The musings of a physician who served the community for over six decades
367 Topics
Downtown A discussion about downtown area in Philadelphia and connections from today with its historical past.
West of Broad A collection of articles about the area west of Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Delaware (State of) Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Religious Philadelphia William Penn wanted a colony with religious freedom. A considerable number, if not the majority, of American religious denominations were founded in this city. The main misconception about religious Philadelphia is that it is Quaker-dominated. But the broader misconception is that it is not Quaker-dominated.
Particular Sights to See:Center City Taxi drivers tell tourists that Center City is a "shining city on a hill". During the Industrial Era, the city almost urbanized out to the county line, and then retreated. Right now, the urban center is surrounded by a semi-deserted ring of former factories.
Philadelphia's Middle Urban Ring Philadelphia grew rapidly for seventy years after the Civil War, then gradually lost population. Skyscrapers drain population upwards, suburbs beckon outwards. The result: a ring around center city, mixed prosperous and dilapidated. Future in doubt.
Historical Motor Excursion North of Philadelphia The narrow waist of New Jersey was the upper border of William Penn's vast land holdings, and the outer edge of Quaker influence. In 1776-77, Lord Howe made this strip the main highway of his attempt to subjugate the Colonies.
Land Tour Around Delaware Bay Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Tourist Trips Around Philadelphia and the Quaker Colonies The states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and southern New Jersey all belonged to William Penn the Quaker. He was the largest private landholder in American history. Using explicit directions, comprehensive touring of the Quaker Colonies takes seven full days. Local residents would need a couple dozen one-day trips to get up to speed.
Touring Philadelphia's Western Regions Philadelpia County had two hundred farms in 1950, but is now thickly settled in all directions. Western regions along the Schuylkill are still spread out somewhat; with many historic estates.
Up the King's High Way New Jersey has a narrow waistline, with New York harbor at one end, and Delaware Bay on the other. Traffic and history travelled the Kings Highway along this path between New York and Philadelphia.
Arch Street: from Sixth to Second When the large meeting house at Fourth and Arch was built, many Quakers moved their houses to the area. At that time, "North of Market" implied the Quaker region of town.
Up Market Street to Sixth and Walnut Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
Sixth and Walnut over to Broad and Sansom In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Montgomery and Bucks Counties The Philadelphia metropolitan region has five Pennsylvania counties, four New Jersey counties, one northern county in the state of Delaware. Here are the four Pennsylvania suburban ones.
Northern Overland Escape Path of the Philadelphia Tories 1 of 1 (16) Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
City Hall to Chestnut Hill There are lots of ways to go from City Hall to Chestnut Hill, including the train from Suburban Station, or from 11th and Market. This tour imagines your driving your car out the Ben Franklin Parkway to Kelly Drive, and then up the Wissahickon.
Philadelphia Reflections is a history of the area around Philadelphia, PA
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Philadelphia Revelations
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George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Obituary
George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Age: 97 of Philadelphia, formerly of Haddonfield
Dr. George Ross Fisher of Philadelphia died on March 9, 2023, surrounded by his loving family.
Born in 1925 in Erie, Pennsylvania, to two teachers, George and Margaret Fisher, he grew up in Pittsburgh, later attending The Lawrenceville School and Yale University (graduating early because of the war). He was very proud of the fact that he was the only person who ever graduated from Yale with a Bachelor of Science in English Literature. He attended Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons where he met the love of his life, fellow medical student, and future renowned Philadelphia radiologist Mary Stuart Blakely. While dating, they entertained themselves by dressing up in evening attire and crashing fancy Manhattan weddings. They married in 1950 and were each other’s true loves, mutual admirers, and life partners until Mary Stuart passed away in 2006. A Columbia faculty member wrote of him, “This young man’s personality is way off the beaten track, and cannot be evaluated by the customary methods.”
After training at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia where he was Chief Resident in Medicine, and spending a year at the NIH, he opened a practice in Endocrinology on Spruce Street where he practiced for sixty years. He also consulted regularly for the employees of Strawbridge and Clothier as well as the Hospital for the Mentally Retarded at Stockley, Delaware. He was beloved by his patients, his guiding philosophy being the adage, “Listen to your patient – he’s telling you his diagnosis.” His patients also told him their stories which gave him an education in all things Philadelphia, the city he passionately loved and which he went on to chronicle in this online blog. Many of these blogs were adapted into a history-oriented tour book, Philadelphia Revelations: Twenty Tours of the Delaware Valley.
He was a true Renaissance Man, interested in everything and everyone, remembering everything he read or heard in complete detail, and endowed with a penetrating intellect which cut to the heart of whatever was being discussed, whether it be medicine, history, literature, economics, investments, politics, science or even lawn care for his home in Haddonfield, NJ where he and his wife raised their four children. He was an “early adopter.” Memories of his children from the 1960s include being taken to visit his colleagues working on the UNIVAC computer at Penn; the air-mail version of the London Economist on the dining room table; and his work on developing a proprietary medical office software using Fortran. His dedication to patients and to his profession extended to his many years representing Pennsylvania to the American Medical Association.
After retiring from his practice in 2003, he started his pioneering “just-in-time” Ross & Perry publishing company, which printed more than 300 new and reprint titles, ranging from Flight Manual for the SR-71 Blackbird Spy Plane (his best seller!) to Terse Verse, a collection of a hundred mostly humorous haikus. He authored four books. In 2013 at age 88, he ran as a Republican for New Jersey Assemblyman for the 6th district (he lost).
