Marylandfs Tough New Hospital Spending Proposal Seen As 'Nationally Significant'
By Jay
Hancock
KHN Staff Writer
Mar 31, 2013 - Kaiser Health News
This KHN story was produced in collaboration with Washington Post
Maryland officials have proposed what analysts call the most ambitious
initiative in the country to control soaring medical spending, a plan that would
bring relief to employers and consumers footing the bill while bluntly
challenging the statefs powerful hospital industry.
The blueprint, which needs the Obama administrationfs approval, would use
Maryland's unique rate-setting system to keep hospital spending from growing no
faster than the overall economy — roughly half its recent rate of increase.
While some see Massachusetts as pushing boundaries by trying
to establish health-spending ceilings, "Maryland has set hospital prices for
more than 30 years" for insurance companies and Medicare alike, state health
secretary Joshua Sharfstein said in an interview. "There are tools to accomplish
this in Maryland that do not exist in other states."
The plan also discusses sweeping measures to coordinate treatment and reward
caregivers for efficiency instead of doing procedures.
"This is a really exciting proposal," said John McDonough, a Harvard
University professor and former state legislator who helped design
Massachusettsf health-care overhaul. "It's nationally significant."
The earliest the measure could take effect is January, but it is far from
being adopted as written. Hospitals reacted coolly and state legislators
complained about how it was developed.
The proposal is a "tectonic change" and "the single most important event
that's affected Maryland hospitals in the last 40 years," Maryland Hospital
Association CEO Carmela Coyle said at a General Assembly hearing last week. "The
only thing that's certain at this point in the application is the [spending]
cap. We don't know about the mechanisms that will actually get us there."
Even the CEO of Maryland's biggest
private health insurer, who has reason to welcome measures to restrain
hospital spending, said the plan is short on details and long on risks for
hospitals.
"It would be wonderful if they [costs] could be slowed down," said Chet
Burrell, CEO of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield. "But then you have to turn to
another question. And that is, what is the method by which they would decrease?
How do you turn the system on a dime? That's where our concerns with the
proposal are greatest."
The plan leaves many of these details to Marylandfs rate-setting Health
Services Cost Review Commission. Two of the commissionfs seven members are
hospital executives, including chairman John Colmers, a top vice president at
Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore.
As a counterforce to industry skeptics, the proposal may have the backing of
Obama administration officials who see Marylandfs tradition of rate control as a
promising model, said Joseph Antos, a health economist at the American
Enterprise Institute who sat on the commission for several years.
"People who favor rate-setting only have Maryland as the example," Antos
said. "The Obama administration believes that [such an approach] is an important
strategy. I think this is the way they would want states to go in the
future."
The Department of Health and Human Services, which must sign off on the part
of the plan that affects Medicare, declined to make officials available for
interviews.
"We've received the proposal from Maryland and we look forward to reviewing
it and working with the state," said HHS spokesman Alper Ozinal.
While much of the blueprint focuses on hospital spending, it leaves the door
open for a second phase after four years in which "our focus will broaden to all
costs" in health care, according to the application, submitted to HHS on
Tuesday.
For doctors and others outside the hospital systems, the second phase would
create cost-control incentives such as shared savings among providers rather
than direct rate-setting, Sharfstein said.
Maryland has set hospital rates since the 1970s, keeping
spending per admission below national trends.
The rate commission's "all payer" approach fixes hospital prices for
everybody — commercial insurers, government programs and people paying cash —
avoiding the cost-shifting from one payer to another that occurs elsewhere. The
system also builds expenses for indigent care into statewide rates, ensuring
that hospitals with high levels of uncompensated treatment stay in business.
Hospital costs have risen in recent years, however, threatening to break an
HHS agreement that waives normal practice and allows Maryland to set Medicare
prices. Maryland hospitals do especially poorly in the category of expensive
readmissions of recently discharged patients.
The proposal submitted last week is part of Maryland's attempt to renegotiate
the waiver and create savings for Medicare.
Despite their reservations, hospitals have a potent incentive to maintain the
waiver and approve some kind of new cost-control system. Although the state has
kept growth in Medicare spending on hospital admissions below the national rate,
what Medicare pays per Maryland case is still far higher than what it spends in
other states.
Losing the waiver would mean foregoing roughly $1 billion in annual hospital
revenue. But approving the new plan — cutting hospital cost growth to less than
that of the long-term expansion of the state economy — would also shock a system
accustomed to adding jobs, buildings and revenue for years, supporting
Marylandfs economy as other industries declined.
"When you all of the sudden jam on the brake and say you're only growing at
state GDP, it's like a two-by-four in the face of the health system," said Uwe
Reinhardt, a health economist at Princeton University. "And it causes a lot of
stress."
Over the past decade, Maryland hospitals have added jobs at nearly five times
the rate of the state as whole, according to Labor Department statistics.
Hospital revenue per Maryland resident — the proposed new benchmark in the
statefs HHS proposal — has grown nearly twice as fast as the economy over the
same period, according to the cost commission.
A spokeswoman for the University of Maryland Medical System, one of the
state's health care heavyweights, declined to comment. Johns Hopkins Medicine,
which also would be hurt by stricter spending limits, said it was still
evaluating the proposal.
The existing waiver caps the growth in Maryland hospital costs per inpatient
case. The new test would track spending growth for both inpatient and outpatient
care — but per Maryland resident rather than per case.
At the same time, the proposal would decrease incentives for hospitals to
perform more procedures and direct the cost commission to adjust rates according
to the statefs economic growth.
The proposal would also expand Maryland initiatives to reduce hospital
readmissions, coordinate care among providers and share the proceeds of cost
savings with caregivers.
Maryland Senate Minority Leader E.J. Pipkin, a Republican and frequent critic
of the administration of Gov. Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, complained that the
proposal should have been drafted with more outside advice.
Sharfstein and other state officials seem to "regard themselves as the sole
possessors of the requisite knowledge to decree what changes must occur to
hospital reimbursement in order to keep Maryland's c waiver," he said in a
prepared statement. "I hope they do -- because they are imposing the most
significant change in four decades on Marylandfs $15 billion health care
industry and largest [private] employer."
Reinhardt, who has
written favorably of Marylandfs rate-setting board, suggested that
Sharfstein may indeed have something that looks like the answer.
"Intellectually, the Maryland health care leaders are way ahead of the health
care leaders in the rest of the country," he said. "It's probably the most
ambitious such thing I've seen."
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