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.
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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.
There is a fair amount of seemingly unrelated detail until we reach the point of this article, where we conclude it really is possible to design and pay for lifetime health costs with the tools we already have, using individually owned lifetime policies. As a part of that, it really should be possible to substitute cost shifting between the youth and the old age of one person, rather than the present kind of cost shifting from one person or group to somebody else. People don't mind taking from one of their pockets and putting into a different one. But fierce possessiveness appears when you shift from my pocket to your pocket, and the health system is riddled with it. "Riddled with cost-shifting" seems to imply underhandedness. In fact, only the simplest businesses could survive without such flexibility. The problem with cost-shifting in medical care is there is so much it, even carried to the extreme of performing carefree, with blithe indifference about how to pay for it. Just review how accustomed we have become to cost shifting as the only possible thing to do.
From the outset, Blue plans announced their business model: patients in the private rooms supporting the care of indigent patients on the wards, up to then entirely supported by the charity. Plus a third, intermediate class of say ministers and school teachers, called semi-private, who were financed on a strict break-even basis. Summary: rich people supported poor people, and the semi-privates broke even. At first, there was just a handful of semiprivate, but after a decade or so, just about everybody was semiprivate, defined as two strangers in a room. Blue Cross had an enormous unintended effect on hospital architecture. When Medicare and Medicaid adopted the same philosophy, the semiprivate room became the standard. If the rooms were small (and cramped) the nurses didn't have to walk so far, but the main driver was the insurance reimbursement formula, which was based on square feet of floor space. A square foot of such space was used as a cost basis for non-patient space in the overhead formula. Eventually, hospital architects were receiving demands for bizarre room sizes, in order to affect the reimbursement formula. The tail was beginning to wag the dog.
t
During that era, charities were payers of last resort, unless creditors were stripped by bankruptcy. Furthermore, to provide a full range of services, some services lost money, subsidized by other departments which generated a profit. Any corporate executive could tell you what came next: the profit centers start to boss the losers around. In group practices, surgeons generally still subsidize primary care ("the feeders"); state Medicaid is roughly 50% subsidized by federal Medicare, and after hospitals are paid, underpayment by Medicaid is balanced by the hospital from other sources, once again mainly from Medicare until payment by diagnosis (DRG) came along. It is when one insurance competitor is forced by internal hospital cost-shifting to subsidize its rival, that most of the outcry is heard. Employer-basing leads to different subsidies between insurances, and by a two-step process, one competitive business subsidizes its fiercest competitor. Generally, a business does not care what things cost, so long as competitors must pay the same price. In the eyes of business, trouble comes from unequal cost-shifting. Its mere suspicion is almost as bad. Working-age people subsidize the generations too young or too old to work. That is obviously what must happen indirectly and unofficially, anyway. Cost-shifting is a normal business practice, an absolutely necessary one, but the cost shifting of hospital costs is almost beyond belief. Because now, no one can tell what anything costs, and because patients who are business employees will reflect the attitude that the absolute amount doesn't matter, only that competitors must pay the same. In short, cost rises meet little resistance.
What brings the matter to a crisis is payment by diagnosis, where it doesn't matter how long a patient stays or how many tests he has, the insurance payment to the hospital is the same. Added to a determination by Medicare to cut costs, the result is that the profit margin for inpatients is around 2%. From the payment designers' point of view, it's an excellent rationing system. But it isn't, because hospital architects are directed to shift their lavishness to service areas with greater profit margins, like emergency rooms and satellite outpatient clinics. The next time you see a building crane at your local hospital, just ask them what kind of building they are putting up. Having spent a fortune twisting hospitals into one kind of shape, the reimbursement system is twisting a new shape, and rather oblivious about it. At the same time, two-bedrooms are being converted to one-bedrooms to attract a carriage trade and justify a higher price. Maybe, just maybe, the bed capacity is somewhat smaller at the end of responding to a pitiful profit margin for inpatients. Changing demographics are also a factor. Trends toward unsustainable cross subsidies grow steadily larger because the contribution of working people is certain to get proportionately smaller. Extended longevity increases the proportion of young and old dependents, boosting the costs of working people by the fact that their shrinking proportion must ultimately pay for all of it. Ultimately, all hospital revenue originates with the working segment of the population. Parents pay for their children, and payroll deductions pay for the elderly grandparents. Working people are supporting it all. Let's not overstate: disappearing infectious diseases reduced the mortality and hospitalization of working people, too. The elimination of polio and tuberculosis was a dramatic godsend but made it harder to finance a general hospital, because of the shrinking client base of employed people. The way things are going, health costs should eventually concentrate in the first and last years of life, with hardly any serious illnesses for the people in the middle years of life who ultimately pay for every bit. Hospital cost-shifting can not indefinitely support its own system because working people will have so few medical expenses it becomes impossible to hide very much within them. If you want to know why payment by diagnosis was welcomed, just reread the last three paragraphs. Unfortunately, if payment is based on diagnosis, it doesn't matter how many x-rays you have, or whether all the door handles are polished brass. We badly need a new way to charge inpatients, and just about every system has been tried. Unfortunately, it took a long time to get rid of payment by the square foot, and it will take a long time to get rid of payment by two hundred very approximate diagnosis groups, or DRG. The very least that could be done is to substitute a better diagnosis code, like SNOMed, for the private ICDA, so that payments are seen to be driven by the right diagnosis, which might tell planners something useful.
