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.
Some colleges produce managers by teaching management theory, but in certain Ivy League colleges it is thought to be more useful to teach how to dominate a committee, eventually perhaps a board of directors, or a board of trustees. The handbook of instruction is James Boswell's Life of Johnson which is a rather large book of verbatim notes that Boswell took of his many lunches at a London club in the 18th Century. Boswell was a quiet mouse privileged to sit in the company of the great Dr. Samuel Johnson, surrounded by the most eminent intellects of the Enlightenment. Boswell carefully manages the background of each episode, describing the issue and the various arguments, and then -- Sam Johnson's booming voice settles the matter. After he speaks, the meeting is over.
Dr. Samuel Johnson
"Why, sir", says Johnson, and then look out for the one-liner to follow. We get the impression that Dr. Johnson used that "Sir" signal to indicate he had enough of these dumb arguments, and soon would come the growled epigram that scatters any token resistance. Boswell may have neglected to record instances where the great Johnson was defeated in debate, who knows. We are left with the distinct impression that if you engaged in lunch table conversation with Sam, you were almost certain to lose. So that's what Ivy League students are being taught: how to win a debate at a committee meeting, in the expectation they would spend much of their lives in committees, boards, and even cabinets. That's how the English-speaking world gets its work done and its decisions made. That's what lunches at the Franklin Inn Club, or the club tables of the Union League, are trying to do for the education of neophytes.
As the goggle-eyed student of the great Chauncey Tinker, who gave young Pottle his start in life, it was an awesome performance for me to watch. But the rules of this game never became entirely clear to me, I'm afraid, until the other evening when I listened to Peter Nowell describe in a half-dozen brief paragraphs how he had revolutionized prevailing theories of the cause of cancer. The Franklin Institute then followed the award ceremony by putting on an all-day symposium of notables who run elaborate enterprises in cancer research, essentially funded by the National Institutes of Health, your tax dollars at work again. Last year, the NIH dispensed thirty billion -- you heard me -- dollars in research grants to internationally known research entrepreneurs, and if you can stay awake during their talks, there must be something the matter with you. So far as I could see, they were painstakingly describing every grain of sand on the beach, whereas Peter Nowell made the whole beach electric and clear in ten minutes. Essentially, he was saying that each patient's cancer is caused by a long chain of events, starting with a single mutation within a single cell. All the other cancer cells of a patient are descendants of that first one, which triggered the cascade of chemical events now repeated by the descendants. To stop the process, you probably only have to find a way to break the chain at one vulnerable point. Then you have a cure, without necessarily understanding every other link in the chain.
Peter Nowell described himself as a "lumper", admitting that most scientists are "splitters". A splitter quite reasonably attacks a complex problem by isolating one small piece of it at a time; that's really a pretty good way to address overwhelming complexity when you encounter it. But you can be sure that people of that mindset should not be found in a President's cabinet, deciding how to save the world from impending disaster. Whether by their own genetic predisposition or as a result of peer pressure in their profession, they are habitual splitters. And it suddenly occurred to me why Sam Johnson's one-liners always won the argument; he was a lumper. Usually right, sometimes wrong, never in doubt. Witty as a Frenchman, but as quick as a rattlesnake. Cordial, perhaps, unless you disagreed with him.
We need more lumpers. If they get that way from the likes of Chauncey Tinker, we need to print more copies of The Life of Johnson. If they are born that way, maybe we need a breeding farm for lumpers, which is what the Assembly Ball amounts to. But don't get me wrong, we need more splitters, too. They just have to learn their place at the table.
It has to be noticed that developing lifetime health insurance is hampered by the considerable pregnancy and newborn costs which intrude at the beginning of the earning period from ages eighteen to forty-five. Otherwise, there is a reasonably manageable medical cost at the end of life, potentially preceded by a long period of negligible medical costs where compounded interest could be at work. So the thought naturally arises we might somehow pay for pregnancies in some novel way, essentially borrowing those costs against the future. What's involved here?
Instead of taxing each affected individual working person to subsidize his newborns and terminal care, the necessary subsidy could take place between three insurance plans, assuming the three costs to fall in separate insurances. Everyone owes a debt for being born, and everyone needs to save enough for getting old and dying. Society's benefits and costs of having children are not confined to those who have children. An unhealthy incentive to delay the first child has been created by paying for pregnancies this way, spreading the consequences to higher education and disrupted careers. Instead of regarding neonatal care as an expense of pregnancy (which we currently regard as part of the mother's health cost), just reverse matters, and include pregnancy costs as part of the baby's own debt for being born. Any move assigning pregnancy costs must somewhat fudge the transition cost of getting born without paying for it or even asking for it. Attitudes depend to some degree on whether people generally want children to help on the farm, to help care for their own old age, as entertainment or plaything, or accidentally. The theoretical fact is that pregnancy costs might be judged fairly split between the child and his parents if it were only practical to do it. Once those practicalities are addressed by covering the first and last years of life with entitlement, transfers become relatively easy. If we must have entitlements, birth and death are certainly inescapable ones.
