Oct
2

Not invented here

If we didn’t invent it, it didn’t need to be invented. 

That’s an expansion of the well-known “not invented here” meme, one far too common among workers’ comp insurers, TPAs, health plans and other large organizations.

We have all encountered this countless times…you can see it in the “Not Invented Here” bias visible in expressions of execs dismissing a new approach, front-line workers rolling their eyes during training, mid-level managers listing in great detail all the reasons this will never work.

I recall a session with the “business analytics” team from a very large workers’ comp insurer, set up by an exec that wanted to “get my ideas” on health care data analytics and the uses thereof…This quickly devolved into a litany of “yeah we already do that…yup tried that and it didn’t work…nope that will never work here…

Digging into a couple of these objections quickly revealed the dismissing party didn’t even try to understand the idea, how it would help them, why it was actually NOT something they’d done before.

Sure, this infects EVERY organization, but the infection is far less dangerous in those that value open discussion, seek contrary opinions, keep asking questions, and are open to learning from failure.

There’s a big push to get more young people involved in the industry.

Like many industries insurance is graying-out; unlike many, insurance is finding it hard indeed to attract the best and brightest. The “Not Invented Here” cancer is a major reason creative, innovative, bold thinkers quickly dismiss the idea of working in insurance, workers’ comp, and claims.

Not so for potential workers satisfied with doing the minimum, happy to parrot their bosses’ trite and obsolete views as they laze their way through the workweek.

The futility of this post is the organizations where NIH is most pervasive are those most blind to that infection.

What does this mean for you.

Asking painful questions is hard. It’s also key to survival.

 

 


Sep
8

Good news Friday…Build America, Buy America

You may not have heard of the Build America, Buy America Act…here’s why it is good news indeed for US manufacturing and construction – and employment.

BABA lays out requirements for US content in federally funded infrastructure projects, requirements that specify how much Made in the USA content is needed to qualify for Federal funding.  

BABA impacts at a minimum,

  • the structures, facilities, and equipment for roads, highways, and bridges;
  • public transportation;
  • dams, ports, harbors, and other maritime facilities;
  • intercity passenger and freight railroads;
  • freight and intermodal facilities; airports;
  • water systems, including drinking water and wastewater systems;
  • electrical transmission facilities and systems;
  • utilities;
  • broadband infrastructure; and buildings and real property; and
  • structures, facilities, and equipment that generate, transport, and distribute energy including EV charging.

All iron and steel must be produced in the US…all manufactured products must have at least 55% minimum Made in the USA content, all construction materials must be “produced in the US” AND manufacturing processes must take place within the US.

per capita funding

Building trades welcomed the new guidance, with Nevada, West Virginia, Mississippi,  Louisiana, Wyoming and Tennessee among the states that will benefit  from new hiring and vastly improved: 

  • roads,
  • bridges, 
  • wildfire protection, 
  • electricity transmission, and
  • broadband.

Check out your state’s funding here.

What does this mean for you?

Better roads, schools, broadband; more good jobs; and more workers’ comp premiums and claims. 


Feb
13

After 10 days away from the keyboard – family vacation in Mexico and gravel bike race in California – it’s back at it.

shockingly the world kept turning while I was unplugged…

The estimable Charles Gaba has just updated his analysis of US healthcare coverage by payer. Charles’ work is the best I’ve encountered to date…he includes everything from Medicare and Medicaid to Exchange programs to Healthcare Sharing ministries (between 865,000 and 1.5 million, Indian Health Services (2.6 million)…

Here’s the all-in-one view…

Despite all  those gazillions of people with insurance, many hospitals are having real/awful/terrible financial problems. Hospitals’ average margin – according to Kaufman Hall – was -3.4% for the first 11 months of 2022.

That said, things steadily improved during the year…

In the tiny world that is workers’ comp, NCCI released its review of medical inflation…among non-hospital providers (docs, PTs, etc).

Thanks to the good work of Raji Chadarevian and David Colon, we know medical inflation among these providers was…minimal.

As in 1.5% per year over the last decade.

Final note. Facility costs are increasing.

