Some states that operate their own marketplaces are continuing to invest in these grass-roots aides.

This article first appeared July 12, 2018 on Kaiser Health News.

By Phil Galewitz

The Trump administration's decision Tuesday to slash funding to nonprofit groups that help Americans buy individual health insurance coverage sparked outrage from advocates of the Affordable Care Act. Using words like "immoral" and "cold-hearted," they saw it as the Republicans' latest act of sabotage against the sweeping health law.

But as the ACA's sixth open-enrollment period under the health law approaches in November, the lack of in-person assistance is unlikely to be a disaster for people seeking coverage, insurance and health experts say.

"I think alone it will have a very small impact on enrollment for 2019," said William Hoagland, a senior vice president with the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington.

But combined with other recent actions by the Trump administration, the decision sets a negative tone, Hoagland said.

"It does send a signal of course that the administration is not promoting enrollment," he said.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced it is cutting money to the groups known as navigators from $36 million to $10 million for the upcoming 45-day enrollment period.

This reduction comes a year after the Trump administration decreased navigators' funding by 40 percent from $62.5 million — and cut advertising and other outreach activities.

CMS Administrator Seema Verma said the navigators that operate in the 34 states that use the federal marketplace — including many health and religious organizations — were ineffective and had outlived their usefulness.

She pointed out that they helped with fewer than 1 percent of enrollments in 2017 — though she counts navigators as "helping" only if consumers sign up in their presence.

CMS also notes that after last year's navigator funding was reduced, the overall enrollment in Obamacare plans increased slightly (when counting people who paid their first month's premiums) to 10.6 million people.

Florida Blue, an insurer that enrolls among the largest number of Obamacare consumers nationwide, said it won't miss the help from the federally funded grass-roots helpers.

"Given our large and unique distribution-channel strategy of utilizing our retail centers along with our telesales efforts, our dedicated field agents and our direct in-market enrollment efforts, we do not depend on navigators to enroll ACA members," said spokesman Paul Kluding.

Greg Fann, a fellow with the Society of Actuaries, said the role of navigators has been overstated.

"I am a numbers guy, and what really matters to people are the numbers and price of the coverage," he said. Nearly 9 in 10 people buying coverage on the ACA exchanges qualify for federal subsidies based on their incomes, and the amount those subsidies rose last year because of an increase in silver-plan premiums.

The navigators, Fann added, were needed more in 2013 and 2014 when the marketplaces were in their first years and millions of people who hadn't bought insurance before were considering the health law's new options.

Insurers and brokers, Fann said, should step in to make up for navigator funding.

Don't count on it, said Steve Israel, a Boynton Beach, Fla., insurance agent and past president of the Florida Association of Health Underwriters. He said most independent brokers want nothing to do with ACA plans because insurers have cut their commissions. "We've been sending people to navigators," Israel said.

Some states that operate their own marketplaces, however, are continuing to invest in these grass-roots aides.

Covered California, for example, is holding its navigator funding steady, dedicating $6.5 million to navigators in this year's budget.

That's more than half of what healthcare.gov is investing in navigators in 34 states.

California has 1.5 million people in Obamacare plans, second highest in the nation behind Florida, which has 1.6 million.

Death By 1,000 Cuts?

Trump spent his first year in office trying to repeal the health law and came within one vote in the U.S. Senate of achieving that goal. Immediately after Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) cast the deciding vote to block the dramatic repeal effort, Trump implored Republicans to let the law disintegrate.

"Let ObamaCare implode, then deal," Trump tweeted on July 28, 2017.

But his administration has not stood idly by.

The Republican-controlled Congress in December passed a law that next year will eliminate the requirement that most Americans have insurance, a move likely to drive healthier people out of insurance market and lead to higher prices for those who are left.

Just last week, CMS said because of a pending lawsuit it was suspending a program created by the law to even out the burden on health insurers whose customers are especially unhealthy or sick. That could take millions of dollars away from some insurers, causing them to hike prices or abandon markets.