Unfortunately, once the finance is made practical, other issues assume greater importance. Science is beginning to make single parenthood more feasible, while easy divorce makes multiple parenthood possible. Easy sharing of the costs could reasonably be resisted as a moral issue we never had, and now don't need. The longer you live, the more interest you earn on those first 26 years. But the longer you live, the more medically expensive you become, toward the other end of life. There is still a great deal of argument about what is a fair division, and much time will elapse before final resolution can be considered a settled matter. But ultimately, serious savings could occur from keeping the first and last years of life in mind as the only universal medical costs, extracting maximum savings as one argument for choosing accounting tricks to settle the pregnancy part of it. What would be left would be accidents and occasional health calamities, which paradoxically are the only parts of current health insurance which truly fit the current insurance model.
Let's give an example. Lifetime health expenses are said to be somewhere around $300,000. If you have $40,000 in a Health Savings Account on attaining the age of 65, you can passively achieve $300,000 by age 86 (which we hope is at least average life expectancy) by letting the HSA grow untouched. In this example, all other sources of health insurance revenue are available for other purposes -- they are the "profit" from using compound interest, but it is unnecessary for that to be exclusively the case. Now, the problem transforms into achieving $40,000 by age 65. That could be reached by investing $150 at birth, or $2400 at age 26. Both are achievable, neither is easy.
But it's nice to have some choice, which including the first 26 years will give you. You can even do it twice, once in the child's account, and secondly in your own. My guess is that about a third of people could spare $40,000 at age 65 right now, trading a single payment for Medicare for its present wobbly finances. With overlapping populations, 2/3 of people could afford to spare $75 from each parent of a newborn, or $150 for a single parent, in return for eliminating the obstetrical premium within their health insurance. Considering the problems of young parents, some might prefer to combine $150 with $4800 for both parents at age 26 into a financing package of $4950 spread over ten years, from 26 to 36. But notice it gets harder, the longer you wait. Finding $80,000 for both parents now aged 65 gets really hard to do, but at least the child is all paid up. If you wait, it gets pretty hard to do this without extending the retirement age to 70, sacrificing five of your thirty years of retirement, but reducing the amount you need to save by about a sixth. Nothing like these choices would be readily accepted. But the policy axiom remains: the younger you start, the easier it is to stretch the distance. And the more attractive it becomes to treat some or all obstetrical costs as the responsibility of the person getting born.
Before concluding this approach is impossible, try to remember it is quite unnecessary to make lifelong healthcare free to the last penny, although some will demand it. In fact, first-dollar coverage (i.e. making all healthcare seem free) is a big part of what got us into this mess. If we only achieve a quarter or a third of this promise, the national aggregate would amount to a stupendous amount of money. A more realistic goal might be to reduce projected medical costs by a third, offset another third with investment income, and pay a third in cash. All three of those approaches seem comfortably achievable.
As this chapter is being written, Obamacare has been struggling for three years to achieve its twin goals of reducing the cost of medical care, while improving its quality and scope. The public has long been skeptical that the two goals are incompatible. During those three years, we have achieved a cure for Hepatitis C. That cure will save millions of lives and eventually the costs will decline. In time, the public will be able to see the difference between the results of the two approaches. During that time, biological science has discovered the relationship between sleep and the circulation of spinal fluid through the brain, probably the greatest advance in physiology since Harvey discovered the circulation of blood in 1628. In another field, Joachim Frank has identified the function of the Ribosome, making strips of protein the way a zipper works, and very likely the step at the beginning of cellular life, operating at room temperature and without caustic chemicals. These three discoveries are surely less than 1% of the scientific advances of the last three years, giving promise of vast advances in the cheap production of protein drug therapies, saving of lives, and ultimately the extension of life expectancy at a lessened cost. During these past three years, what has Obamacare accomplished, at enormous cost, and widespread turmoil in the medical system?
As we approach the elections which will serve as a national judgment on Obamacare, it still remains difficult to say what it is. It clearly will raise costs, not lower them. It will extend a few subsidies to people who were uninsured, but the subsidies could have been extended without so much uproar. In any event, a number of people will have worse insurance after the dust settles. A regulation factory has been established, pumping out confusion, but changing comparatively little after three years of trying. It begins to seem incredible that there is so little to show for so much uproar, and there is room to doubt anything dramatic will emerge so late in the process. If the goal is to establish a regulation factory to shift control to the regulators, the public is quite right to ask what good will come of that; at the present rate of revelation, the eventual product will just be an expensive nuisance. So it seems fair to compare the final product with the Veterans Administration health system, which has been operating on a large scale for more than fifty years.