A gregarious extrovert, he loved meeting his fellow Philadelphians well into his nineties at the Shakespeare Society, the Global Interdependence Center, the College of Physicians, the Right Angle Club, the Union League, the Haddonfield 65 Club, and the Franklin Inn. He faithfully attended Quaker Meeting in Haddonfield NJ for over 60 years. Later in life he was fortunate to be joined in his life, travels, and adventures by his dear friend Dr. Janice Gordon.
He passed away peacefully, held in the Light and surrounded by his family as they sang to him and read aloud the love letters that he and his wife penned throughout their courtship. In addition to his children – George, Miriam, Margaret, and Stuart – he leaves his three children-in-law, eight grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and his younger brother, John.
A memorial service, followed by a reception, will be held at the Friends Meeting in Haddonfield New Jersey on April 1 at one in the afternoon. Memorial contributions may be sent to Haddonfield Friends Meeting, 47 Friends Avenue, Haddonfield, NJ 08033.
At USAToday, techniques are astounding. After getting an 800-word piece, an editor by phone will suggest cuts to 300 words; the piece is always improved. Last-minute speed, trying to watch television, is unbelievable. On one occasion, after a medical meeting in Kansas City, watching a baseball game go into extra innings I fell asleep with the game undecided. The next morning a newspaper was pushed under my door. It was USAToday, not only carrying the final score but a full story, under a color photo of the winning play. Just consider the precision Chicago reporting, Washington DC editing, Kansas City printing and local delivery that took place in seven hours. By contrast in book publishing, a full year often intervenes between manuscript submission and actual bookstore sales.
So on a certain Monday night, the editor called. The Senate Majority Leader, George Mitchell, finally was to unveil the Clinton Health Proposal tomorrow morning. Would I please submit an editorial to run in the morning paper; he would supply the title. It was to be called, What Should Congress Do Now? and the deadline was 7 PM tonight. My watch read 5:30 PM.
Well, what fun. After a few minutes of stumbling around, I resolved to build the editorial around the theme, Don't Make Things Worse. It then seemed natural to allude to similar proposals gone famously wrong, define some predictable traps, and end up with Hippocrates. Over and over it is thundered
at medical students: Primum non nocere. First do no harm. It all came together in my head, and I sat at the typewriter to bang it out. But when I came to that last sentence, pleading at least do no harm, I was hit by terrible doubt.
That phrase comes to us in Latin, and Hippocrates was a Greek, living at least five hundred years before the Roman Empire. Famous though the saying is, it wasn't (then) in Bartlett's Quotations, or Roget's Thesaurus, or anything else I could lay my hands on in what was, after all, a medical office. It was 6:50 PM. I called a learned friend from his dinner-table, and he agreed it was a strange business, looked at a couple of books, couldn't help, sorry. So, I drew a deep breath, said the Hell with it, typed in, "As Hippocrates said, At Least Do No Harm," and shoved it into the fax machine. The next morning it appeared, next to two million copies of my photo; so at least the editor seemed to like it. Some friends soon called to say that Senators Dole and Moynihan had adopted the line on the noon and six o'clock news, each attributing it to Hippocrates. No matter what happened to the Clinton Health Plan, it looked to me as though I would be forever guilty of supplying the world with a highly quotable misquotation.
Since then, with more time to do a proper search, I'm unfortunately still uncertain. William Safire at the New York Times, was intrigued but could only refer me to a nice lady at the Library of Congress who was a crony. She tried to help but was stumped. Some Hippocrates scholars at the Library of the Philadelphia College of Physicians were able to find a reference in The Epidemics which seems to say what we are looking for, and that reference has tardily crept into Bartlett's latest edition. Some people think Galen really wrote it, which might account for the Latin; but even that is unsatisfying to scholars. Somebody or other took that phrase, whether written by Hippocrates or not and pounded it over and over until it became a medical student incantation. Even if Hippocrates actually did express that sentiment in passing, it doesn't come through as a really important statement, and there isn't much evidence that his students were repeating it over and over as the words of the master.
My present suspicion is that vague rumors about Samuel Hahnemann, the father of Homeopathy having a hand in promoting the slogan during the Nineteenth century, may have some underlying substance. Homeopathy was a belief system which emphasized the prescribing of infinitely minute doses of medicines. It had a flurry in the 19th Century when conventional Medicine was reeling from excesses of bleeding and purging, which surely did a lot of harm to victims of, say, Yellow Fever. The acrimony even spilled over into the emotionalism of the abortion debate, because laws prohibiting abortion had been sponsored by the allopathic American Medical Association. The verbal warfare between doctors of Homeopathy and "Allopathy" was bitter beyond describing. Although conventional medical care finally got its feet on the ground, and homeopathy is now pretty much a historical relic, the homeopaths did have that big strong point. Doing nothing is clearly better than doing something harmful. Nobody takes Latin, much, anymore. So the modern medical way of saying the same thing has come to be, "The hardest thing to do, is to do nothing". This way of stating the same idea is widely believed to have been offered by William Osler, but after all the controversy about Primam non-nocere , I am now reluctant to be too sure about anything in this area.
