As policymakers across the country look to balance their
budgets, some are turning to Medicaid, recycling the same harmful policies
they’ve used year-after-year: eliminating coverage for vulnerable Americans,
restricting critical benefits like prescription drug coverage, imposing
premiums on those who can’t afford them, and slashing already-low provider
reimbursement rates.
Community Catalyst and Georgetown University Health
Policy Institute Center for Children and Families created the States of
Innovation blog series to shine a spotlight on states that are trying to find a
better way. We will highlight states that are pioneering new approaches to
making Medicaid more sustainable without harming – and often by improving –
care for the millions of vulnerable seniors, people with disabilities, children
and low-income parents that rely on Medicaid. Our inaugural blog focuses on an
initiative in Maryland to reduce the incidence of costly hospital-acquired
infections and other medical errors.
By improving how Medicaid and other health insurers
reimburse hospitals, Maryland dramatically lowered its rates of costly,
potentially avoidable events (PAEs) such as hospital-acquired infections.
Maryland’s initiative is far more exciting than that sentence would lead you to
believe, and we’ll tell you why.
What’s Really at Stake?
Wonky terms like “potentially avoidable events” – and
even wonkier acronyms like “PAEs” – obscure what this is really about: the
hundreds of thousands of people each year
whose lives are shortened and who endure needless pain or lengthy hospital
stays because of preventable medical errors.
Indeed, “PAE” takes on personal meaning to people like
Ginny Harvey. In 1996, Ginny broke her ankle stepping off a curb and had
surgery at a prominent hospital in Boston. That’s where her story should have
ended.
But during her hospital stay she acquired a staph infection,
which quickly escalated into a fast-moving bone infection. After enduring 28
surgeries over the course of five years – including painful bone and muscle
graphs – Ginny was forced to amputate her leg to save her life. “The staph
infection did not ruin my life,” she says, “but it has altered my life
forever.” For more on Ginny’s story, click here.
Maryland vs. Medical Errors
Maryland is tackling this type of hospital-acquired infection
and other medical errors head on. Before we talk about how the state is doing
it, let’s start with why we selected Maryland for our debut blog in the series.
The state achieved tremendous results across the health care system (not
just in Medicaid) in just the first year of their initiative:
- A nearly 20 percent reduction in hospital-acquired
infections, like the type that Ginny suffered from. - A 12 percent drop in overall hospital-acquired
complication rates. This includes infections but also other harmful preventable
events like accidental punctures during invasive procedures. - More than $60 million in savings. Because the health
care needed to treat these types of preventable complications is extremely
costly, as Maryland’s complication rates dropped so did its health care costs.
How Did Maryland Do It?
Maryland’s reforms build on a common-sense concept:
hospitals should get paid more for providing higher quality care, and less for
providing harmful care. This may seem obvious, but many states’ Medicaid
payment methodologies fully reimburse hospitals for the costs associated with
treating harmful conditions that could have been prevented. Those payment
systems fail to reward hospitals for investing in preventing the types of
infections Ginny endured.
The Affordable Care Act will soon require all states to
take the first step: stop paying for the costs associated with a handful of
medical errors that are virtually always preventable, such as operating on the
wrong body-part. But these particularly egregious and extremely rare medical
errors represent only a tiny sliver of the potentially preventable
hospital-acquired complications that alter families’ lives and drive up our
nations’ health care costs every day.
Maryland is the first state to tackle a broader list of
49 adverse events including ones that are usually – but not always –
preventable, such as the type of infection that invaded Ginny’s bones. Because
these infections are not always preventable, and no hospital could be expected
to lower its rate to zero, Maryland did not eliminate payment altogether for
the costs associated with them. Instead, it adjusted a portion of hospital
payments based on the rates of these complications; hospitals that do a good
job at avoiding these events relative to their peers get a little extra money,
and hospitals with a relatively high rate get a little less. This provides
hospitals with the incentive to lower their overall rates of complications –
saving money and saving lives.
The Real Question: Why Aren’t Other States Doing It?
Remarkably few states are following Maryland’s lead. And
while they leave this cost-saving option on the table, Republican Governors are
flocking to Capitol Hill and insisting that they need to cut vulnerable
Americans off Medicaid to get their budgets under control.
For example, Governor Christie is requesting that CMS allow New Jersey to freeze
Medicaid enrollment for parents earning more than $439 a month. This proposal
would result in 23,000 people being denied health coverage, and would save the
state only nine million dollars.
Harmful eligibility cuts like these are unconscionable,
particularly when New Jersey – and other states like it – could save even more
money through payment reforms like Maryland’s that improve health care quality
and better families’ lives.
To learn more about moving payment reform in your state’s
Medicaid program, please read Community Catalyst’s policy brief.
Over the summer, Community Catalyst will also be releasing model Medicaid
payment reform legislation, as well as a state-by-state report card to help you
track which states are following Maryland’s lead.
This blog was based partly on an interview with Robert
Murray, Executive Director of Maryland’s Health Services Cost Review
Commission.
Katherine Howitt, Policy Analyst at Community Catalyst