How could we have created individual policies that failed to reward customer loyalty with guaranteed renewal?
Or monopoly status, to companies without guaranteed issue?
Lost Opportunity
Under the growing circumstances, it might be possible to persuade most people it was a mistake to pay current costs out of current revenues ("pay as you go"). That is, we should have created individual policies, individually owned, that included a contractual renewal right in return for customer loyalty. And while we were at it, a guaranteed issue in return for monopoly status. As it is, whole demographic groups have come to believe that others have a moral duty to subsidize their costs. But these others know that a moral right is not a contract right, and both sides know a severe economic depression is apt to sweep aside merely moral claims. Taken all together, it is probably possible to persuade most Americans that it would be best to replace one-year "term" health insurance system with a "whole life" system, chosen and owned by each individual. People would pay in their estimated costs when young, accumulate compound interest income in the meantime and thus pay less than their costs when they are elderly. The overall lifetime cost would be less, by roughly the amount of the investment income. A dozen or so television serials and books might well convince the nation. What would be hard for people to accept, however, are the huge costs and convulsive disruptions of changing existing systems during the transition from whatever we have today, to whatever this imagined system would lead to. Asked offhand, the average American would probably guess this transition would take thirty years. Most people greatly underestimate the power of compound interest, and greatly overestimate the difficulty of doing something new.
Medicare would pay terminal costs as before, but be reimbursed by the escrow fund.
Transfer Vehicle
It would be difficult, all right, but not that bad. In the first place, we have an unusual set of circumstances involving the finances of the end of life. Predicting the average stock market price eighty years from now is considerably more precise than estimating what it will be eighty days from now. Furthermore, health expenses tend to be small for children and get progressively larger until we find that absolutely everybody will die and have some medical expenses, often very large ones. The list of diseases is steadily shortening and the life expectancy is getting longer. We have already discussed how relatively easy it would be to anticipate the heavy costs of the last year of life from Medicare statistics and the timing of it from life insurance data. That's not likely to change because no matter what other costs might be lowered, everyone is going to die. While it is true that current interest rates are unusually low, even they could be estimated, since the point is not to pay terminal care costs to the penny but to reduce them by whatever income might be generated. Forward projections would be comparatively straight-forward, so it seems likely the proof of concept would emerge in a few years. The vigilance of the public about government stewardship of the escrow, and of inflation control, are less certain but reasonably secure. Just assuring transparency would make watchdogs of the public in its own behalf, particularly if the rules prevent the individual from pilfering the fund for himself. As a practical matter, Medicare would pay medical costs as before, and be reimbursed by the escrow fund during the transition period. By the time the transition is complete, many other problems will be solved, and attention can be focused on this one. By comparison, generating the funds is the easy part. Keeping the voters from giving themselves a raise will always be with us.
Malpractice costs are disproportionately concentrated in Obstetrics.
Who is doing the suing?