The Veteran's Administration health system is in the news, finally. Perhaps we should examine what is the matter with the VA, as at least a source of ideas about the forces which hem in any government health system. For example, whether it is a municipal, state or federal hospital system, it seems to be much better at constructing new buildings than maintaining them. Perhaps it is time to convene a study or a series of studies to address this discrete issue. Why is the system of control by budget relatively successful in an environment of designing and building a project, and so unsuccessful in running it?
Second, is there an inherent problem in setting the rules by the Congress or Legislature, instead of an appointed board of overseers? No doubt, there is an occasional abuse of power by a trustee of any organization, but lower-level administrators do not act as though this a big problem for them in private institutions. So what is it about governance by politicians which encourages the endless intrusion of politicians into the admissions, purchasing methods, hiring and disciplining processes of public hospitals? Does it make a problem to have control at the highest level be unified in a Congress or City Council, or is it the other way around, with too little authority vested in the operating divisions? Every administrator complains about staff physicians intruding into daily operations, but is it possible that the public institutions have gone too far in hierarchy, or else possibly not far enough? Most physicians hate administrative work, allowing a few tyrants to emerge, who do like it. When these would-be dictators are in administration because they are poor physicians, trouble is almost inevitable, and it cannot be improved by giving the power to nurses, pharmacists or other professionals who are normally lower in the pecking order than the professionals who now report to them. There is no good substitute for physician control, but what if all the physicians in a health system would rather quit than do administrative work? Maybe, just maybe, the private sector has something to teach us in this delicate issue.
To go on, politics may play the same disruptive role as professionals harnessed as administrators. Administrators detect and quickly resent a Union or American Legion official placed in a role which can disrupt the official power structure, just as if a pharmacist were appointed, or a nurse practitioner, or even an eminent neurosurgeon.
Finally, some new title should be applied to the type of corruption which is seen when union officials get their way in disrupting the day to day business of a health system. Quite recently, I was forced to hear the Director of local city Veterans Affairs say to an open meeting of strangers that he was totally and permanently disabled with a service-connected disability, and also working full time for $50,000 a year. Furthermore, he had recently declined an offer to work at a higher government level, at $200,000 a year -- plus, of course, his 100% permanent disability payments. There is more than a small chance he was making some exaggerated boasts, but even so, it is appalling to hear such indiscrete remarks being offered, without the slightest sign that he recognized the revulsion such remarks made on his audience. It seemed obvious to all of us that he heard such remarks so constantly, that he regarded such politics (new word needed) as reflecting a normal, legal and desirable state of affairs. If Obamacare contemplates anything approaching what seems to be the normal attitudes prevailing in the VA, it really will not matter much what is written in its regulations. In defense of the VA, a more compassionate history may reveal a plausible explanation.
It is my view that Congress is more responsible than they themselves realize, and the problem is worse than we think. Things have been trending in the present direction for fifty years, but
the adoption of the DRG system of hospital payments came along in the 1980s. It was a brilliant rationing system, but it did not work well in Psychiatry, where the diagnosis has little correspondence to the cost. After a few convulsive experiments, Psychiatric hospitals were offered a payment system so unsuitable they could not exist with it. One by one, inpatient psychiatry disappeared no matter what the patient's finances were, and there is really only the Veterans System left. The situation was so egregious that admission officers simply ignored any rules which prevented admission of a case which clearly needed it. The distinction between service-connected and non-service-connected was most readily shoved aside, since humanitarian and medical urgency so clearly over-rode the rules. After twenty years, the disregard for administrative admission rules spread out to almost every condition, and it is going to be very hard to put the genie back in the bottle, when so many involved participants never wanted such non-medical constraints, from the very beginning.
Building a network of modern buildings in every section of the country, running an organization dominated by unions and their counterpart the American Legion, within a system which most doctors in the country avoid if they can, the VA is a quiet disgrace, slouching along for half a century. The underfunding, the political favoritism, the squelching of pride and achievement and the waste, are all about what you would expect from a union-dominated or politically dominated system. But most disheartening is to watch reform efforts squelched. Under the leadership of Dr. Dan Blain, a system of Dean's Hospitals had been created to infuse the high standards of neighboring teaching hospitals into what seemed like systems similar toward medicine, reformed by the Flexner Report in 1914. For a few years, it seemed to be working, but in time the financial ethics of teaching hospitals seemed, not to raise the standards of the VA, but to be dragged toward imitating their behavior. The medical school doctors assigned to VA hospitals served out their time, then agitated to be transferred back to the teaching hospitals, with difficulties in replacing them with the same quality, slowing winning. When you begin to see elevator operators running the self-service elevators, you can be pretty sure the administrators have lost the battle. There are thank goodness, plenty of exceptions. But nobody seriously expects them to change things very much. If you like what you see at the VA, you are going to love Obamacare.
