Highlights of the important and the interesting from the world of health care:
FDA considers new labeling rules: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reportedly considering doing something it should’ve done a long time ago: adjusting serving sizes on food packaging to reflect the way Americans really eat. The agency is also toying with the idea of encouraging food companies to place nutrition labels on the front of packaging, though both moves disappointingly would be voluntary, according to the New York Times. Â No longer would industry be able to get away with calling one bowl of cereal two servings, which confuses consumers and perhaps leads people to ingest far more calories than they suspected. The moves would be done in an attempt to combat obesity, but one wonders if the proposed rules would really have any teeth as long as they’re voluntary. Still, they could provide a wake-up call to some consumers.
“If you put on a meaningful portion size, it would scare a lot of people,” said Barry Popkin, a nutrition professor at the University of North Carolina. “They would see, ‘I’m going to get 300 calories from that, or 500 calories.’Â “
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Lawyers love Illinois: In a move that could have ramifications for the national health reform debate, last week the Illinois Supreme Court struck down a law that limited malpractice damages. The move without a doubt makes the state very popular with lawyers, and not so popular with medical professionals. The law had established limits on pain and suffering and other non-economic damages of $500,000 in cases against doctors and $1 million against hospitals. The American Medical Association argues that states that have such caps are more attractive to doctors, thus the laws benefit patients by relieving issues surrounding access to care. Intuitively the argument makes sense, and the AMA’s assertion may very well have plenty of truth to it.
But beware arguments that seem to make sense on the face. Doctors and other advocates of so-called tort reform–another way of describing the practice of placing caps on malpractice claims–also love to claim that such caps bring down malpractice insurance costs to doctors, who then pass the savings on to patients. The argument follows that malpractice limits would reduce the ridiculously high and still-rising cost of health care in America. The only problem? The numbers simply don’t back it up. “The Congressional Budget Office reported in September that reforms, such as capping non-economic damages, would lower the nation’s health care bill by only 0.5 percent,” the Chicago Tribune reports. Tort reform is yet another example of a seemingly “common-sense” solution that actually makes little sense in practice.
A physician’s vote for single payer: A sometimes overlooked aspect of health reform is that one option that has plenty of advocates and has already been adopted in a number of countries was never really on the table in the so-called “Obamacare” debate: a single-payer or Medicare-for-all type of system. The approach has plenty of supporters among the physician community, including an internist who penned an editorial in the Toledo Blade on the topic. Dr. Jonathan Ross writes that as long as private insurers are in charge, the U.S. will never have the high-quality, accessible and affordable care it deserves. Ross says that with single-payer, “There would be few or no co-payments because we would save hundreds of billions each year from the administrative efficiencies of a single, national, comprehensive health insurance program.”
Attempting to view the U.S. health system from a physician’s perspective, I’ve always been surprised that more aren’t in favor of single-payer. Like Ross, doctors frequently complain of the annoying and time-wasting administrative burdens imposed on them by having to deal with different rules from a myriad of insurers. With single-payer that all goes away. Most doctors say the reason they got into medicine in the first place was to make a difference in peoples’ lives and establish meaningful relationships with patients. Single-payer would free up much of their time to do exactly that.
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How to turn analytics into actual policy outcomes.
Why health reform should be financed by taxes on the wealthy: Newsweek’s Daniel Gross, in his fine article “You’re Rich. Get Over It,” writes that any way you slice it or anywhere you live, $250,000 is a lot of money and those who earn that amount can handle a tax hike. Those who claim differently, such as Rush Limbaugh, are simply comparing that $250,000 income to others of their social group, whom indeed, they may trail when it comes to status and income. But compared to the rest of America, $250K is plenty. Only about 2 percent of American households report income at greater than $250,000, so if reform efforts that will benefit the other 98 percent of Americans by reducing health costs have to be financed (partly) on the backs of that 2 percent, so be it.
Photo courtesy of flickr user sylvar.