But what about the first years of life , whose expenses have already been spent? (The term is loosely applied to pregnancy and post-partial.) The proposal here is to do it in stages. First, get the terminal care fund established and defended, showing benefits in its first year or two, as proof of the concept. Then, start collecting a contribution to the terminal care fund for the moral debt each citizen has for his early childhood costs, and do it for twenty years. Since both first-year and last-year care costs are being paid twice, funding can soon switch from double-paying terminal care to double-paying first-year of life costs, and eventually phase out double-payment. In time, the whole system becomes fully funded but it seems likely the dumb-bell shape of lifetime medical costs would lead to a strong temptation to spend the money on non-medical costs for spurious reasons. Therefore, the retention of the present system for employee benefits would have the additional benefit of creating a watchdog for straight-forward accounting practices. Meanwhile, keep chipping away at these maternity and childhood costs. The first chip is to recognize that malpractice costs are disproportionately concentrated in this group, so the fund would greatly benefit from tort reform. Vaccine costs are also strongly influenced by liability costs. The reader may have wondered why this article has said so little about litigation costs. It is to concentrate the focus of tort reform on this revised purpose for saving the money.
The second redirection of attention would be to campaign to lower the age at which American women have their first child, greatly reducing neonatal problems, including infertility measures and congenital malformations. Absorbing the cost of having a baby ought to assist this effort, otherwise highly desirable on purely medical grounds. Unfortunately, our system of graduate education and career advancement will incentivize timing conflicts with biologic goals. Society will have to work these conflicts out in its own way, but at least we can adjust health insurance timing to be more in keeping with societal trends.
Finally, it should be said that the Health Savings Accounts are a vastly simpler way of paying for health care than using the service benefits approach, and the payment system greatly needs simplification. Using a high deductible has the potential to preserve market benchmarks for prices which are otherwise going to induce unworkable price controls, permanently. The system of "first dollar coverage" was accelerated by a wish to include as much as possible under the Henry Kaiser income tax evasion, and it will return if we neglect to correct that flaw. Experience with Health Savings Accounts has demonstrated as much as a 30% reduction in claims costs. Linking market-set outpatient costs to the same services when provided to inpatients should be an adequate price control for helpless sick people since an improved system of diagnosis-related groups should accomplish most of it. But the main advantage is to reduce these fund transfers to money without health attachments, to make unification and substitution more plausible. That is, to eliminate "service benefits" and not replace them with "diagnosis benefits" except for helpless bed patients. A return to dollar indemnity is greatly needed, although perhaps not totally.
To a considerable degree, service benefits are in conflict with indemnity benefits, in a manner resembling the conflict between debt and equity in the financial sphere. At some point, there must be a reconciliation between these two ways of paying for things, especially by keeping indemnity consistent with market prices. The best one can hope for is to shift the location of the interface between service benefits and indemnity, bringing the friction out into public view, and equalizing the power of the sponsors. Therefore, the best place to hold the debate is to treat diagnosis groups as inpatient service benefits, and outpatient costs as indemnity. With reasonable exceptions, of course. One of the main mistakes of the DRG system was to extend it to every inpatient. Inpatient psychiatry should be paid for as if it were an outpatient service, and chronic diseases such as Alzheimer's disease should also be excluded from DRG as well. Emergency room visits should be separated into two groups as well (admitted to hospital and discharged home), with reimbursement slanted to reduce the incentives for unnecessary use of the Emergency room, not the other way around as it is at present. The whole trick here is to see the double reimbursement situation as an opportunity for constantly rebalancing the two approaches, rather than allowing it to be pounced upon as a loophole.
We started by saying these issues should be chipped away, during the period when more important issues are being addressed head-on. But the list of small issues is a long one, providing ample opportunity for trade-offs in ambiguous opportunities. More than anything else, the endless capacity to develop new problems demonstrates the need for careful construction of an institution to serve as an informed and trustworthy umpire.
Once a bill is signed by the President after enactment by both houses of Congress, it is normal procedure for the Executive branch to devise regulations (with the force of law) to implement its intent. Commonly, this process uncovers unintentional flaws in the statute, which is then returned to Congress for "technical" amendments. When there is a politically divided government however, suspicions can be instinctive in the Supreme Court that regulations or technical amendments might be written to conflict with the original will of Congress. Before matters get to that point, however, differences between House and Senate versions must be reconciled, and then identical reconciliations must be agreed by both houses. In the case of the Affordable Care Act, widely differing versions between the two houses were tolerated or even encouraged, but the House version was withdrawn in order to jam through an identical version of the Senate bill in its place. This did avoid the need for reconciliation. However, the maneuver was so hurried it required more than average corner-cutting, and potentially had to accept some un-removable booby traps in the surviving Senate version.