Most payers are doing a really crappy job addressing this; their bill review partners/operations are woefully ill-equipped to ensure your dollars aren’t being Hoovered up by healthcare systems and hospitals.

And yes “most payers”includes you.

To date those increases have been matched by a $2 billion decline in drug spending – which, by the way, has also reduced claim durations (way lower opioid usage = way more claim resolutions).

Physician costs are pretty much flat, drug costs are way down, and facility costs are headed up…net is you need to PLEASE stop catastrophizing about “severity increases” and other nonsense.

If I read one more survey or interview or discussion of workers’ comp execs afraid of “rate inadequacy” or medical inflation or some other incredibly uninformed and wrong-headed and ignorant fear mongering I’m going to call them out publicly.

Just. Stop.

 


Jan
26

CMS just reported US healthcare spending topped $4.3 trillion in 2021…almost $13,000 per person.

Meanwhile work comp medical spend for 2021 was likely around $32.5 billion…or 0.74% of US healthcare spend.

Government accounts for about 2/3 of total spend, among private employers Amazon has more health plan participants than any other company…

chart courtesy Mark Farrah and Associates

Old friends and colleagues Adam Fowler and Kevin Tribout’s latest edition of the Policy Guys podcast is up here. Honored to be part of the pod, especially with such distinguished hosts!

Off to Baton Rouge to get together with my friends at LWCC – looking forward to great food and better people.

 

 


Oct
12

What healthcare costs and what you pay

Individuals and families will spend about a trillion dollars on healthcare costs this year. 

Most of those dollars pay for out-of-pocket costs and your share of employer-sponsored health insurance costs.

For those with employer-sponsored health insurance, annual premiums in 2020 averaged $7,470 for individuals; $21,342 for families.

Average premiums went up 4% this year, continuing the long-term trend of healthcare inflation significantly exceeding overall inflation.

Over the last five years, premiums increased 22%, more than twice the overall inflation rate (10%).

Then there’s out of pocket costs.

Most families with high deductible plans will have to cough up (no pun intended) more than $4,000 before their insurance plan starts paying.

What does this mean for you?

Every year, more and more of your income goes to healthcare.

 


Sep
3

If other services were like healthcare…

There’s this ongoing debate/discussion about healthcare as an economic good.  Fact is, unlike flat panel TVs or cars, healthcare is quite different for a whole bunch of reasons;;

  • we often don’t know what services we need,
  • even experts are often unable to make informed decisions,
  • we don’t know what the cost will be, and
  • even if we’re given an estimate up front, that’s just an estimate,
  • once you’ve paid your out-of-pocket maximum you don’t care about cost, and
  • in many circumstances the emotion involved makes rational decision making impossible

To further explain how healthcare is different, I offer Sarah Mirk’s take on what would happen if other services were like healthcare…

How the health insurance marketplace works – School!

How emergency healthcare works – Fire departments!

More of Sarah’s work – and a lot of other cool stuff – is at The Nib.


Aug
26

Here’s what happened last week…

People who enroll in exchange programs in red states pay 3.2 percent more for their health insurance than folks in purple or blue states.  Research indicates it is because fewer folks in red states sign up for coverage – and these are likely the healthier people.

Families pay about a third of their healthcare costs, with employers picking up most of the rest.

In part that may be because healthcare now costs more than a new car…Yet one more straw on that poor camel’s back…

Yet another indicator that the healthcare market continues to rapidly consolidate came last week with news that Tufts and Harvard Pilgrim look to be merging.

A you-should-definitely-read-this piece from Harvard Business Review reminds us that variations in data should be considered thru the lens of statistics, not emotion or intuition. An excerpt:

Sorting out variation provides needed context, points to opportunity, and helps managers maintain their cool when something goes wrong. Managers should learn how to measure variation, understand what it tells them about their business, decompose it, and, when necessary, reduce it.

WCRI’s Vennela Thumula PharmD will be discussing Interstate variations in opioid dispensing in a webinar on September 12.  Dr Thumula is one of the nation’s leading experts on workers’ comp opioids and well worth your listen. Register here.