We start with the lucky circumstance that everyone has belonged to Medicare for half a century, and before that, large populations had Blue Cross and Blue Shield. The cost of healthcare at various ages is pretty well known for large populations. Since lifetime life insurance is cheaper than term life insurance, it is safe to assume lifetime health design is cheaper than year-to-year health insurance. The present inflexibility is one of the relics of an insurance system based on employer gifts to employees who are no longer as sickly as they once were. To go further, it also seems pretty safe to convert from a more expensive system to a cheaper one, and expect profits, except for the quirks of the tax laws. At the least, marketing costs should be reduced, the provision would no longer be needed for gallbladder and cataract removals in people who have already had the surgery, and interest could be earned on unused premiums over long periods -- if we could unify around patient insurance rather than yearly renewals based on place of employment. The system would become vastly more efficient, and interstate transfers would be facilitated. The methods employed by ERISA would be a good model for a start, and its experience would be useful.
Accounting theory has it, every cost must be attached to a charge. So charges inflate to accommodate them.
What Costs So Much?
Whole-life insurance has its differences. Whole-life experiences fewer drop-outs but makes an extra profit from investing the unused premium money for many more years. The additional investment income allows the premium to be lowered because it is not constantly threatened with non-renewal, and enhanced health care regularly creates greater longevity than the original estimate. So, whole-life insurance really can withstand careful investigation as a model. The bottom line is that healthcare would be less expensive if we shifted to the whole-life approach.
This book's present proposal is to do roughly the same thing, converting term health insurance into lifetime health insurance, year by year. After all, that would start from a 15-million subscriber base. That's just the basic revenue source, however. Health insurance has a number of jumbled issues during a long transition period. The purpose of stressing the life insurance model first is to overcome a natural suspicion that we intend to claim magical powers of predicting the future. That risk is assumed to be stipulated, and we will not bore you with constantly repeating it.
Let's start at the far end, with the final answer to the test. In the year 2000 dollars, the average American spends an average of $325,000 on health care in a lifetime. Women spend about 10% more than men. The main problem is to take a lump of money at the end and restore it to different young people as they get sick. When they remain well, the problem of balance transfers is fairly simple. To ensure the entire lives of 340 million Americans, the cost would be trillions of dollars. That's 110,500 trillion, in fact, give or take a few trillion. Or 110 of whatever is one thousand times bigger than a trillion. The original mind-boggling figures were developed by Michigan Blue Cross from its own data and confirmed by several federal agencies; the future projections are my own. By the end of this book, we will have suggested it should be possible -- to cut that figure in half, without changing the medical part of it very much.
It is legitimate to be skeptical since a ninety-year lifetime history involves a great many diseases we don't see any more. They afflicted many people who would have been readily cured with present medications except the drugs weren't invented. As if that weren't complex enough, it also involves predictions about the health costs of people who are still alive, destined to be treated with drugs nobody has seen, yet. To hammer this last point home, it is roughly estimated that fifty percent of drugs now in use, was not available only seven years ago. Since we must go back ninety years to get data about the childhood illnesses of our presently oldest citizens, the unreliability of also looking ninety years forward from 2015 must be clear. And to do that for a population constantly in the transition from very young to very old is daunting, indeed. But the facts of life, that people are born, go to school, get jobs, get sick, and then die -- never change. What's new, is it takes longer to run the course, and thus opens up gaps between steps. If we gather the gaps and meanwhile charge premiums on the longer time intervals, we produce a brand new source of revenue. While the intricacies sound complicated, in the end, we rely on going from a more expensive process to a cheaper one, assuming the transition costs can be supported.
The value of attempting it is considerable. We already have a technique which the statistical community agrees is reasonable, which tells us lifetime insurance would require something over $350,000 per person. Future trends can be estimated well enough, to show whether costs-after-inflation are going up or down, and roughly by how much. A penny in 1913 money is called a dollar today, just for illustration. Naturally, we then assume a dollar today will be called 100 dollars, a century from now. Regardless of numbers games with the value of a dollar, we have a tool to estimate the general magnitude of health costs, and by how much they will likely change. It's useful, even when its answers are surprising.
