That is half 3 of Jeff Goldsmith’s historical past of managed care. If you happen to missed it learn Part 1 & Part 2
By JEFF GOLDSMITH
Two main modifications in medical health insurance ensued because the US well being system entered the 21st century- a strategic shift of well being price threat from suppliers to sufferers and the emergence of machine pushed managed care.
Insurers Shift Technique from Sharing Danger with Hospitals and Medical doctors to Markedly Implicating their “Sufferers’.
After the 2008 recession, employers and their well being plans shifted technique from placing physicians and hospitals in danger via delegated threat capitation to placing sufferers in danger via increased affected person price sharing. Within the wake of the recession, the variety of sufferers with excessive deductible well being plans almost quintupled–to over sixty million lives. By 2024, 32% of the lives in employer-based plans (50% amongst small employers’) had been in excessive deductible plans no matter affected person financial circumstances.
The acknowledged intention of the Excessive Deductible Well being Plan motion was to encourage sufferers to “store” for care. In actual care conditions, nonetheless, sufferers discovered it tough or inconceivable to find out precisely what their share of the fee could be or which suppliers did the very best job of taking good care of them. For an in depth review of the literature on how healthcare “customers” battle to handle their monetary threat, learn Peter Ubel’s 2019 Sick to Debt: How Smarter Markets Lead to Better Care.
Employers and insurers, working collectively to “empower customers”, quickly shifted “self-pay” dangerous money owed onto their supplier networks. Some 60% of hospital bad debts are actually from sufferers with insurance coverage. As an alternative of “looking for care”, customers discovered themselves saddled with virtually $200 billion in medical bills they might not pay, and hospitals and physicians ended up consuming most of it.
This escalating “insured dangerous debt” drawback compelled suppliers to rent income cycle administration (RCM) consultants to revise and strengthen their insurance policies relating to affected person monetary duty, “revenue integrity” (that means crossing all of the “t’s” and dotting all of the “I’s” in every medical declare and ensuring care is coded correctly) and rigorously monitoring the stream of claims to and from their main insurance coverage carriers. In consequence many suppliers discovered themselves spending 10-15% of their whole working bills on RCM!
Medicare Benefit Permits Insurer Market Dominance
The motion from Ellwood’s imaginative and prescient of regionally-based supplier sponsored well being plans to market dominance by big nationwide carriers was cemented by the emergence of Medicare Advantage as probably the most important and worthwhile medical health insurance market section. In 2013, Medicare Benefit accounted for 29% of whole Medicare spending. A decade later, in 2024, it was 54% (of roughly a trillion greenback program). And till a federal crackdown on MA coding and fee insurance policies by the carriers, it was a 5% margin business, considerably extra worthwhile than industrial insurance coverage, ObamaCare Alternate or managed Medicaid companies.
As Medicare Benefit emerged as the most important medical health insurance market, it was dominated by a cartel of enormous publicly traded carriers.
Six publicly traded carriers (United, Humana, CVS/Aetna, Elevance/Anthem, CIGNA and Centene) accounted for 69% of MA’s 34.6 million enrollment as of November 2024. Kaiser, the “founder” of the motion, added one other 5.5%. The highest two MA plans, United and Humana, account for nearly 46% of MA’s enrollment! Sixty p.c of United and CVS/Aetna’s medical health insurance premium stream and 90% of Humana’s now come from this single program, in response to a current Financial institution of America evaluation.
Nonetheless, owing to the aggressive promotional activism of consultants and personal fairness financed “administration providers organizations”, the median MA plan enrollment is lower than 2000 lives (!). Throughout the 2010’s, Medicare Benefit turned an business in and of itself. A tremendous variety of small hospital and doctor sponsored plans are combating over lower than 1 / 4 of MA enrollment, and, predictably, shedding cash on each subscriber (detrimental 5% margins are typical). Some communities have as many as forty MA plans competing for his or her share of this profitable market.