Great piece from HealthAffairs on evidence-based treatment guidelines.  There’s a lot of nonsense and BS out there – especially in workers’ comp guidelines – and this article provides a solid foundation to understand what’s real and what isn’t. Here’s the central message…

There are two core issues that lead to a host of problems. First, there is a lack of centralized authority to coordinate, vet, approve, and catalog guidelines. Second, there is an absence of a universal methodology to create guidelines—every professional organization promulgating guidelines today generally decides freely which, if any, framework they will use to construct guidelines.

Finally, if you want to understand how to incentivize physicians – and improve your ability to work with them, read this.

take time to develop relationships with physicians. I need to develop trust. I need to convey the why. And then, once we do that, you can begin to move into the how and the what. And then physicians are ready to look at the dashboards to help you move them forward.

 


May
22

Bankruptcy: financial risk and patient impact

What are your risks if one of your vendors goes bankrupt?

Health insurers have gone belly-up in the past, in some cases leaving hundreds of millions in unpaid claims.

Here’s a potential scenario, where a payer – say a TPA or insurer – contracts with a vendor to handle certain types of medical services. The vendor schedules the patient, the patient gets the care, the provider bills the vendor; the vendor bills and is paid by the payer. 30-60 days later the vendor pays the provider.

At least, that’s how it is supposed to work.

Now let’s say the vendor runs into cash flow problems. Provider payment delays increase, and soon there are complaints from providers to the payer, or worse, regulators.

Some savvy payers who stay on top of this stuff immediately require the vendor pay their treating providers immediately after the payer reimburses the vendor. Others figure it’s no big deal and it will work out.

This goes on for a little while longer, until the vendor’s owners – let’s say a big investment firm – decide to walk away and write off their stake in the vendor. The new “owners” are the debt holders, the firms that bought bonds issued by the vendor’s owners. Now, the value of those bonds has dropped , and the bondholders need to quickly re-organize the vendor to cut their losses.

The new owners declare bankruptcy so they can buy some time while they figure out what to do.

No big deal, you say…companies go bankrupt all the time…someone will buy the vendor, and all will be fine.

Uh, no.

The treating providers who are delivering care to your patients now demand that you – the payer – guarantee payment for past bills and for scheduled care. You protest that you’ve already paid those past bills. The treating providers point out that no one’s paid them, and now that the vendor is in bankruptcy, there is no assurance they will ever be paid all they are owed.

The potential consequences include:

  • the patient gets billed, and/or;
  • the Insurance Commission weighs in, and/or;
  • treating providers refuse to continue or deliver treatment until payment is guaranteed by the payer.

So, payers may have to A) pay twice for the care that has been already billed and paid, and B) do so immediately or risk angry patients not getting treated, calling lawyers, and staying out of work even longer.

That’s the immediate problem – and it has to be addressed immediately.

There’s a bigger problem, though, and it’s almost as urgent. 

If the bankrupt vendor is a dominant player in its niche(s), do other vendors have enough capacity to quickly step in and take over? 

If not, how quickly can they ramp up?

If the answer is “not for a while”, how are you going to schedule treatment, collect and review data, manage care – all those functions the vendor was performing?

If you’re a TPA, the problem is even knottier. How do you go back to your employer/insurer clients and tell them they need to pay again for services they already paid for? Oh, and the vendor in question is one you – the TPA – recommended?

What does this mean for you?

Hopefully…nothing.

 

 

 


Nov
20

Customer Service, part 2

Well, who knew a holiday week post on customer service would be so popular?

It appears we struck a nerve there, perhaps driven as much by universal frustration with big “service” companies as anything else.

To that point, here’s an example of a huge business that completely misses the point.

This summer American Airlines allowed flight attendants to give little things to passengers upset about delays or other problems. Frequent flyer miles, drink coupons, seat upgrades, stuff that didn’t cost AA anything but made angry passengers feel that AA cared about the problems the airline caused.

Then, some genius at HQ decided this was a bad idea.