A software program for lashing fifty thousand computers together, called Hadoop, is what gave macroeconomics, the study of huge populations, its big push. The aristocratic Maynard Keynes, who invented macroeconomics, would probably not be amused on looking up Hadoop on any search engine, to find it is possible to download it free of charge to anyone who asks. Fifty thousand computers? Anyone can also rent eight hours of time on them from IBM or Amazon, for about ten dollars. Not many great scientific discoveries have become widely available so quickly or so cheaply.
Although the news media will probably concentrate on locating spies in Central Asia, or predicting the outcome of national elections, or telling which dot in the sky is really an approaching asteroid, Hadoop will certainly make it easier to make advance predictions in health insurance. Creating 300 million individual policies is do-able, projections of the gross domestic product are much easier, more accurate and can extend farther into the future. Ideas of preserving privacy in this avalanche are simply swept away by the discovery that much of what we thought was privacy was just a matter of being lost in a forest of data. So let us momentarily feel safe in predicting that a system of individually owned health insurance is entirely practical, cradle to grave, or at least need not be rejected as impractical because of size. If the Federal Reserve can manage a portfolio of $3 trillion, a national piggy bank for health care costs is not beyond our ability to manage. Set aside for a moment whether it is desirable to do such a thing, it is definitely possible to do it. Since small-scale tests seem to show potential savings in American healthcare costs in the range of 5% of annual American GDP, development costs need not stop us. Although the plans of Obamacare could bankrupt the nation, it is also a possibility that what is truly wrong with them is the thinking is too small. Bad implementation is expensive, failure to abort a failing program is worse. But getting the wrong design for the program is fatal.
The general process for getting things right in politics is to do something, and see if something bad happens. If not, do even more of it. But if your monitor shows that something bad is really happening, drop the project. Big Data, the process of monitoring huge amounts of data simultaneously, using Hadoop and fifty thousand computers in the desert, could be a monitor for experimental changes in the health insurance system. The trick is to include automatic monitoring alarms as enormous volumes of data flow past. The incentive for alertness is this data will be there anyway, and somebody in the role of trial attorney can go back in retrospect and show you missed a trend.
Presumably, the outcomes to measure are whether health is improving, and costs are going down. Compared with past trends, and other nations. Doing localized experiments, by states perhaps, would allow you to compare that state with others. It's rather like politicians giving speeches, and then watching what happens to their popularity polls. But it can be like counting the number of grains of sand on the beach -- who cares?
When any innovation is this new, powerful and cheap, it is almost impossible to slow the stampede to try it out. Almost anything which can be imagined will be tried out, and a few surprising things will be discovered quickly. But then it can be predicted that things will settle down to using this big machine on statistical issues which were formerly just beyond its reach, leaving acceptance of Hadoop computing to find its niche. Genomics comes readily to mind in medicine. But already a quite different sort of use has appeared in statistics. Statisticians have built up a whole structure around the estimation of large numbers by careful examination of small samples. The science of such approaches is the science of carefully selecting representative samples of a predetermined size, measuring their contents, and then extrapolating the size and composition of the original. Quite often, more time and expense was devoted to assuring the representativeness of the sample, than was spent extrapolating the answer.
Almost overnight, that whole approach has been swept away. With fifty thousand computers, it is easier just to count the whole thing than to bother with samples. The interesting thing for medicine will be the immediate reconsideration of subsets. When a study is conducted, let's say to see if a drug helps high blood pressure, a lot of data is collected. Regardless of whether the drug helped high blood pressure or not, it is possible to see if it helps the blood pressure of Hispanics, or of Chinese, or young women, or old men, or people with diabetes, or, well, you get the idea. In statistics, it is assumed something is true if there is a 95% chance it is true. But 5% of the time, or one time in twenty, it just happened that way by coincidence. So, if you go on splitting the data into a hundred pieces, it will appear to be true in five of them, when it was really only due to chance, and maybe wasn't true in any of them. That error, which is very common, is eliminated by measuring the whole experimental group instead of taking samples and extrapolating from them. So, the long and the short of it is a whole profession of sample analyzers is now out of a job, while the amount of false information is greatly reduced. Now, we can start to see the power of Hadoop emerging, although it is too soon to say what it will be used for.
Until rather recently, most wounded soldiers could expect to die from their wounds. George Washington died of an infected throat, an unlikely outcome today. Infectious diseases are now much less likely to be fatal, while preventive measures are in the process of eliminating fatal heart attacks and strokes. It was mentioned in earlier sections that the two most medically expensive years of anyone's life are likely to become the first and last years of a considerably extended lifetime.
If we could be sure of that, or its timing, it would make modern health insurance design easier. Some people can be expected to outlive a formerly fatal condition, and it should be possible to raise annual premiums a little to account for it. If we were smart, we would try to lower premiums by taking advantage of the extended time for investments, which results. But a new and largely unexpected health cost is the treatment of chronic conditions. That might lead to fewer diseases but more expensive ones. In the past, it was possible to regard chronic illnesses as incompletely cured ones, just a step away from total elimination. However, the cost of diseases in the chronic category has risen so much it undermines attempts to fund it with insurance. People with chronic disease are also living longer. Take atrial fibrillation, from which your author happens to suffer, as an example.