The Rise of Machine Pushed Managed Care
The massive nationwide carriers rely, in flip, on a posh community of contractors to handle their Medicare Benefit care administration and fee. A shadowy business populated with billion greenback excessive tech corporations nobody within the care system had ever heard of–with names like Emdeon (now Change Healthcare,), Equian, MultiPlan (taken private by Carlyle in 2024), naviHealth, Signify and Cotiviti–emerged to service well being plans with automated programs to overview hospital and doctor claims previous to fee.
These corporations used AI pushed machine studying to investigate and course of the stream of a whole bunch of billions of {dollars} in medical claims. A big fraction of these claims are denied, both due to information errors within the claims themselves, or as a result of AI guidelines engines kicked them out for not conforming to continuously evolving medical necessity standards.
Prior authorization, a forty-year-old HMO expense management instrument for managing “elective care”, has been augmented by “potential pre-payment overview” utilized after hospitals have admitted and cared for sufferers and submitted insurance coverage claims. In accordance with the American Medical Affiliation, every working towards doctor within the US is required to submit 45 prior authorization requests for their patients each week.
Hospitals noticed, in some instances, a doubling of claims denials or repricing in only a twelve to eighteen-month interval after 2016 based mostly on these automated “potential” opinions. This surge of machine-driven denials performed a serious function within the mysterious 39% plummet in hospital working earnings seen in 2016 and 2017.
A key issue within the wave of denials was the elevated centrality of hospital emergency admissions as the principle gateway to advanced and costly inpatient care. Upwards of 70% of patients in lots of well being programs are admitted via the emergency room and care is rendered to these sufferers on an pressing foundation.
With main care physicians withdrawing from hospital apply, selections to confess sufferers to hospitals had been more and more made by employed physicians or doctor contractors to the hospital, lots of whom are “out of community” with the insurance coverage carriers, and beneath restricted management by the hospitals themselves.
After-the-fact denials by insurers typically end in sudden increased payments to sufferers with excessive deductible plans in addition to important new administrative bills for hospitals to trace and contest the surge of denials.
UnitedHealth Group Makes its Transfer
Following the greater than decade-long personal fairness rollup of those care managing tech corporations after the 12 months 2000 dot-com/tech inventory crash, a tremendous proportion of this shadowy sector ended up being owned by a single firm. In a surprising speedy hearth $20 billion acquisition spree from 2019 to 2021, UnitedHealth Group purchased Equian, Change Healthcare and naviHealth. The US Division of Justice unsuccessfully challenged the most important of those transactions–the Change Healthcare acquisition– on anti-trust grounds.
By the point this blitz was over, United’s $19 billion OptumInsight enterprise intelligence subsidiary was processing one-third of all medical claims within the US with automated claims administration software program–a exceptional $1.5 trillion in well being supplier funds a 12 months. OptumInsight’s largest single buyer was United’s well being plans–63% of its whole revenues.
However OptumInsight’s different clients had been rivals of United’s medical health insurance enterprise (a lot for “vertical integration”). The RCM Business, on behalf of doctor and hospital suppliers, and Optum Perception have locked horns in what might be referred to as The Struggle of the Robots–as dueling AI programs fought over the documentation, approval and fee of trillions of {dollars} in medical funds. Within the battle between Skynet Medical and the RCM business, sufferers and physicians have been decreased to mere datapoints.
COVID produced what proved to be a short lived stop hearth within the Struggle of the Robots. It is because the shutdown of routine care in hospitals throughout 2020 produced a multi-hundred billion $$ windfall in money stream for well being plans together with United’s. Denying care throughout a well being emergency would have additionally produced a whole lot of ugly headlines, so well being plans merely turned the denial machine off, in response to colleagues within the income cycle business. Well being plans didn’t need to be socked with a “windfall earnings” tax (for exceeding ObamaCare’s statutory medical loss ratio (MLR) limits. Nonetheless, when well being plans medical bills (so-called Medical Loss Ratios, or MLRs) started rising once more, the denial equipment cranked up once more, and the battle resumed.
Physicians have been collateral injury on this battle, as a result of an enormous fraction of their accessible apply time, as a lot as half of their whole hours, is now spent minutely documenting each single scientific choice they make of their digital well being report system, feeding the AI denial machine information.