Republican Senator Scott Brown
A situation of this complexity would be difficult under any circumstances. But the Senate required a supermajority of 60 to evade a filibuster of the reconciliation. The Democrats had a bare sixty, including some with deep reservations which could only be pacified by accepting unwelcome provisions. And, it included at least two Senators in poor health. Consequently, differing Obamacare bills had been passed while there was a safe Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, but only one-vote Democratic filibuster control in the Senate. Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy then died, and an elected Republican, Scott Brown, replaced him. With Democratic Senator Richard Byrd in poor health the original plan to cherry-pick a clever administration hybrid out of differing versions in front of the House-Senate conference committee, became unfeasible, if not dangerous. About the only option seemingly available to the Democratic floor leaders was to adopt one version or the other and then achieve consent for an identical bill from the other house. The Senate version was chosen to survive and be forced through the House in a matter of hours, even though almost no Congressman had read it; and this behavior was conducted under full television coverage by C-Span. Television viewers probably did not have enough information to understand why things were being handled so roughly, but it added to a public distaste for the brutal tactics they could readily observe the leadership had been applying. Although it has been useful to blame excessive partisanship for this mess, it would not be difficult to name a dozen majority leaders in the past who might have surmounted such difficulties with more instinctive ease.
Democratic Senator Richard Byrd
The Republicans were given no face-saving consideration in any of these matters and reacted with outrage. The obedient Democrats were humiliated by the public watching their abject subjugation. As one consequence, the November 2112 election administered a heavy defeat to the Democrats, while sending a large contingent of freshmen Republican Congressmen with what they considered to be a strong public mandate to disrupt or even repeal Obamacare. Most of these new Congressmen belonged to the "Tea Party", had little experience with the "inside baseball" of Congress, and found they disliked the environment. Many of them had the inclination to repeal this one Act, followed by resigning from Congress after a single two-year term. Their fury at discovering the legislative straight-jacket they were in, must have contributed greatly to the polarization which was already notable. Naturally, the White House bureaucrats destined to write the Obamacare regulations were watching, dismayed by the prospect of claiming controversial opinions to be the "will of Congress". At this writing, it seems likely at least some regulations will come under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court, for failing to follow the intent of Congress, for following an unconstitutional intent, or for failing to implement statutory sections of the law at all. Therefore, it would not be surprising to find some regulations which were then written, contained some "booby traps" for the Supreme Court. All of this would seem to predict epic contests between Chief Justice Roberts and President Obama, both of them constitutional strategists.
Meanwhile, many Republicans and some Democrats are calling for the President to postpone implementation, ostensibly until the enrollment computers are fully functional, but really hoping to get past the November 2014 elections. The approaching State of the Union address might have been an opportunity to blow the trumpet of compromise. But Barack Obama has proved to be an unusually stubborn person, and the prospect of facing an opposition majority in Congress does not seem to bother him. If he chooses to tough it out, perhaps we can finally learn exactly what he had in mind for the Law. If it is of any consequence to him, he had managed to get this far without fully revealing what he was trying to achieve. Almost before Senators Kennedy and Byrd died, the Tea Party gained control of the House, and Obama was forced to work his own way out of a hodge-podge.
A major tactical part of this strange interlude grew out of what lawyers and courts call "Standing". The Supreme Court, in particular, is rigid in refusing to hear a case where no one has been injured. Anxious to avoid hypothetical arguments more properly the province of the Legislative Branch, the Court insists on hearing real cases of injury by one party against another. When a new law has not yet been completely implemented, there is likely to be an interval when no one can claim he has been injured by it. That is, no one at all has "Standing". As we will see in a minute, various state governments took the position that the law injured them by invading what the Constitution declared was the province of the several states. And therefore, the states had been injured by the law, even though no insurance policies had been issued. It will be noted the Court's decision in the case confined itself to this argument. Obviously, it reserves the right to take up the case a second time, after millions of people acquire standing, and the Court can choose which argument, by which person with Standing, it chooses to hear.