Theoretically, there is room for a change in expectations. Some people may decide living eighty years is long enough, and then decline to pay for more. However, I've tried it, and I don't feel eighty is enough. So, for my own benefit if for no better reason, I decided to see what could be done with the cost problem. One solution is to work longer than retiring at age 65. If future medical care changes direction drastically, its payment system might also be forced to change. But if health care doesn't change much, the payment system won't need to predict the future. That reasoning reflects the insurance industry's own history, where the marketing department eventually asserts dominance over the actuaries, by declaring it is more important to predict generally, than with precision.
The approach has its limits. Health insurance did historically underestimate how much the payment system could warp the medical one over long periods, primarily because it initially misapprehended who its customers were. Payment methodology is now relentless in persuading its true customers, who are businessmen in the Human Relations departments of large corporations. They don't like to hear it phrased that way, but we now have a four-party system, not just a third party insurance, and its fourth-party directors, big employers. As corporate taxes rose, the system invented by Henry Kaiser in 1944 used corporate tax deductions to fund the third-party system with 60-cent dollars. In fairness to Mr. Kaiser, much of the system has migrated to take advantage of the tax deduction, and the tax rates themselves are higher.
Looking back over an expedient system designed for short-term goals, a shocking realization now begins to dawn: most current "reform" thinking is about how to twist the medical system to fit some unrelated budget. Even more shocking is the business customers discovered how modified tax laws could let them buy health insurance with a discounted business dollar. When donated to employees, another 15 or 20 cents could be clipped off. Obviously, if health insurance is subsidized by business tax deductions, and Medicare is 50% subsidized directly by tax infusion, health reform can't claim to be a reform until finance is fixed. Essentially, the employer-based system amounts to this: by giving health insurance instead of salary, the employer skips paying for extraneous things which have been linked to the salary level. Union domination of state legislatures has assisted this goal. Just, for example, the Philadelphia wage tax is based on 4% of wages, the New Jersey income tax is based on wages, and so on. If you can find a way to pay the same, but claim the pay packet is smaller, you've got the idea.
Gradually we reach the point of rebellion; if it is legitimate for insurance executives to tell physicians how to practice medicine, it must, of course, be equally legitimate for physicians to re-design the payment system. So let's have a go at it.
Footnote: In the thirty years since I wrote The Hospital That Ate Chicago about medical costs, the newspapers report physician reimbursement has progressively diminished from 19%, to 7% of total "healthcare" costs, so perhaps now it's legitimate for some related professions to answer a few cost questions, too.
As patient readers will gradually see, considerable extra money is already in the financial system, leaving difficult problems of how to get it out and spread it around. This isn't snake oil or a mirage. The beneficiaries would scarcely see any difference in medical care if Health Savings Accounts fulfilled their promise. But frankly, the insurance providers would have to make some wrenching changes. Since millions make their living from sticking with the present, it is undoubtedly harder to design a new system which would please them. We're not going to mention it further in this book, but the easiest way to remove a big business from the equation would be to eliminate the corporate income tax and shift the tax to individual stockholders. It is not corporate revenue which finances the medical system, it is corporate tax deduction, largely because we have imposed a system of double taxation of corporate profits. Eliminate one of the taxes, and business might complain less about losing the tax deduction. Meanwhile, health insurers would have a new line of work offered to them. Corporate officers should, and often do, regard themselves as custodians of the capital in use, which in fact belongs to the shareholders.
What about the public? Well, medical care now costs 18% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 18% is pretty surely crowding out other things the public might prefer to buy. In a sense, the political beauty of the premium-investment proposal we are about to unfold lies in its primary aim of cutting net costs by only adding new revenue. Critics will say we pretend to lower costs by raising them. But essentially the money is spent to eliminate hidden subsidies and red tape which are off the books, and by other means which have been overlooked in the past. The accounting theory is that every cost must be attached to a charge, so charges have been inflated to accommodate that notion.
Obstetrics. In this segment we examine the pros and cons of what we have already proposed, the donation of obstetrical costs, whether by the government or by compelling relatives to do it, and whether to every child or only in hardship cases. As a conservative, I sympathize with the conservative response of the "slippery slope" rejoinder, but even if the idea is rejected for such understandable concerns, I believe discussion of it is warranted. We seem to have forgotten what an important obstacle to healthcare financing is presented by this comparatively minor expense, coming at such a vulnerable moment. In one sense, there's no hope of waiting it out; obstetrical costs will be awkward, forever. The approach I favor is to donate the cost at birth to an HSA, wait ninety years, and see it reduced 500-fold. The main problem is keeping its custodians honest.