Digital well being data had been touted as a revolutionary instrument for bettering scientific productiveness. As an alternative, they’ve turn out to be an all-seeing surveillance mechanism- a 24/panopticon surveilling doctor exercise of behalf of huge insurance coverage carriers, and depriving sufferers of direct care time spent with their physicians and different caregivers.
Skynet Crashes!
It didn’t take greater than eighteen months for the historic Optum roll-up of medical claims administration software program and providers to explode in United’s face. On Feb 21, 2024, a shadowy Russian hacker collective AlphV invaded and crippled Change Healthcare’s data systems, shutting down $120 billion a month in healthcare funds. Solely eighteen months into proudly owning all this equipment, Optum’s information programs had been a sizzling mess, a extremely weak mashup of dozens of functions and databases rolled up from the handfuls of smaller firms that had been a part of Change.
AlphV operatives impersonated a senior Change government, stealing his login credentials. The hackers used these phony credentials to seek out and exfiltrate (e.g. obtain and steal) about 8 terabytes of well being claims info, together with personally identifiable well being info on 100 million Individuals. Then they deleted Change’s back-up information so they might now not course of medical claims. United paid a $22 million ransom fee to revive their information, but it surely was stolen by considered one of AlphV’s members and their programs remained offline for months!
The impact was markedly uneven relying on the place suppliers had been positioned and who they contracted with. Some hospital programs whose medical health insurance payers used different distributors than Change noticed no financial hurt. Different noticed 100% of their money stream crash to zero {dollars} and commenced incurring, in some instances, seven or eight determine weekly working losses. Doctor practices all throughout the US had been crippled, and house owners had been placing their payrolls for nurses and physicians on their private bank cards or acquiring private loans from their banks.
The Change outage was slowly restored over a 4 month interval. United/Optum has admitted thus far to $3 billion in direct bills for restoring their information programs. Lawsuits in search of to recuperate damages from United for the additional price of months of submitting and monitoring paper medical claims stay unresolved.
Whereas 100 million sufferers and their households skilled violations of their medical privateness, the Change hack revealed a serious nationwide safety problem. Absolutely one-third of all medical funds and one fifth of US GDP had been flowing via a single personal firm’s leaky pipes. International hackers have right this moment the aptitude of reaching into United’s information programs and principally crippling the US healthcare system. After a scorching Might Senate Finance Committee hearing, the US Congress took no motion to shut this gaping gap in information safety for a key piece of US infrastructure. Skynet Medical is now again in operation.
Managed Care within the 21st Century
A managed care motion which started greater than seventy years in the past by empowering clinicians to handle look after populations of their communities inside a hard and fast funds has devolved, by levels, into an more and more data-driven money administration system run by AI on behalf of huge, publicly traded well being care conglomerates. Physicians pay an enormous tax in time diverted from affected person care, and sufferers bear an unpredictable and unmanageable degree of financial threat for well being care over which they’ve restricted or no management. And a managed care business devoted to decreasing healthcare prices added tens of billions in administrative bills to hospitals and different care suppliers.
The early levels of this devolution spawned profitable, prime quality built-in well being programs and well being plans in some components of the nation. Nonetheless, the final decade has seen a large consolidation of medical health insurance within the fingers of a small variety of immense corporations, via the explosive progress of the Medicare Benefit program.
In its current 10Q SEC filing, after complaining about suppliers’ aggressive coding practices and growing Medicare utilization, United mentioned, “We endeavor to mitigate these will increase by partaking hospitals, physicians and customers with info and serving to them make clinically sound decisions . . .” This beneficial “recommendation” from United’s AI pushed claims administration system guarantees to revive United’s lagging earnings progress.
Clinicians and hospitals are growing managed by machines, not colleagues and their selections dictated by algorithms they by no means see, somewhat than considerate scientific tradition and human values. Dr. Ellwood is probably going rolling over in his grave.
Jeff Goldsmith is a veteran well being care futurist, President of Well being Futures Inc and common THCB Contributor. This comes from his personal substack