Atrial fibrillation, or AF, is a pretty common disorder whose causes and mechanics do not concern us here. It has occasionally fatal or hospitalizable flare-ups, but for the most part, the patients (before 1990) would make one or two visits to the doctor a year, for checkups and renewal of inexpensive digitalis prescriptions. It was then realized that a small but definite proportion of the patients would have a serious stroke related to forming a clot within the chamber of the heart and throwing it into the brain. That is, although the patients were living a long time with their chronic condition, they were often later actually dying prematurely from preventable strokes. Accordingly, the patients were urged to take anti-clotting pills and monitor progress with weekly blood tests. Although it is true the maintenance costs of this disorder were abruptly raised, these costs would have to be offset by reducing the costs of hospital confinement and wheelchair life at the other end of life. To that would, unfortunately, have to be added the hospitalization and transfusion costs for the rare patient whose anti-clot medication gets out of control and provokes a massive bleeding episode. The net financial cost and gain from this change of treatment have not been completely worked out, but insured patients don't much care about that; they would rather have a weekly blood test than the gruesome experience of paralysis from a stroke. One thing is clear, however. A great many people paid for their blood tests with insurance that covered them when they were 40 or 50 years old and eventually saved money for Medicare because they didn't get a stroke when they were older. The tension between the two coverages held the potential for conflicts of interest to emerge between insurers.
Going forward, further changes occurred in the treatment of atrial fibrillation. By 2012, several medications emerged which did not require the cost and nuisance of weekly blood tests. Switching over to this improved medication, I discovered that the co-payment on my insurance was $68 a month, for the pills alone. By the formula which used to apply, this would imply another 80%, or $270, was paid by Medicare to the drug industry each month. There is no way the patient can be sure of these facts in a cross-subsidy world, but on the face of it, it becomes entirely possible for the drug costs to exceed my share of the cost risk of having a stroke. Since there are several of these drugs, it is possible that competition may drive down the drug cost. In any event, the drug cost will drop substantially when the patents expire, and we will finally be able to estimate the enduring cost/benefit of the new drug compared with its blood-test predecessor. But that's probably not the end of it. Sooner or later, someone will discover a way to prevent or cure atrial fibrillation, generating a new cost cycle, we hope a final and lower one. We go through this history of a single disease entity for the purpose of asking a simple question: How can you predict future health care costs in such a violently changing environment, well enough to construct an insurance design?
You can't. You cannot predict what mixture of diseases will lie in the future, but you can rouse yourself when they start to grow in frequency. You can't predict, so you monitor. And for that you need a professional monitoring organization, preferably acting in conjunction with other monitoring agencies throughout the world while remaining in competition with them for the glory of being right. It might also be well to isolate the monitors from the regulators, just enough to enable them to criticize each other's work because they didn't participate in it.
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The line of reasoning we have been following leads to an unexpected conclusion. When the insurance company is big enough and rich enough, it can ride out occasional additions to the chronic disease category, calculate its per-person cost, and run a responsible insurance company. Just how big it has to be, and how much it has to save in reserves, will, unfortunately, vary with the state of medical science. Eventually, we will get to that end-game of first and last years of life, with only accidents, epidemics, and self-inflicted disease during the interval. My first suggestion is we stop paying insurance for the first year after a new drug's introduction, giving the insurance company a chance to know about its new cost center that was unknown when they set the premiums. The patients could get the drug, but they would have to pay cash in full. While we are being fair, we should extend patent protection by a year to compensate. It would reduce premiums somewhat, because at present they have to set aside a reserve fund for such contingencies, and there might be other ripple effects, like giving competitors an extra year to catch up.
In the meantime, we must still make a guess as to the "actuarial sound" size of a viable subscriber group. In the environment which thinks about these things, the minimum actuarial size of the group is about 2000 subscribers, but only if coverage is limited to a single year. More conservative theorists would put the minimum actuarial size at 5000 members for a one-year premium. At either size or in fact at any size, there is a small but diminishing risk that some quirk will bankrupt the insurance. Therefore, we must return to the insurance, or reinsurance, described at the beginning of this section; that is, excess major medical insurance. The difference is that its proper role is to re-insure groups, not individuals. Although the risk becomes vanishingly small by increasing the size of the subscriber group, some risk always remains for reinsurance coverage. Although there are many twists and turns to be considered, it is worth mastering these complexities. Taken all together, they explain why the insurance industry favors large groups over small ones, one-year coverage instead of lifetime coverage, and either employer-based or government-based re-insurance with a deep pocket. These are entirely legitimate attitudes for people placed in charge of insurance solvency, and woe unto anyone who accepts this responsibility without providing for its inherent risks.
However, in recent years society has been acting as if the advice of insurance executives is to be taken without understanding its parochial limits. Yes, the biggest group we can imagine is the whole nation, and the biggest re-insurance carrier would be the Federal Government. But nothing in such stipulation suggests that it would be desirable for the government to run the insurance, or for national participation to be mandatory, or for a single size to fit everyone. To get to specific problem areas, it is much more desirable to design specific programs for the prison inmates, the mentally handicapped, and the non-citizens for a total of about thirty million people -- than to twist around the whole insurance system which is serving non-retarded, non-prisoner, non-illegal citizens moderately well. To say nothing of ending up with forty million who are still excluded, and an extra cost, estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to be a trillion dollars in ten years. Along with with the introduction of all the other curses of bigness, plus a certainty of political meddling. At the very least, don't make things worse.