No matter how prosperous our country becomes, the birth of children always occurs at a time of marginal finances for the parents, zero finances for the baby, and considerable cost for the event. The cost impact will always present the alternatives to not having more children afterward. Thus the decision to have children is left in the hands of a couple whose goals may vary from those of Society. Furthermore, although the cost may appall the parents, it isn't great enough to justify alternative methods of obstetrical delivery. The amount of hospital internal cost-shifting -- and malpractice claims -- is so great that stripped away, the true cost no longer justifies a shift to less-trained providers or to home births. These are make-shifts, which ultimately prove not to save money. Do the procedure the best way you know, and find a different way to pay for it in the long run.
If economists are correct, our only choice is which parties must share the cost of "eating the loss". Economists also tell us adding new population is the main way to increase the growth of our economy. If both are the case, then the real dispute lies between immigration and increasing our birthrate. Arguments could be made in either direction, except our politics now place both contending groups in the same political party. Intervening in the argument often amounts to taking the choice away from the people directly at odds, thus decreasing the likelihood of a satisfying outcome.
In my mind, that last concern might justify procrastination in most major social distortions except this one. No more than a fifth or even a tenth of the rest of the world has reached our level of prosperity, but they are trying. China and India have applied drastic methods to reduce their overpopulation, and with luck will succeed. Therefore, while the supply of potential immigrants remains immense, it is foreseeably self-correcting. While the impoverished segment of the population shows scant sign of recognizing it, their economic future lies in continuing to outnumber them until the supply of immigrants has a chance to decline.
The Battlefield. It starts with birth, where a hospital can't refuse to deliver an uninsured baby when the mother goes into labor because the baby won't wait. When the bad debts from this source begin to be a problem, the distraught administrator has little option but to close the whole obstetrical unit. "We don't deliver babies" may be an effective way of stopping obstetrical bad debts, but it generates problems for even families who have insurance. Long before the hospital is driven to this resort, you can be sure the obstetricians have been delivering free care. Afterward, they can't do even that. A lot of people suffer indignities and worse from this situation, especially when the government offers scant reimbursement. And yet, within a few years, almost all of those children had some kind of job, making it possible for them to pay old debts. A few even became basketball stars or concert singers, but by that time the hospitals don't even keep records for debt collection. In retrospect, many of those debts were at least partially collectible, but in fact, hardly any were collected. Eventually, the Maternal Care Act was passed, eventually forming the basis for Medicaid. Surely, that was a far more expensive way to address the problem -- and an unsatisfactory one-- than to make a hundred-dollar donation, once, and wait for income to accumulate.
Social Change After Childhood. I caution we may not be ready for more, for some time. Without a firm commitment to stop at that point, attempting to equalize gender costs will be much slower if it works at all. There is a limit to what society is willing to change, especially if it takes decades to show results, and particularly after similar attempts have been unrewarded in the past. I recognize we have a recreational drug problem, an employment unfairness, and a host of marriage disturbances. But the volume of a complaint is insufficient reason to court failure by overreaching.
This book will appear in print around the time of the November 2016 presidential election, and therefore have little effect on its outcome. I expect the election to polarize both political parties still further on the Affordable Care Act, sucking all the oxygen out of the room, as the expression goes. It is likely to create a sort of lame-duck situation during November and December, no matter who wins. Therefore, I decided to present a book which superficially seems to have little to say about the Affordable Care Act, in order to grasp the microphone first, about health issues which got ignored by the Affordable Care uproar. Even when discussion seems to focus on the A.C.A., trade-offs are blithely apt to ignore "germane-ness". And thus get to issues which have been debated very little, and pass very quickly. This book primarily attempts to do two things to re-focus attention:
1. To draw attention to the Health Savings Account legislation as a fall-back from almost any deadlock. HSA is already enacted, tested, and distributed. If Congress reaches a deadlock, the HSA is existing law, and anybody in a jam can simply go down the street and buy one. It's simple and cheap to get started, is approximately as inexpensive as any other health insurance, and you can discard it whenever you like. (Naturally, I hope people will keep it.)
It does have a few flaws, which I hope Congress might correct. It unnecessarily limits buyers to people who are employed. That seems purposeless to me, while it prevents minor children from being enrolled, limits the deposit of funds to a fixed amount of their own money, and forces people out of the HSA at age 65. Forcing people to drop it as they acquire Medicare, impairs one of its most important virtues, the incentive to apply unspent money to retirement living, just at the time they are likely to retire. Some people will have other retirement sources and time-tables, and wish to defer use of some or all of them. Getting back to children, permitting deposits at birth would add at least twenty years to the compound interest period available preceding retirement, allowing the retirement fund to grow four times as large. Dropping the age and employment limits would not require more than a few sentences of an amendment, and provide maximum flexibility.