The Trump administration also issued new rules to try to make it easier for individuals and small businesses to buy health plans that cost less than ACA coverage because they cover fewer medical services. These plans would bypass the law's protections that prevent companies from charging higher prices to women, older people and those with preexisting medical conditions.

Critics deride such plans as "junk insurance."

CMS now wants the navigators to promote these policies in addition to steering people toward ACA-compliant plans and Medicaid.

This adds to the concern about the lack of navigator funding.

The availability of such new types of coverage will increase consumer demand for specially trained navigators, said Elizabeth Hagan, a senior consultant with Transform Health, a consulting firm.

She said the problem with reducing consumer assistance is not so much that fewer people will buy coverage but that people will buy policies that don't fit their needs.

Jodi Ray, who leads the University of South Florida's navigator program — the largest one in the state — said her staffers do much more than help with enrollment. They also help consumers file appeals with insurers.

"This is how health care disparities are exacerbated — we will be put in the awful position of pitting populations that need assistance against each other in order to prioritize how we can use the resources," she said.

Reversing the landmark case would not automatically make abortion illegal across the country. Instead, it would return the decision about abortion legality to the states.

This article first appeared July 10, 2018 on Kaiser Health News.

By Julie Rovner

What would the U.S. look like without Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that legalized abortion nationwide?

That’s the question now that President Donald Trump has chosen conservative Judge Brett Kavanaugh as his nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Reversing the landmark case would not automatically make abortion illegal across the country. Instead, it would return the decision about abortion legality to the states, where a patchwork of laws are already in place that render abortion more or less available, largely depending on individual states’ political leanings.

“We think there are 22 states likely to ban abortion without Roe,” due to a combination of factors including existing laws and regulation on the books and the positions of the governor and state legislature, said Amy Myrick, staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represents abortion-rights advocates in court.

“The threat level is very high now,” Myrick said.

Kavanaugh never opined on Roe v. Wade directly during his tenure on the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. In his 2006 confirmation hearing for that position, though, he said he would follow Roe v. Wade as a “binding precedent” of the Supreme Court — which lower-court judges are required to do.

Abortion opponents are buoyed by the pick.

“Judge Kavanaugh is an experienced, principled jurist with a strong record of protecting life and constitutional rights,” said a statement from Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser. She spearheaded support for Trump in his presidential campaign after he promised to appoint to the Supreme Court only justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade.

Kennedy, by contrast, was a swing vote on abortion issues. He frequently sided with conservatives to uphold abortion restrictions. However, in key cases in 1992 and 2016, he sided with liberals to uphold Roe’s core finding that the right to abortion is part of a right to privacy that is embedded within the U.S. Constitution.

Even now, with Roe v. Wade’s protections in place, a woman’s ability to access abortion is heavily dependent on where she lives.

According to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-rights think tank, 19 states adopted 63 new restrictions on abortion rights and access.

At the same time, 21 states adopted 58 measures last year intended to expand access to women’s reproductive health.

Since 2011, states have enacted nearly 1,200 separate abortion restrictions, according to Guttmacher, making these types of laws far more common.

As of now, four states — Louisiana, Mississippi and North and South Dakota — have what are known as abortion “trigger laws.” Those laws — passed long after Roe was handed down — would make abortion illegal if and when the Supreme Court were to say Roe is no more.

“They are designed to make abortion illegal immediately,” said Myrick.

Another dozen or so states still have pre-Roe abortion bans on the books.

Some have been formally blocked by the courts, but not repealed. Those bans could, at least in theory, be reinstated, although “someone would have to go into court and ask to lift that injunction,” said Myrick.

States could simply begin enforcing other bans that were never formally blocked, like one in Alabama that makes abortion providers subject to fines and up to a year in jail.

At the same time, Myrick said, “there are 20 states where abortion would probably remain safe and legal.”

The Path To The High Court

Several major challenges to state abortion laws are already in the judicial pipeline. One of these will have to get to the Supreme Court to enable a majority to overturn Roe v. Wade.

“It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of what or when,” said Sarah Lipton-Lubet, vice president for reproductive health and rights at the National Partnership for Women and Families.