One must be sympathetic with the original designers of modern conventional health insurance. They had few models to work with and no advance knowledge of how medical care would evolve in the following century. Most major scientific advances have driven disease costs away from working people. Consequently, retirees expanded in number. The result is employer-based insurance with a little remaining disease in the employees, but which still ends at the time of retirement. Consequently, Medicare developed in part as one way to tax workers to pay for retirees. Longevity continued to expand, but initial revenues became exhausted, and the government quietly resorted to deficit financing. As the balance of payments turned negative after 1965, we resorted to foreign borrowing. It is now revealed by Secretary Sibelius that 50% of Medicare funding is a subsidy, temporarily funded by borrowing (selling them U.S. bonds) from the Chinese government.
This situation cannot continue indefinitely, and it especially cannot be extended to other programs in the form of "single payer" programs. The Health Savings Account retains the spread-the-risk feature of insurance but more or less limits it to hospital inpatients, who are in no position to negotiate prices, by utilizing high-deductible insurance. In the outpatient area, the early adopters have demonstrated a 30% reduction in costs in the outpatient area, while prudent shopping is rewarded by returning the savings to the individual. It helps cost-saving to have a defined incentive, that any unused surplus may be used for retirement. This success prompts another warning: merging Medicare with other health programs would clash with merging Medicare with Social Security.
It seems certain to a doctor that the enormous resources being devoted to medical research will eliminate at least one of the half-dozen remaining expensive diseases within a decade or two. If we are lucky, the ongoing costs of this future cure will be less than the present cost of treating it. That's what happened when we woke up to the preventive value against heart attacks and strokes, of a little aspirin tablet. Even if early costs are high, patents soon run out, competitive products emerge, competition brings down the cost of that disease. Repeat that miracle five or six times in the next fifty years, and the whole cost issue changes. Instead of worrying about the cost of dying too soon, we will gradually worry more about the cost of living too long. Medicare will shrink, but Social Security will get more expensive. What could possibly make more sense than to merge Medicare with Social Security? And, what would be more unfortunate, than to merge Medicare with healthcare programs for other ages, thereby creating more or less direct competition for available funds and program control? Perhaps that could be avoided, but choices would be governmental rather than individual. And they would be wasteful, generating resistance to reducing one part of the program, rather than diverting any unused medical budget toward retirement benefits.
So it seems in the interest of retired people to soften their resistance to the development of programs to shift unused Medicare funds to retirement. That is, to close down Medicare as it becomes unneeded, allowing the individual subscriber to decide the balance between them, in his own particular case. Inevitably, that would provoke resistance, but it need not constitute the third rail of politics: touch it and you are dead.
Accordingly, we examine in this section of the book, just what might be involved in allowing voluntary, gradual, buy-outs of a Medicare program which surely cannot continue on its present course indefinitely. It's just one part, but an important part, of funding about half the cost of healthcare, other than Obamacare.
So, we discover Health Savings Accounts are not snake-oil, a quick-fix solution to every healthcare problem ever complained about. No good idea is improved by such exaggeration. What is offered here is a long-term plan for greatly reducing the cost of healthcare, conceivably cutting it in half. It has some features which would show quick results, and we must devise a transition plan which puts them first. But it might take fifty years to achieve it all, and much can happen to upset plans in fifty years. The plan of this book is to suggest what should be done, in more or less the order of when to do it. But first to sketch in -- very briefly -- the final goals for doing any of it.
What Have You Done for Me, Lately? What I propose is a healthcare network of existing systems, linked together one by one with the retirement and investment incentives of Health (and Retirement) Savings Accounts. The short term value of the network is to create a unified transfer system to the more distant goals, providing some time to reach them. The HSA will be tempted to wander from its mission but should remain as simple as possible -- a gussied-up transfer vehicle for healthcare funds. Most of the elements are in place for this, although some enabling amendments might be suggested. Meanwhile, the option must persist for using HRSAs by themselves as total lifetime coverage, since transitional changes may leave some people without suitable alternatives. But repairing existing programs rather than replacing them--Medicare, in particular--usually offers the advantage of shortening the transition time. The long transition period is certainly what people will find hardest to accept.
With the framework in place, the institutions attached to it should be gradually coaxed into externalizing their surpluses (dividends or their equivalent) instead of re-investing them, allowing surplus to flow between low-cost and high-cost eras of consumers' lives within the network, ultimately ending up as individual retirement financing in the private sector. That last part may be hard for people working in the public sector to accept because it removes the government as the insurer of last resort for pensions. But for reasons too obscure to describe here, that was never possible as long as Congress controlled the extension of the national debt. And that, in turn, was driven by the conviction the private sector was a superior creator of wealth, not an unlimited source of taxes. Ultimately, our model is the goose that laid golden eggs.