2. We also portray universal Health Savings (and Retirement) funds as potentially "a string holding together a necklace of pearls". To do that requires major legislation, going far beyond emergency stop-gaps for deadlocks. It's potentially a program for health, phased in over a century, and including the possibility of even including ACA. Since one Congress cannot bind a successor, it provides a road map through ten or more changes of political control in Washington, adding or subtracting individual programs which sometimes have little relation with each other. As a matter of fact, if an attachment is voluntary, you can have other parallel programs without attaching them, if you prefer.
By happenstance, reform could start with one "pearl" already in place. By the legislation's automatic transfer to an Individual Retirement Account at the onset of Medicare coverage, every subscriber in effect would immediately possess one of the essential ingredients of a lifetime health and retirement funding system. That even generates coherence, symbolizing prolonged longevity as a result of earlier health care. On the other hand, it implies the present configuration of Medicare is perpetual when it already has a number of features which should be changed. Therefore, it is essential to state at the outset that the string, the HRSA, intends to be kept as simple as possible so that amendment complexity is concentrated into the "pearls" themselves. After doing so, the HSA can remain versatile enough to suffice for newborns, mentally handicapped and billionaires, alike. It might provide healthcare for prisoners in custody as well as the marooned Medicare copayment supplements. Some things wouldn't work and can be dropped without upsetting the whole system. The expression is KISS -- which they tell me means keep it simple, stupid.
The basic structure is to divide health finance into two parts, one for everyday routine expenditures, and the other for bare-bones, cheap, insurance -- for people who are too sick in bed to be bothered with haggling over finances. If there is anything left over at age 65, it can be spent for retirement and serves as a life-long incentive to be frugal about health expenses. It's for everybody, not just some demographic group. If the government chooses to subsidize certain groups, then that becomes an independent topic, sharing a common framework, hanging separately from the necklace as it were. At the moment, it's one serious technical flaw is to imply total control over investment policy lies in the hands of any corporation which manages it, leading eventually to suboptimal investment performance for customers. Also, limiting management to visible fees rather than invisible profit-competition should allow plenty of room for shopping between managers.
Having established the basic framework and pointed out its present main -- but correctable -- flaws (management control of investment, and mandatory management participation in profits), we added two potential pearls to the necklace. One is the two parts (80/20) of Medicare with its finances unified, and the other is to provide health coverage for children up to the age of 25. These are both sensitive topics and may take the protracted debate to get the mechanics right. When these two programs have finally got their books balanced by deciding who pays for what, they are ready for voluntary acceptance into HSAs, and they remain eligible to be tossed out if unexpected problems surface, once we get over any notion of infallibility. Balancing the books may include subsidies, but the subsidies for poor or the handicapped must reasonably result in balanced books. It is intended to be an insurance design, not a subsidy originator. A design, not a budget; the government may subsidize as it pleases without changing the design. The government has a right, even a duty, to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves. But deficit financing is not wise: if you are going to subsidize, subsidize the pearls, not the string. This wouldn't eliminate politics, it merely shifts politics to a less dangerous level.
At that point, we now stop detailed planning and merely list seven more "pearls" which might be added on the same terms. They would be special programs for difficult situations, like prisoners in custody, physically or mentally handicapped to the point of not being self-sufficient, and aliens within our borders. We are told the aggregate of these three groups alone is thirty million people.
When it comes time to negotiate the Affordable Care Act, between twenty and forty million more are eligible to become self-financed "pearls" after the ACA finds a way to balance its books. It is not intended to subsidize other subsidies linked to programs. That's the government's job. Unfortunately, the government has tended to raise prices for people struggling to pay their bills by subsidizing other people who cannot. The consequence is even more people cannot afford their own care, threatening to sink the lifeboat for everybody. If we are to subsidize the health care of some part of the population, let the money come from defense, or agriculture, or infrastructure, not from the quality of healthcare of some other person.
To continue the list, additional pearls for the future are the accumulated debts of fifty years of deficits, and the tax deduction-supported gifts of health insurance from employers to employees. I'd like to see some resolution of the mess left behind by Maricopa Medical Society v. Arizona decision of the Supreme Court. As these problems get worked out to be self-sufficient, they become eligible to become "pearls" as long as it remains clear this proposal is not a cross-subsidy vehicle. At the moment, the ACA shows no signs of adding anything to the HRSAs except more deficits, making solutions more difficult to find. Just because we see no end to problems, shouldn't keep us from getting started. In particular, when the ACA is addressed, out goes the oxygen from the room, diverting attention from anything except expedients. That should not be necessary. All of these problems can be worked on simultaneously.