The cases fall into three major categories.

The first — and most likely type to result in the court taking a broad look at Roe v. Wade — are “gestational” bans that seek to restrict abortion at a certain point in pregnancy, said Lipton-Lubet.

Mississippi has a 15-week ban, currently being challenged in federal court. Louisiana enacted a similar ban, but it would take effect only if Mississippi’s law is upheld. Iowa earlier this spring passed a six-week ban, although that is being challenged in state court, not federal, under the Iowa Constitution.

The second category involves regulations on abortion providers.

One pending case, for instance, involves an Arkansas law that would effectively ban medication abortions. Finally, there are bans on specific procedures, including several in Texas, Arkansas and Alabama that would outlaw “dilation and evacuation” abortions, which are the most common type used in the second trimester of pregnancy.

Myrick and Lipton-Lubet agree that there is no way to predict which abortion case is likely to reach the high court first.

The case that’s actually closest to the Supreme Court, noted Myrick, is a challenge to an Indiana law that would outlaw abortion if the woman is seeking it for sex selection or because the fetus could be disabled. A federal appeals court found that law unconstitutional in April.

Many analysts also agree that even with the court’s likely philosophical shift, Roe v. Wade might not actually be overturned at all.

Instead, said Lipton-Lubet, a more conservative court could “just hollow it out” by allowing restrictive state laws to stand.

“The court cares about things like its own legitimacy,” said Myrick, “and how often a precedent has been upheld in the past.” Given that Roe’s central finding — that the decision to have an abortion falls under the constitutional right to privacy — has been upheld three times, even an anti-abortion court might be loath to overrule it in its entirety.

The effort developed partly out of the realization that untreated mental health conditions negatively affect patients' physical health, thus costing the system more money.

This article first appeared July 05, 2018 on Kaiser Health News.

By Caroline Covington

AUSTIN, Texas — Kerstin Taylor fought alcohol and substance abuse problems for two decades. She periodically sought help through addiction and psychiatric treatments to stay sober, but she continued to relapse.

That unrelenting roller coaster, and the emotional and mental fallout, left her with little energy or resources to take charge of her overall health. Taylor, 53, has asthma and doctors told her she was at risk of developing diabetes.

"I wasn't doing anything to help myself," she said about her physical health.

Then an opportunity to get coordinated mental and physical health care services helped turn life around for Taylor, who also lives with bipolar and obsessive-compulsive disorders.

Until recently, health care professionals, in general, treated the mind and body separately and cared for them under different systems. That meant someone like Taylor, who relies on public transportation, had trouble getting to referrals for physical care at locations far away from her psychiatric appointments. That made follow-ups unlikely.

In 2012, Integral Care in Austin offered Taylor a holistic approach, with access to physical health care and a program to manage chronic disease, on top of her regular psychiatric care. Many of the services were available either at the clinic or in her home, and one case manager would help Taylor handle it all.

The seamless care made a big difference, Taylor said, because her recovery depends on addressing all aspects of her health, not just her mental state.

"With chronic-disease [management], resting well, good nutrition, that's a full package right there," Taylor said. "It has really built me up to be a better woman."

Now she has her own efficiency apartment in south Austin and plans to volunteer for a local animal charity. She walks regularly with a chronic-disease case manager and has taken courses to learn how to cook healthful food on a budget.

Efforts to provide integrated care are spreading, especially in public health clinics.

It developed partly out of the realization that untreated mental health conditions negatively affect patients' physical health, thus costing the system more money.

And in 2010, the Affordable Care Act established a mandate to give parity to mental health services.

A desire to reduce costly emergency room visits also is driving the trend.

A 2007 survey conducted by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality indicated that 1 in 8 emergency room visits were related to a mental health or substance abuse diagnosis. Those patients were also more than twice as likely to be admitted to the hospital during that visit.

Over the past decade, the federal government has bet on integrated care to help relieve the problem. From 2009 to 2015, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) awarded 187 grants worth over $162 million to implement integrated care models.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services also is investing in integrated care. A 2013 report by SAMHSA found that Medicaid is the largest single payer for mental health services, and nearly a quarter of the inpatient hospital stays covered by the program were for mental health and substance abuse issues.