An easy early step would be to create following-year bonuses for low expenditures within the "pearls" on this string. Much will depend on intervening national politics, and it is intended to avoid including ACA or employer-based insurance until the direction clarifies. Meanwhile, everyone might have the option of adopting an HRSA fully, plus Medicare, plus the childhood transfer mechanism. The ultimate unified vehicle would be an accordion-structured First and Last Years of Life Reinsurance (see below), although if several variants emerge, that would be fine.
The final step, integrating the ACA and present employer-based systems is left entirely out of the project for the first few years. But driving it onward, posing the threat of retirement destitution if you don't, would be the availability of retirement financing from every penny you legitimately save from healthcare, from the day of birth to the day of death. Since no one wants to die, and very few enjoy living in poverty, restraining this vast incentive must rest with its health beneficiaries, since everyone is its ultimate beneficiary. When scientists finally do cure the worst diseases cheaply, the retirement folks may be permitted to start to win the healthcare vs. retirement pension competition.
Special projects and program outliers, such as prison inmates, mentally and physically disabled, and illegal immigrants, are left for us to find solutions more tailored to their needs, and here are not dealt with further. This proposal deals with the great majority of Americans who are not in poverty, not handicapped, and not poorly treated. Surely they should have a voice in such a vital topic, which from their perspective could be considerably cheaper, and rather easily improved over present uncertainties. Along the way, if they themselves could devise something beyond golf, bridge, gardening, and travel to occupy thirty years, it would be an enhancement to the community. Arguments can be made for regulating immigration, but not ones for providing servants for a rentier society.
We begin integration with the big gorilla, Medicare. In the first place, the program is bleeding money. The first step in saving money should be to stop losing so much of it, and that definitely won't be easy as long as serious illness keeps migrating into the Medicare age group. Furthermore, it contains the most expensive item of all, terminal care. The transfer of terminal care out of Medicare by the Last Four Years of Life transfer, should facilitate this decision. Other programs may get financially healthier if we do nothing. If we do nothing about Medicare, it probably will only get into deeper trouble.
At the moment, our best dream is the scientists will find something as cheap as aspirin, which will cure something as expensive as cancer. A century ago and roughly simultaneously, scientists discovered cures for pernicious anemia and type I diabetes, both fatal conditions. Pernicious anemia has virtually disappeared with occasional injections of a vitamin, while diabetes has grown to be about as expensive as anything, despite lifesaving injections of insulin. Unless you want to gamble on similar mixed outcomes in the future, read on.
Headlines in the Wall Street Journal announced collapse of Congressional healthcare reform. In the same edition, a small short article buried in its depths described a possibly major step toward its reform. Martin Feldstein calmly observed, a tax exemption for healthcare insurance of 2.9% really amounts to a wage increase whose elimination might go a long way toward paying for the eighty-year mess Henry J. Kaiser had created. (In fact, it was effectively taxable income of 4%.)
It was all so simple: healthcare extended longevity, created thirty years of new retirement cost. In turn, exempting the premium for healthcare became a tax-exempt increase in wages -- for the 70% of employees getting insurance as a gift. Maybe not at first, but wages adjust to expect it during eighty years. Social Security could not cope with an extra thirty years, so SSA was going broke, while health insurance was actually the main cause of increased longevity.
But notice how unused Health Savings Accounts automatically turn into retirement accounts (IRAs) for Medicare recipients. So if you are lucky and prudent with healthcare, or if you overfund an HSA, unused healthcare money makes a reappearance in retirement funds where it belongs. If you have used up the money, you have probably been sick, and maybe won't need so much for a shortened retirement. Increasingly, expensive healthcare hits the elderly hardest, so there are many years during which compound interest overcomes inflation. At the rate things are going, retirement may become four times as expensive as Medicare, so let's consider that future.
Medicare doesn't save its withholdings, it uses "pay as you go" and spends the money on other things, like battleships. Therefore, to make any use of this windfall, it is necessary to save it, invest it, and use it for retirement. Just doing that much might redirect the other 30% of the withheld tax to its intended purpose. So the economic effect would be considerable, just by stirring around in that corner of it.
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.