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It is now time to identify the financial maneuvers which promise partial success. It isn't true there is only one principle involved, but there is certainly one main one. Almost all of the magic of money creation in this proposal is provided by stretching out the time for income earning. A longer earning period takes advantage of the rock-solid principle of compound interest rising at the end of its investment period. To return to our oft-repeated formula, money earning 7% will double in 10 years, so 2,4, 8, 16 reaches 512x magnification in 90 years. From age 80 to 90 the money grows 128-fold., so an original investment of $100 grows from $25,600 to $51,200 between the ages of 80 and 90 or $2,560 per year for a $100 investment. That is, it's not growing at 7%; during those last 10 years, it's growing at 256%. And it's not magic, it's just math. Furthermore, it's not new. The ancient Greek Aristotle complained about the unfairness of it because he was seeing it as a debtor. So that suggests a related strategy: wherever possible, position citizens as creditors, not as debtors.
What's new about this whole thing is the extension of longevity. In Aristotle's day, it was considered remarkable to live to be forty years old. In our era, life expectancy at birth is moving from 80 toward 90. So today it's not a pipe dream, it's a realistic strategy. But stretching it out automatically comes with problems, too. There's a greater risk, fifty years of extra opportunity for someone to chisel it from you. History is replete with examples of kings who shaved gold coins, financiers who took more profit for themselves than for their investors, central banks who give you back a penny when you invested a dollar a century earlier. If you win a war, you might emerge better off; but if you lose a war you may be more like the seventy million people who died from wars in the past century, an experience which strongly favors having no wars, but otherwise doesn't seem to change things much. This risk/reward ratio strongly suggests we have neglected the necessary precautions required. So the proposals of earlier pages to balance the Medicare budget, etc., carry the risk that something or someone will come along and divert the money to other purposes. And without planning to forestall that, you have not got a workable plan.
That's the thinking underneath the dispersion of control to individual Health Savings Accounts, just as it is the reasoning behind resistance to consolidated systems of control, such as "single payer" systems as presently described by their proponents. They all just make it easier for your trusted agent to steal bigger amounts of money at one time. William Penn, the richest private landholder in recorded Western history, spent his days in debtor's prison because his steward falsely accused him of stealing the money from him. Robert Morris, the financial savior of our nation, likewise went to debtor's prison while the Governor of his state nearly sprained his hand signing over property deeds to himself. When the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, a dollar was a dollar; now it is a penny. Nobody needs to explain what "pay to play" means. So, although we need much more ingenuity in devising safeguards for savers, we need to grit our teeth and allow some people to fail to take their opportunities. Countless teenagers who might have had a comfortable retirement will instead have the opportunity to smash up their red convertible on the way home from college. We absolutely must not deprive them of this risk, out of sympathy for its consequences. There will be plenty of Huns, Goths and Vandals watching what Rome does with its advantages.
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Suffice it to say a billion dollars will turn anyone's head; Health Savings Accounts are already many times that size in aggregate. Although ownership is dispersed widely, it is only a matter of time before some stockholders organization is formed, ostensibly to protect the interests of HSA owners. There will be an eternal need to suggest tweaks in the law to adjust to new circumstances. There will be a need to monitor the performance of managers, and even to counter the power of regulators. Sneaky little laws will get thrown in the hopper, requiring alarms in the night. Someone who lost money will sue to recover it; someone will have to decide whether to settle or resist in court, ever mindful of precedents being set. Executives will demand extraordinary life-styles; someone will have to decide if their production warrants the rewards. Someone else will have to be fired for incompetence or venality, but he will find many friends to defend him. The methods of selection of the board of directors are vital issues, now and forever in the future. As much as anything, continuous publication of results ("sunlight") is vital to oversight. The directors of the oversight body should have a deep suspicion of the directors of the "pearls" and only limited pathways for promotion between the two. Every time, every single time a dereliction is discovered, the results should be published and morals are drawn. Mr. Giuliani made a name for himself by policing broken windows, and it's still a very sound principle.
There is a financial success, and then there is product quality, which is different. Organizations will undoubtedly be formed to monitor quality, and these will produce measurable monitoring results. An effort should be made to make a meaningful match between these two report cards, with comparable groups having access to each other's data. There should be observers from each discipline on the other's board, and possibly a few voting overlaps. Disparities between rankings in the two evaluations should be explored and evaluated, and at least one annual meeting should be composed of both kinds of boards, devoted to the interaction of cost and quality. This may prove particularly fruitful at moments when scientific advances cause major changes in underlying premises. On another level, dialog should be frequent between research groups like the NIH, to see if research parallels needs..
A particularly interesting comparison might result from contrasting the regions with their 20% copayment partner's performance. They should be very similar, but may not prove to be.
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.