In Texas, 64 of the state's 73 federally qualified health centers offer some mental health services, according to data from the Health Resources and Services Administration. That's a jump from just 36 clinics over a decade ago.

Integrated health care is "fundamental" to achieving state goals such as reducing suicide rates, lowering incarceration rates for people with mental health issues and developing a savvier mental health care workforce, according to the state's behavioral health strategic plan.

Learning To Be Flexible And Multitask

Austin's CommUnity Care is a federally qualified health care clinic that serves mostly low-income and uninsured patients in several locations around the city. Pediatrician Tracy Lama-Briseño sees the benefits and challenges of integrated care there every day.

She said the average person would be surprised to learn how many young children and teens deal with mental health issues.

"We do have some pretty young kids that start to present at an early age with symptoms of anxiety or sadness," she said. "Parents separating … the loss of a loved one. All that can be pretty confusing to a young child."

Lama-Briseño's clinic sees about 23,000 medical patients per year, approximately 1,700 of whom use mental health services.

Sometimes the boundaries of responsibility can get blurred between mental and physical health care, she said. "I feel like I do a little bit more social work than I would like," she said. "But in the end, it's about taking care of the kids and the families."

Addressing mental health in primary care gives access to people who might never seek it out, but it also opens the door to additional responsibilities for Lama-Briseño. For instance, CommUnity Care administers a two-question depression screening to every new patient older than 12 and repeats it for existing patients once a year. The results can prompt further action.

Lama-Briseño describes how her young patients can come in for one thing, like an earache, and then the visit turns into something completely different. She said it all happens quickly.

"You can't say ‘OK, make another appointment,'" she added. "It has to be, you know, dealt with then and there. And so I definitely had to learn how to be flexible and sort of multitask."

Lack Of Mental Health Specialists

One of the challenges for the integrated model is recruiting mental health professionals. Approximately 1 million adults statewide have a "serious mental illness," according to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, and more than 80 percent of Texas' 254 counties don't have enough mental health professionals to care for patients.

The Department of State Health Services also reports that the majority of counties, especially in the western half of the state and in the Panhandle, have no practicing psychiatrists.

"My concern, actually, is that we don't have a big enough pipeline to fill these jobs that are gonna be available," said Neftali Serrano, executive director of the Collaborative Family Healthcare Association, an advocacy group for integrated care.

Serrano likened the problem to trying to build a plane while flying it. The health care system can't just stop, so people need to be trained in this new way so that, as integrated care becomes more common, they'll be ready to work, he said.

"This is not just about plopping a mental health professional in a primary care setting," he said. "It takes … a certain kind of behavioral health professional, and well-trained physicians and nurse practitioners and [physician assistants] to do this work well."

Buy-in from primary care doctors is another piece to the complicated puzzle of integrated care. While surveys show many support integrating mental health professionals with primary care, some lack the incentive to change their practices.

Dr. Ernest Buck is chief medical officer of Driscoll Health Plan, which serves mostly kids and families on Medicaid in a highly rural area that spans 26,000 square miles from south of San Antonio all the way down to Brownsville. Buck said most practices in his network aren't willing to bring on a therapist.

"It's hard to start a new model where a physician's practice could be put at risk, particularly at Medicaid rates," which tend to be lower than private insurance plan payments, he said.

Also, many primary care doctors simply weren't trained to work this way — collaboratively, on a team with mental health professionals.

Bill Tierney, head of Population Health at the University of Texas-Austin's Dell Medical School, said that when he was a practicing family doctor he rarely worked with mental health professionals.

"For 15 years, I practiced with no mental health support," he said. "If I sent [patients] to the mental health clinic, I didn't know whether they got there. They had a separate information system, I couldn't see how they were being treated, and patients often didn't want to go to see the shrink."

A growing number of nurse practitioners—typically, registered nurses who have completed a master's degree in nursing—are adding up to a year of clinical and other training, often in primary care.