Secondly, there is nothing in these ancient insurance cautions to preclude the gathering of investment income on the premiums, while at the same time despairing of predicting the costs of the medical care it is assigned to mitigate. There are risks to investing, but they are accepted every day by consenting adults. There is a great deal of bad investment advice in circulation and some outrageous fees. We can expect to hear plenty of it in discussions about sums this large. But surely our political system has the wit to consult with a variety of advisors, and ultimately let the public decide whether letting our elected leaders administer the matter, is cheaper than losing the opportunity entirely.
Third. It should be obvious that there are many important unknowns in the discussion of this subject and a deficit of timely monitoring information. The nation needs a monitoring system of great probity, immediate responses of experts to sudden developments, and the power to invade privacy occasionally to get the data. It is debatable whether a monitoring organization should have regulatory power, but it certainly should have close contact with those who have the power to act. There has to be a defined pathway between the complaint of any citizen, leading to access to those who have the power to do something about it. Both the legal and the medical professions have models to examine which are centuries old, functioning well in spite of having no official power to act. The Federal Reserve, on the other hand, has the power to command and the power to investigate within its field; it is its vaunted independence which might be questioned. It could even be suggested that its independence rests on the public perception that its viewpoints are more likely to be accurate, than are those of whoever seeks influence.
Fourth. Let us have incremental patchwork, by all means. That is the conservative approach to public affairs of great moment. But until the Supreme Court finds a way to remove the anti-trust blockade of Maricopa (1982) and medical malpractice's destruction of practitioner discretion, things are unlikely to make great leaps forward. The path to influencing the Legislative Branch is perhaps more direct, but its seventy-year continuation of income tax preferences for employer-purchased health insurance sends a clear warning. The Sustainable Growth Factor (the "Doc fix") sends a similarly unfortunate signal.
Fifth. But who will watch these watchdogs? The careful reader will perceive how many of the proposed reforms in this book have little to do with the Affordable Care Act, except help ACA exploit public perception that something is wrong, and relies too much on special pleading. The electronic medical record is an example, reflecting reliance on advice from group practices. The dismal failure of the electronic insurance exchanges has indelibly stained the Administration's reputation as a computer authority, so this feature is now up for political sale. Nevertheless, it remains a good idea to permit interstate competition between health insurance companies, since that could create competition between fifty actuarily-sized monopolies while encouraging other insurance companies who do not enjoy similar hospital discount prices to seek equal treatment. It is almost a century past time to insist on equal prices for equal services, by imposing a "most favored nation" requirement, or fixed relationships between hospital costs and hospital prices, regardless of whether they apply to inpatients, emergency room, or outpatient satellite clinics. Strict segregation of patient-care revenues from research funding and totally non-medical activities in teaching hospitals within universities -- ought to require no mentioning. Oversight, perhaps regulation, of the whole accounting system of the medical industry definitely ought to be a function of the monitoring system mentioned in point Three.
three intended as part of a larger volume about the Affordable Care Act of 2010, commonly called Obamacare. However, that episode is vexed with unexpected developments, so I set the longer version aside lest it gets longer. This slimmer one concentrates on what I would offer in place of the ACA, or at least parts of it. I fully expect any criticism of an American President's plan to be greeted with, "OK, wise guy, what would you suggest that's better? " So, here it is.
It's the Health Savings Account, in two forms, single-year and multi-year. The 1981 single-year version works pretty well, but the passage of time suggests a dozen or more tweaks, which are explained individually. The original version has often demonstrated a 30% cost reduction among several million early-adopters. So perhaps if we polish a few rough spots, the 30% savings will spread even further. Whether it spreads any faster will depend on national politics.
Meanwhile, in searching for more ways to cut cost, I discovered less expensive variations of Health Savings Accounts can be developed on a lifetime model. Lifetime insurance makes it possible to eliminate costs like covering gall bladder removal in people whose gall bladder has already been removed. That's the idea which started me down this path. Even more important, however, it soon provided a framework for combining several advances like whole-life insurance, passive investing, direct-pay insurance and eventually, even some Constitutional reconsiderations. Adding complexity worries me because although some people will quit trying to understand complexity, and just adopt it because it works, other people will reject it, just because it sounds confusing. As it gets more complicated, it also must get more paternalistic; opinions differ on whether it is an advantage. There are enough Americans who won't accept anything unless they understand every word of it so their carefulness will keep it slowed down. Even that has its advantage: a careful approach upsets fewer apple carts.
No doubt the two versions of Health Savings Accounts could be described in fewer pages. But greater density can hinder comprehension, seldom helps it for fast readers. Furthermore, presenting an alternative without a critique would leave the reader uncertain whether I believe the Affordable Care Reform presently goes too far, or not far enough. (In fact, both things are true, because it seems so likely both government and business employers will abandon the patient in pursuit of other agendas.) At the same time, the Affordable Care Act seems politically unsustainable. It costs too much. It needs more balance between benevolence and fiscal prudence, and it certainly needs more restraint to both sides protesting the other will ruin us. Of course, we must do what we can for the poor. But we also need to stop promising more than we can deliver. In the very long run, it won't be politicians, it will be scientists who seriously reduce the cost of disease for everyone, by eliminating diseases. Until that happy day arrives, we need to maintain a lowered tension of aspirations. When government and business operate as partners, that's nice, but somehow it doesn't sound like a level playing field for the rest of us. But having business and government at odds with each other would fit anybody's description of unsustainable.
