s website Nursing Home Compare.

Nursing Home Compare is exactly what the name suggests. It is a site where, by inputting a zip code, one can compare what Medicare calls Health Deficiencies in specific nursing homes within the relative geography chosen. It includes a humongously large database containing a number of datasets devoted to health deficiencies. This may be the place one would search for nursing home data regarding COVID-19. But we won’t know that until “the end of this month.” Maybe.

We shall see.

By the way, Verma’s announcement of one month ago began with this:

Today, under the leadership of President Trump, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced new regulatory requirements that will require nursing homes to inform residents, their families and representatives of COVID-19 cases in their facilities.

“Leadership.” Really?

Research on what is most effective to stop COVID-19 transmission

Two new research papers look into the effectiveness of the measures governments have either required or recommended for slowing the spread of the virus.

The first, Strong Social Distancing Measures In The United States Reduced The COVID-19 Growth Rate, published in Health Affairs on 14 May, investigated the efficacy of four social distancing policies taken by most state and local governments: Shelter-in-place orders (SIPOs), public school closures, bans on large social gatherings, and closures of entertainment-related businesses. Specifically, the researchers were trying to estimate the relationship between social distancing policies and the exponential growth rate of confirmed COVID-19 cases using an event-study regression with multiple treatments.

There were surprising results.

First, from the Paper:

Adoption of government-imposed social distancing measures reduced the daily growth rate by 5.4 percentage points after 1–5 days, 6.8 after 6–10 days, 8.2 after 11–15 days, and 9.1 after 16–20 days. Holding the amount of voluntary social distancing constant, these results imply 10 times greater spread by April 27 without SIPOs (10 million cases) and more than 35 times greater spread without any of the four measures (35 million). Our paper illustrates the potential danger of exponential spread in the absence of interventions,…

Second, only two of the policies produced statistically significant impacts on the growth rate at the 95% confidence level: SIPOs and the closures of entertainment-related businesses.

In contrast, the researchers found no evidence that bans on large social gatherings or school closures influenced the growth rate. That is not to say there was no influence on the growth rate due to these measures, just that whatever influence was there, it was not statistically significant.

The school closure finding is important as school boards and college trustees ponder whether to reopen in the fall. Yesterday, Boston College, where I spent some of my youth, announced that the campus would be open for classes for the fall semester.

The second PaperFace Masks Against COVID-19: An Evidence Review, “synthesized the relevant literature to inform multiple areas: 1) transmission characteristics of COVID-19, 2) filtering characteristics and efficacy of masks, 3) estimated population impacts of widespread community mask use, and 4) sociological considerations for policies concerning mask-wearing.”

The verdict of the researchers: “The preponderance of evidence indicates that mask wearing reduces the transmissibility per contact by reducing transmission of infected droplets in both laboratory and clinical contexts. Public mask wearing is most effective at stopping spread of the virus when compliance is high. The decreased transmissibility could substantially reduce the death toll and economic impact while the cost of the intervention is low.” In otherwords, masks work.

This paper carried the following supplemental tidbit:

While the focus of this article is on preventing the spread of COVID-19 disease through public mask wearing, many countries face concurrent epidemics of contagious respiratory diseases like tuberculosis and influenza. Tuberculosis kills 1.5 million people globally per year, and in 2018, 10 million people fell ill. Face covering has been shown to also reduce the transmission of tuberculosis. Similarly, influenza transmission in the community declined by 44% in Hong Kong after the implementation of changes in population behaviors, including social distancing and increased mask wearing, enforced in most stores, during the COVID-19 outbreak.
This could be important when one considers that an effective vaccine for tuberculosis exists: the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin vaccine. It isn’t usually given to infants in the U.S., because the disease isn’t a widespread problem here. However, when we eventually have a vaccine for COVID-19, we’re going to have to face the fact that getting it to people around the world is not going to be easy.
And, God help us, we’ll also have to deal with the anti-vax cult living among us here at home.

 

COVID-19: Two Updates

Tuesday, May 19th, 2020

Who pays?