This from Forbes:

Every time some bright young marketing executive tried to make American (or some other airline) more responsive, and more quickly responsive to passengers’ dissatisfaction by empowering front-line workers to offer some form of compensation, the bean counters back at headquarters quickly noticed that the cost of such empowerment escalated rapidly. The result, alas, always has been the dramatic reduction or elimination of front-line workers’ authority to solve customer service issues at the point of contact.

Instead of fixing the problem, the corporate knuckleheads tried to deal with the fallout – but stopped when it cost too much. 

This is exactly what killed US manufacturing, autos, and many other businesses. At the end of their assembly lines, GM, Ford, and Chrysler diverted many just-built cars with manufacturing defects to another mini-factory.

Auto worker using hammers to straighten a hood on a just-built car…

There, very skilled and very expensive workers diagnosed and fixed cars that had just been built. These guys are yesterday’s American Airlines flight attendants, tasked with fixing problems caused by management.

Clearly senior management didn’t understand that if they spent the time and energy and dollars to do it right the first time, they wouldn’t have to a) fix problems with cars they just built, and b) deal with pissed-off customers.

Yes, it takes that time and energy and dollars. But the results are measured in customers kept, service problems eliminated, and extra costs avoided.

Or, you can just wait for your businesses’ version of Honda to come in and eat your lunch.

What does this mean for you?

Find out what your customers want, and do it right the first time. They will love you and reward you for it.

 

 

 

 


Nov
19

It’s all about customer service

HSA’s third Survey of Bill Review in Workers’ Comp and Auto is done – final editing is in process and we’ll have the report out shortly. There’s one key takeaway – it’s all about customer service.

We will dig into the details next week, but first a couple thoughts about “customer service.”

The core of customer service is this: the customer wants to feel valued, that they are important to the seller. There are two basic ways of achieving that – thru organizational policy and by individual employee actions.

I fly American Airlines a lot, and almost exclusively. I’ve long figured that it’s best to have some “status” with an airline because something bad will inevitably happen and when it does you need some stature to get any help at all. In general, that works out. But of late, the “value” of my loyalty has dropped considerably. While I’m still piling up the miles, American seems to have made the corporate decision that it is now “Too Big To Care.”

AA is the world’s largest airline, flies everywhere, and probably thinks it can do what it pleases and we’ll just have to deal with it.

Verizon has a similar Too Big to Care perspective. As the dominant wireless carrier, they are all about maximizing revenue from each customer, and in my experience give their service staff little leeway to fix problems or come up with creative solutions.

USAA has long had a reputation as the best personal lines insurer, but of late it’s customer focus seems to have been shoved aside in favor of snappy TV ads during football games. You have to put your dollars somewhere, and it’s cool to be an exec in a company your neighbors see on the tube.

These three organizations are surveying me all the time about service, about how smiley the flight attendants are, how fast they answered the phone, whether I was happy or not with the encounter with customer service.

Wrong questions.

These are questions intended to rate, reward, and penalize the folks on the phone, at the counter, at the airport. Instead, the should be asking customers what upset them about the service or how they change their policies to do better.

Because most times it’s not the person, it’s the policy.

For example – Dumb corporate edicts about closing flight doors 10 minutes before “departure” time may help on-time performance stats, but they piss off late arriving customers. The bigwigs are missing the point – who cares about on-time performance if you can’t get on the damn plane?

What these companies are missing is understanding that people care about how they are treated as individuals, which means these huge organizations have to give their service people the leeway, training, and flexibility to solve the customer’s problem.

And this isn’t apologizing and offering to rebook on another flight sometime in the next couple of days in seats by the rear restroom. It is keeping the plane’s doors open, or giving a credit when a customer misreads a confusing policy or doesn’t exactly comply with a process designed to make the seller’s workflow easier.

So, what does this all have to do with bill review?

These three companies are all Too Big To Care.

With consolidation increasing in work comp, it’s possible some vendors may get Too Big To Care.  In fact, it’s likely. 

That opens up opportunities for others, for companies that understand what patients, providers, employers want and need, and give their front-line staff the ability to deliver on those wants and needs.

What does this mean for you?

Customer service starts with understanding that customers want to feel like you care. It’s a ton of work to figure this out, but the rewards are long, stable, and profitable customer relationships.