The Affordable Care Act contains at least two innovative ideas which I certainly endorse. The idea of direct payment of insurance from client to the insurance company (replacing employers as absentee brokers), is good since it reduces the temptation for financial intermediaries to abuse the role of umpires. Rent-seeking is the technical term for this, I believe. Most office and outpatient claims could easily be paid by a bank credit card, streamlining the slow and expensive claims processing approach. Sadly, we may never know the full benefits of direct payment, because public dismay at the fumbling introduction of computerized insurance exchanges could poison direct-pay indefinitely. And secondly, to go on with my diplomatic message, the ACA use of a "cap" on out-of-pocket payment seems like a simple, clever way to avoid adding another costly layer of reinsurance. The system already requires three levels of insurance (basic, supplementary, and major medical) to pay simple claims completely; it doesn't need more layers, it needs fewer. These two features, translated as -- more business efficiency, and less mission-creep -- could easily be allied with Health Savings Accounts, which in the past brought financial pragmatism to several million Americans, voluntarily. Remember, this country responds poorly to almost anything containing the word "mandatory".
However, two points of agreement are not enough innovation to balance the remaining unevenness. I regret how the Affordable Care Act continues to push the square peg of "service benefits" into the round hole of casualty insurance. That sort of incompatible mixture befuddled things for a century, and I look for little good to come of it. Except for helpless hospital inpatients with a tube in their nose, service benefits generate rent-seeking, because service benefits blur the boundaries and create loopholes. Later on, we describe the confusion and exploitation created by service benefits (renamed Diagnosis-Related Groups) as a method of reimbursement. If sharpened and refocused, they could ease the problem of negotiating prices with people too sick to cope with finances. But the wide implementation of that inpatient approach without vigilant pilot testing has resulted in chaos in outpatient pricing. Even dropping DRG and returning to the old system would now pose a daunting risk, for one main reason. The DRG system has made hospital outpatient prices -- totally meaningless, and bewildering to patients who encounter two widely different prices for the same thing in the same institution. As a goal, the techniques of service benefits should be revised for inpatients, but eliminated for outpatients, who are generally alert for bargains. Two systems of payments perhaps, but reaching roughly the same price. As it happens, this uproar is not the fault of Obamacare, nor is its remedy inherent in Health Savings Accounts. But neither system of reimbursement can function without understanding what hospitals are all about.
The Health Savings Account is a mixture of two approaches which more accurately reflect the natural expectations of consumers. It's a mixture of cash payments with insurance coverage. It can be viewed as cash with insurance standing behind it, or it can be viewed as insurance with cash to fill in its gaps. It's definitely a step away from One Size Fits All. That may make a problem for Congress to decide which committee has jurisdiction, but in practice, it is more useful to address the larger issue, which is making the customer happy. The tendency should be resisted to specify by law that one system is to be used for inpatients, and the other for outpatients, for example. That's the way it mainly works out of course, but there are plenty of exceptions. My friends in administrative positions will have to forgive me for saying no one really likes uniformity -- except administrators. What has evolved is failing to appreciate the difference between a marginally better choice for everybody, and a clearly better choice for a majority. We have democracy all right, but there are many cases where multiple choice is more suitable than the majority rule. Admittedly, individually owned accounts create technical difficulty for cross-subsidy of expensive items, and I thoroughly understand the nation's attachment to pooled insurance as a way to subsidize the poor and helpless. But other patients have special problems, too. An unwarranted affection for simplification leads to this kind of outcome.
Perhaps we do start to wander off the topic, which is saving money for healthcare. In a larger sense, it is only a small part of another larger problem, which is how to fix an engine, while the motor is still running. Neither one of the larger topics, however, is the main mission of this book, so let's restate what it is.
Regardless of chapter markings, there are only two topics: regular Health Savings Accounts, as they exist today. And Lifetime Health Savings Accounts, as I hope they will evolve, tomorrow.
On his 66th birthday, a Health Savings Account owner has only one choice at present: to turn any surplus from healthcare into an IRA (Individual Retirement Account), for taxable retirement living. However, that's a step better than Medicare or employer-based insurance alone, which return unused surplus to the donor of the gift, either the government or the employer, in the guise of the reduced premium cost. However, economists agree the salary soon adjusts downward to treat the confidently expected gift, as part of wage costs. Therefore, health insurance is more expensive than it would be if the surplus were returned to the beneficiary directly. These forms of health insurance have been dominant so long, everyone feels they describe necessary features of health insurance, rather than terms of a contract negotiated by parties other than the beneficiary.
The presumption is made the individual has Medicare, so any accumulated surplus in his HSA needs to be spent after age 66, but not on health, since he assumes he will then be completely covered. This presumption is strengthened when the employees of a group plan are merged into a group, but quickly emerge when transfers are made. So any surplus is an average of the group, not specific to the individual. Data is not available to determine whether the size of this issue is enough to worry about. But a pathway probably was not created for overfunding Medicare to create retirement savings through employer-based insurance. In the first place, the surplus does not exist. In the second place, any surplus was probably expected to flow back into Medicare to reduce its cost. In 1965, it was probably expected that Social Security would fill this need, but increasing longevity has created resistance to enhancing all entitlement programs. It scarcely matters, today.
