Accountability - The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel

On April 7, 1775, Samuel Johnson said:  "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."  His biographer had to clarify that Dr. Johnson was not talking about love of country but "pretend patriotism which so many have made a cloak for self interest".  We see the rhetorical application in American elections where politicians spend more time on discussions of their military records rather than issues relevant to any kind of plan that they have for the nation or solving any real problems.  Nunberg makes the observation that that the term can also mean an irrational bias favoring one's country and that Americans have applied the term indiscriminately at times. He also points out that it can be a word designed to put people on the defensive.  

If I had to pick a word in the medical field that has similar uses - it would be "accountability".  There has probably been no single word more responsible for facilitating managed care and recent government intrusions into the practice of medicine.  If you think about the premise of physicians being "accountable" to politicians and businesses - it is absurd on the face of it.  Taking a professional who has been trained to be accountable to an individual patient and who operates in a professional environment that specifies behavior toward that person and telling them that they are now going to be monitored by businesses with a goal of maximizing profits or politicians with numerous conflicts of interest and a clear interest in getting re-elected - is an ongoing disaster.  So  how has it happened?  I would suggest that most of it has to do with rhetoric.

Before I point out the medical applications of the accountability rhetoric let me say that I don't consider this to be specifically applied to medicine.  Accountability rhetoric is broadly applied by any person or group seeking some kind of political advantage.  An obvious example is education and teaching.  Politicians everywhere get a lot of mileage out of the idea that they are going to hold teachers accountable usually through standardized test scores.  It has become a pat answer to taxpayers concerns about the money being spent on education and low graduation rates.  In some states, the test scores are marched out every year and used to rank schools and teachers.  Never mind the fact that the school system that produces the top international performance scores does not work that way.  In Finland, a professional teaching culture is by far and away the most significant factor in their academic excellence.  In the book written about this the teachers say they would not tolerate the kinds of intrusions that are common in the United States.  These intrusions are all based on accountability rhetoric.  

In preparing for this post, I searched my e-mails from the past three years and found 1800 e-mails containing the word accountability.  Most of those hits were due to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).  If you read the long title of this act it was clearly doomed out of the box.  The major impetus for the PPACA (Obamacare) was health insurance portability suggesting that HIPPA was already a failure.  That did not deter legislators from including a Privacy Rule under HIPAA to supposedly crack down on privacy violations.  My read of the bill is that is actually broadens the use of anyone's medical information among all "covered entities" affiliated with your health plan.  In the meantime,  the Privacy Rule was so threatening that it almost immediately made it more difficult for the doctors doing the work to get access to data.  Was it necessary for physicians?  Absolutely not - physicians are trained in medical privacy and all broad breaches of medical privacy have been due to either hacking or business people losing computers with significant amounts of data.  Make no mistake about it - politicians will be there to make the most accountable people accountable and greatly decrease their efficiency.   A great example of the title of this post.

I have recently posted a number of examples of accountability rhetoric being used for political leverage against physicians.   It can be used by medical boards, advocacy organizations, state agencies, federal agencies, and specialty boards in addition to politicians.  I am going to focus on a single example and that is Medicare.  All of the information that follows is public and can be accessed through the Medicare link on the American Psychiatric Association's web site.  I picked it up on my Facebook feed but it disappeared and I had to call APA staff to figure out where it went.  I am very familiar with the history of Medicare quality initiatives because I was one of their quality reviewers for inpatient hospitalizations in Minnesota and Wisconsin in the late 1980s and 1990s.  If you look for inpatient psychiatry measures you will find that many of them (polypharmacy, multiple drugs from the same class, discharge planning) are unchanged from that era, despite the fact that the review organization was disbanded because it did not find enough quality or utilization problems to justify its ongoing existence.

The APA points out that Medicare now has a fee scale that takes into account "quality of care measures instead of just paying a standard fee for every procedure (CPT) code".  They have a Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) that requires psychiatrists to report on one measure in order to avoid a 1.5% penalty.  For 2013 that report has to be made on one Medicare patient.  This is described as an "incentive" to report on quality performance measures and of course a "penalty" for those who fail to report.   A managed care company would call it a "holdback" in that it is technically work that has been done, but the no cost way to turn it into an "incentive" is just to take it from the people doing the work and make it seem like they are rewarded with it later.

The document goes on to document "measures identified as pertinent to psychiatrists (along with their designated codes)".  If you are a psychiatrist read through these reporting measures and marvel at the morass of initial codes that I am sure are going to grow as this administrative nightmare continues.  The further problem is that Medicare/CMS clearly has the goal of comparing physicians and holding them accountable based on the fantasy that these measures actually mean something in clinical practice or even the world.  And if this list of measures is not enough, there are also 50+ page guidelines online like: "The American Medical Association-convened Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement - Adult Major Depressive Disorder Performance Measurement Set" that describes an additional set of performance measures.  The AMA is involved and if you click the link 2013 PQRS Quality Measures you can search on Major Depressive Disorder and find the following links.  You can download the 50+ page document from the top link.

Most people realize that physicians currently have some of the highest burnout rates of any group of professionals.  Those burnout rates are directly related to micromanagement even before we get to the level I just described in the above paragraphs.  The paradox that every physician is aware of is that these reportable measures are not valid objective markers and they are being promoted by bureaucrats who not only have no accountability but in the case of the mental health system of care are some of the same people who destroyed it in the first place.  Don't forget that Congress skewed insurance coverage of mental illness and addictions so badly that Senators Wellstone and Domenici had to write legislation in an attempt to correct that.  At this time the final form of their legislation is still pending.

So accountability has become the last refuge of scoundrels.  Be very skeptical of any politician or bureaucrat waving that flag.  It has little to do with reality and more to do with promoting their own self interests while creating a tremendous and unnecessary burden for the doctors they regulate.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Nunberg G.  Going Nucular: language, politics, and culture in confrontational times.  Cambridge: MA Perseus Books Group, 2004.

For a complete analysis of political doublespeak as applied to medicine see:

Robert W. Geist:  Hot Air Index: Political/Commercial Double-speak Lexicon for Medicine