The last question asked in our question-filled Post of 13 May was the same as the first question asked, namely: Who’s the guy at the end of the line left holding the bill for COVID-19 workers’ compensation claim costs?

Right now, as we have written here, each state is addressing this in its own way; fifty different plans for one national crisis.Thus far, workers’ compensation is the pot out of which, in one way or another, claims are addressed. Employers do not like this.

Employers of essential workers haven’t wanted to scream too loudly about being the last in line guy, what with so many of their  workers falling ill, even dying, every day. That kind of crass insensitivity would be bad for business. But inwardly, they have to be nervous about getting stuck with the check, the cost of which, as we have documented here, could be enormous.

Employers have already taken a high hard one to the side of the head with the complete and utter devastation COVID-19 has done to their economic well being, and the requirement to pay the workers’ compensation claims which are going to avalanche over the top of them is something with which they strongly disagree. For what it’s worth, I think they have a point.

Back at the state capitals, I would venture, governors don’t really care where the money comes from, just as long as it’s not coming out of their state treasuries.

And throughout history, insurers have resisted paying for occupational disease claims. Witness the 20-year fight to avoid paying the costs of pneumoconiosis, which resulted in the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, amended four years later by the Black Lung benefits Act, which created the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund.

So, if the states don’t pay and if insurers don’t pay and if employers don’t pay, who is left?

Brothers and sisters, the federal government is left, which is another way of saying we are left. We will all share the risk and share the costs. If you cannot bring yourself to believe that, you haven’t been paying attention.

In fact, a model exists: The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, which:

…provides compensation to individuals (or a personal representative of a deceased individual) who were present at the World Trade Center or the surrounding New York City exposure zone; the Pentagon crash site; and the Shanksville, Pennsylvania crash site, at some point between September 11, 2001, and May 30, 2002, and who have since been diagnosed with a 9/11-related illness.  The VCF is not limited to first responders.  Compensation is also available to those who worked or volunteered in construction, clean-up, and debris removal; as well as people who lived, worked, or went to school in the exposure zone.

The wheels are already in motion. Last week, a bipartisan group in the House unveiled the Pandemic Heroes Compensation Act, a plan to compensate essential workers who fall sick or die from COVID-19. The Act is modeled on the September 11th Victim Compensation Act.

Senate democrats are also proposing legislation. Like everything else in D.C. these days, the road from here to eventual victim compensation will be tortuous, but I cannot see any other way of paying for this national catastrophe other than with a national program. Can you?

The Moderna results

For a number of years, I chaired the Board of a BIOTECH pre-clinical Contract Research Organization (CRO). We took compounds, whose makers hoped would become the next blockbuster drugs, and tested them in mice, rats, guinea pigs, rabbits, pigs and non-human primates (that’s right, monkeys). In the biotech business, everyone knows everyone else, and we certainly knew a lot of scientists trying to develop vaccines.

Yesterday, the Boston pharmaceutical company Moderna reported a vaccine it was developing for COVID-19 produced antibodies in humans. In vaccine development, this is the beginning of a Phase One trial, and its purpose is to confirm the vaccine is not toxic. Moderna’s Phase One trial is composed of 45 participants, eight of whom  Moderna says produced the antibodies. We know nothing of the other 37.

While encouraging, you won’t find respected scientists getting too excited yet. They know what Moderna has done is to take the ball out of the end zone and reach the one yard line. Nintey-nine to go.

Two things are exciting, however. First, Moderna was able to get to this point at light speed. What Moderna did in about 70 days usually takes three to four years. That is over the moon fast, but the other ninety-nine yards are going to be increasingly more arduous. Second, there are more than 100 other groups around the world, both pharmaceutical and academic, who are also going hell bent for leather to develop the vaccine that will eradicate COVID-19. Although I have every confidence one of these groups, maybe Moderna,  will cross the goal line at the other end of the field, it will take a miracle on the order of the Raising of Lazarus for this to happen before mid to late 2021.

Until then: Constant vigilance. Complacency will kill you. Really. Please keep this in mind as all the beaches and parks open this coming Memorial Day weekend. It will be highly tempting to revert to former form.