Happy Washington’s Birthday.

The FEHBlog found a couple of interesting articles related to the CMS protection of healthcare costs discussed in last Wednesday’s Post. The editor emeritus of Modern Healthcare asserts that CMS is full of beans.

Over the past decade, CMS actuaries have consistently overestimated future healthcare spending. They failed to foresee the great moderation [in the rate of increase] that in fact took place [this decade]. Their latest projections should be viewed in that light. As the great sage Yogi Berra once said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Researchers in Health Affairs assert that

Currently, official statistics of the medical care sector only measure the number of goods and services consumed (for example, visits and prescriptions) and associated prices, while neglecting much of the quality changes of medical care treatments. Experts agree that factoring in the quality of treatment would lead to lower quality-adjusted price growth, indicating that consumers are getting more per dollar spent in this sector than current official estimates. A complete understanding of the growth trends in the medical care sector, as well as our overall economy, hinges on properly accounting for quality alongside costs. 

The FEHBlog has been intrigued by blockchain technology application in healthcare and other sectors.  MIT Technology Review cautions that

while blockchain technology has been long touted for its security, under certain conditions it can  be quite vulnerable. Sometimes shoddy execution can be blamed, or unintentional software bugs. Other times it’s more of a gray area—the complicated result of interactions between the code, the economics of the blockchain, and human greed. That’s been known in theory since the technology’s beginning. Now that so many blockchains are out in the world, we are learning what it actually means—often the hard way.

In relevant private sector health plan news —

• Becker’s Hospital Review reports that Walmart reduced the copayment for a telehealth visit in its employee health plan from $40 to $4 effective January 1, 2019. The FEHBlog thinks that this is a good call for a gap filler service like telehealth. 
• The Wall Street Journal reports that Jack Stoddard, the chief operating officer of the Amazon/Berkshire Hathaway/J.P. Morgan Chase joint venture to establish an innovative health plan for their employees “had testified that the venture will be deploying smaller-scale tests of ideas like making primary-care access easier, or maintenance drugs cheaper. If these ideas work, they could be scaled up among the venture’s owners. One goal is to bolster the importance of primary care, he said in the newly public testimony.” Makes perfect sense to the FEHBlog.