However, if changes in laws and regulations would make it possible, there might be other choices, one of which would be to overfund Medicare coverage, continue the HSA, and spend the generated surplus on retirement. But notice this: as things stand, if you don't need Medicare anymore, you don't get anything back and the government can spend the surplus on battleships. Just as, in plain fact, a commercial insurance company can spend a surplus on executive salaries. It's not fair to say Medicare will "never" have a surplus. By design, any surplus will always be used for healthcare, because that's thought to be part of "share the risk". It's a design feature common in sharing the risk programs, although not a devastating one.
In short, the designers of Medicare never imagined it would run a surplus, and at present, it is far from it. But in the long, long run, scientists will eventually cure those chronic diseases of the elderly, and then there might actually be such a surplus. It is already clear things are moving in the direction of making Social Security a larger if not more important program than Medicare -- in the short run -- and could largely replace Medicare, in the long run. Because expensive illness is often fatal illness, a great many people do not survive it. So, one ray of hope in this situation is that relatively few people will have both devastations, so the future is probably one expensive entitlement transforming into the other with relatively little overlap. In that case, dual catastrophes are best addressed by insurance. With luck, the people who drop dead without warning or cost will equal the number of overlaps, smoothing down national expense to only two groups, which eventually merge into one as science merges chronic disease into the growing group whose problem is outliving their savings. There are other ways of approaching that problem, but at least a flexible health program could provide a source of funding for it and a general outline of where it might be headed. Notice that compound interest works in favor of this solution, and could be an important component. In fact, unknown treatments will increase future expense, but by definition are not counted. Therefore, statistical projections can show a revenue surplus after the age of 90, which may in fact never materialize.
Therefore it would be easier to pass a seemingly meaningless amendment, right now, while it doesn't cost anything. We've just shown how HSA does it, and Medicare could do it too if it tried. The more likely circumstance would be to get a reduction of either payroll deductions or Medicare premiums in return for surrendering some particular benefit, like transfusions for members of Jehovah's Witnesses. At the moment, religious objectors cause lawsuits and other commotion, just because they don't want some particular feature of health insurance, and actually I can think of no reason why we should make it mandatory. In fact, doing things for someone's own good is a suspect idea, generally.
The long-range reasoning, however, is this: in 2015 the great need is for flexibility. Some of us will need to spend every dime we have on staying alive. And some of us will need to save every dime we can, in order not to outlive our retirement funds. But that probably won't be the same dilemma, fifty years from now. Almost every one of us could be threatened with poverty during extended retirement into undefinable longevity. It strains the imagination to think of ways to pay for both the present elaborate Medicare and an extended retirement in addition. So, by that time, I fully expect people to have come to the realization that Medicare must be liquidated piece by piece. Not to fund Obamacare, but to pay for their own retirement. When you go to a funeral every week, the idea doesn't usually occur that dying too early might ever become a thing of the past.
Neither employer-based nor Medicare returns an unused surplus to subscribers.
For one thing, I expect "rent-seeking" to soak up a lot of the savings from people not getting quite so sick. Rent-seeking will take many forms, like Botox injections and cosmetic surgery. Or like elaborate hospital equipment and excessive salaries, or like too much stand-by but essentially unused equipment. It may sometimes be hard to tell where the money is going, but costs will surely fail to fall as rapidly as illness can disappear. We will need a way for people to perceive this, and for them voluntarily to start saving for it by gradually opting out of Medicare. It won't be an all-or-none issue; people will perceive it at different rates. Therefore, we need to provide a way to get out of Medicare in steps, and individually one by one, over a period of decades. For political reasons, the use of a surplus should be limited to your own retirement living. All of this is called "planning ahead".
Proposal 1:At present, Health Savings Accounts are limited to age 21-66. There should be no age limits at either end, and some provision should be made for inheritance of surplus to newborn children, sufficient to cover their healthcare up to age 21. (3320)
Proposal 2: At present, contributions to Health Savings accounts are limited to $3500 per year, age 21 to 66. This should be changed to an aggregate lifetime amount, at least until latecomers have had an adequate transition to the program. (3320)
Health Savings Accounts provide the flexibility to do this, but at present many Medicare program details are awkwardly designed to anticipate the need. Right now, the program is not sufficiently modular to permit dropping one feature but retaining others and letting the funds follow the needs. And designing partial proposals is inhibited by a political terror that the public will misinterpret motives. So the first step is for people like me, who have nothing to lose, to step forward and start talking about it. The need for retirement money is looming ahead; we need to prepare Medicare for gradual liquidizing, to pay for it.
The first step is probably to design a way to buy out of Medicare, save some money by substituting an HSA for their healthcare, and buy something more appealing with the surplus. The first version will probably be crude and awkward, but it provides a platform to build on. Most politicians, whatever they may think of Medicare and its financing, regard talk of privatizing Medicare as political suicide, so we should be thinking of pilot studies, think tanks, and experimental projects. The old folks who have, or will soon have, Medicare coverage regards it as such a treasure, they tell their elected representatives that privatizing Medicare is the third rail of politics: touch it and you are dead. But a Washington sage once remarked that if things can't go on, they will stop. So, what would it require, induce potential Medicare beneficiaries to select something else, before circumstances abruptly force it on them?