This article first appeared July 03, 2018 on Kaiser Health News.

By Michelle Andrews

The patient at the clinic was in his 40s and had lost both his legs to Type 1 diabetes. He had mental health and substance abuse problems and was taking large amounts of opioids to manage pain. He was assigned to Nichole Mitchell, who in 2014 was a newly minted nurse practitioner in her first week of a one-year postgraduate residency program at the Community Health Center clinic in Middletown, Conn.

In a regular clinical appointment, “I would have been given 20 minutes with him, and would have been without the support or knowledge of how to treat pain or Type 1 diabetes,” she said.

But her residency program gives the nurse practitioners extra time to assess patients, allowing her to come up with a plan for the man’s care, she said, with a doctor at her side to whom she could put all her questions.

A few years later, Mitchell is still at that clinic and now mentors nurse practitioner residents. She has developed a specialty in caring for patients with HIV and hepatitis C, as well as transgender health care.

The residency program “gives you the space to explore things you’re interested in in family practice,” Mitchell said. “There’s no way I could have gotten that training without the residency.”

Mitchell is part of a growing cadre of nurse practitioners — typically, registered nurses who have completed a master’s degree in nursing — who tack on up to a year of clinical and other training, often in primary care.

Residencies may be at federally qualified health centers, Veterans Affairs medical centers or private practices and hospital systems. Patients run the gamut, but many are low-income and have complicated needs.

Proponents say the programs help prepare new nurse practitioners to deal with the growing number of patients with complex health issues. But detractors say that a standard training program already provides adequate preparation to handle patients with serious health care needs. Nurse practitioners who choose not to do a residency, as the vast majority of the 23,000 who graduate each year do not, are well qualified to provide good patient care, they say.

As many communities, especially rural ones, struggle to attract medical providers, it’s increasingly likely that patients will see a nurse practitioner rather than a medical doctor when they need care. In 2016, nurse practitioners made up a quarter of primary care providers in rural areas and 23 percent in non-rural areas, up from 17.6 and 15.9 percent, respectively, in 2008, according to a study in the June issue of Health Affairs.

Depending on the state, they may practice independently of physicians or with varying degrees of oversight. Research has shown that nurse practitioners generally provide care that’s comparable to that of doctors in terms of quality, safety and effectiveness.

But their training differs. Unlike the three-year residency programs that doctors must generally complete after medical school in order to practice medicine, nurse practitioner residency programs, sometimes called fellowships, are completely voluntary. Like medical school residents, though, the nurse practitioner residents work for a fraction of what they would make at a regular job, typically about half to three-quarters of a normal salary.

Advocates say it’s worth it.

“It’s a very difficult transition to go from excellent nurse practitioner training to full scope-of-practice provider,” said Margaret Flinter, a nurse practitioner who is senior vice president and clinical director of Community Health Center, a network of community health centers in Connecticut.

“My experience was that too often, too many junior NPs found it a difficult transition, and we lost people, maybe forever, based on the intensity and readiness for seeing people” at our centers.

Flinter started the first nurse practitioner residency program in 2007. There are now more than 50 postgraduate primary care residency programs nationwide, she said. Mentored clinical training is a key part of the programs, but they typically also include formal lectures and clinical rotations in other specialties.

Not everyone is as gung-ho about the need for nurse practitioner residency programs, though.

“There’s a lot of debate within the community,” said Joyce Knestrick, president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. Knestrick practices in Wheeling, W.Va., a rural area about an hour’s drive from Pittsburgh. She said that there could be a benefit if a nurse practitioner wanted to switch from primary care to work in a cardiology practice, for example. But otherwise she’s not sold on the idea.

A position statement from the Nurse Practitioner Roundtable, a group of professional organizations of which AANP is a member, offered this assessment: “Forty years of patient outcomes and clinical research demonstrates that nurse practitioners consistently provide high quality, competent care. Additional post-graduate preparation is not required or necessary for entry into practice.”

“We already have good outcomes to show that our current educational system has been effective,” Knestrick said. “So I’m not really sure what the benefit is for residencies.”