That's probably not the best way to go about it. The early initiatives should be generated by scientific advances. The likelihood is great that science will cure one or two of the big five (cancer, diabetes, Parkinsonism, Alzheimer's Disease, schizophrenia) and bit by bit, Medicare will get cheaper in spite of the rent-seeking. As it does, it will seem attractive to increasing numbers of people, to consider cheaper health insurance, shifting Medicare funding to retirement income. The rules should be relaxed to let early-adopters test the changing environment. We already have a flexible funding vehicle in Health Savings Accounts, and fifteen million existing subscribers who will endorse it.
The Problem With Medicare. Medicare is 50% self-funded by payroll deductions and premiums and is 50% subsidized by the federal government. The old folks get a dollar for fifty cents and are not about to give it up. They obviously should get their own fifty cents back. It's the fifty cents of government subsidy which is at issue, and the published budget should reflect that fact. Just notice how retirees display almost no interest in the Obamacare controversy, except for one thing. Old folks are uneasy that funding for Medicare might get squeezed in order to finance Obamacare, particularly if the two were in the same budget compartment. When the conversation gets around to that point, retirees suddenly wake up and start talking loudly. If the discussion centered on the subsidy, things might subside, somewhat.
But hold on. A retiree approaching his 66th birthday has already pre-paid approximately a quarter of the costs of Medicare, and when he joins, his premiums will later amount to another quarter of the cost. That 50% is the retiree's share of the present costs of Medicare, and naturally, he doesn't expect to see it disappear. The 50% subsidy provided by the government, on the other hand, is what concerns everyone. Even the people who advocate "single payer" systems are talking about extending Medicare to the whole population, gradually perhaps, but probably including the 50% subsidy to everyone. Since healthcare now consumes 18% of Gross Domestic Product, are we willing to see 9% of GDP go from the private sector to the public sector in extra taxes? Or in increased borrowing from foreign nations? We will have to let the politicians wrestle with issues like that, but it will be hard to persuade the public to go along with it.
Meanwhile, let's see what persuasion can do if we offer a good enough deal. For a start, let's presume someone in his late fifties had invested in his HSA while he was young, and is approaching the age where he could augment his retirement income from a substantial balance in his IRA (recently converted from HSA). Then, let us say he also wakes up to the realization he gets a second tax deduction from an HSA if he spends extra retirement money on medical care, either on Medicare payroll deductions or Medicare premiums. And if he stops spending some other obligation, he effectively gets a further tax deduction from spending the money on something else which is tax-free. Potentially, that could add a few thousand dollars a year to his income from age 21 to the day he dies. It's a very attractive goal, and while it really would be legitimately spent on healthcare, Congress might well decide they can't afford to lose that much tax revenue.
So, the rumination goes, the proposal must somehow save some money for the Government, too. If the subscriber were allowed to make a deal to buy out his Medicare, he might make a payment out of his HSA of about $86,000 untaxed, which with 6.5% declining income, would repay the costs of Medicare throughout his remaining life expectancy, all from the invested lump sum. That might seem like enough on paper, but the government has been going in debt for some time to foreigners and would like to stop doing that. If possible, it would like to pay back the earlier loans. If you include this debt, the Medicare cost is revealed as greater than it seems. Furthermore, the GAO will quickly tell you, if you save tax money, you, unfortunately, make it harder to balance the federal budget. The details of all this may be hard to explain, but the general sense of it all is pretty clear.
Let's qualify the simplifications. Different people will have different payroll deductions, at different ages. To some extent, these balance out, because if you have a larger balance in your HSA, you are likely to be older, and likely to have paid more into your Medicare payroll deductions. And to some extent, averages will cancel out and vary with the economy from time to time. A change in the tax code would scramble all of these numbers, but it's preliminary. Medicare is best privatized in pieces, and for that you need prices, so preliminary pricing should be devised for those people who for religious or other reasons, would be interested. Furthermore, accumulating money of this order will require normal interest rates, not abnormally low ones as at present. Since that time is hard to predict, it is necessary to supply minimum interest guarantees, best approximated by index funds of 10-year treasury bonds. Buying out Medicare is a very delicate matter, and should be approached very slowly. The first step is to talk about it without starting a panic. The initial appeal will be found among those who perceive a greater risk from outliving their income than their risk of a major illness cost. They are rare at present, but times will change,
109 Volumes
Philadephia: America's Capital, 1774-1800 The Continental Congress met in Philadelphia from 1774 to 1788. Next, the new republic had its capital here from 1790 to 1800. Thoroughly Quaker Philadelphia was in the center of the founding twenty-five years when, and where, the enduring political institutions of America emerged.
Philadelphia: Decline and Fall (1900-2060) The world's richest industrial city in 1900, was defeated and dejected by 1950. Why? Digby Baltzell blamed it on the Quakers. Others blame the Erie Canal, and Andrew Jackson, or maybe Martin van Buren. Some say the city-county consolidation of 1858. Others blame the unions. We rather favor the decline of family business and the rise of the modern corporation in its place.
Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
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