Tag Archives: Maternity

The Economics of Mid-Levels

Another old post from The Physician Executive with currency in today’s environment. 

 

I was once a family physician delivering babies in an East Coast big city.

No, I am not a masochist, I was a family practice residency faculty.

Given the intense turf wars caused by an oversupply of competing specialists, it was an unpleasant environment to work. The concentration of specialty providers in big cities and urban areas poses some problems when it comes to costs. Frequently, one looks to mid-levels as a way of addressing problems in health care. Indeed Physician Assistants and Nurse Practitioners have a potentially important role to play in health care, but where?

Jason Shafrin at the Health Economist takes a look at midwives (included in the ranks of nurse practitioners for most of the latter part of the past century.)

I like midlevel providers like nurse practitioners and physician assistants because of their ability to bolster the ranks of primary care, the main engine of cost containment in health care. They can be invaluable in rural areas where it is difficult to entice specialists, even where there is a critical mass of demand for their services.

On the other hand, Jason’s post appears to be looking at midwives as a less costly alternative to obstetricians. A commenter on my site reminded me of Milton Friedman’s assertion that licensing leads to higher costs without assuring quality. In medicine, we have established a complicated and lengthy licensing process in the secure belief that the alternative was the chaos of snake-oil salesman that populated the United States at the turn of the last century. In other words, there was a compelling societal reason to limit and license people delivering health care.

I’m not sure what we accomplish by looking at mid levels as alternatives to established specialty providers. Moreover, specialists and midwives are equally maldistributed, being over-represented in metropolitan areas, where competition finds a way of increasing costs. Yes, health care acts strangely and higher concentrations of specialists tends to increase costs rather than reduce prices as one would expect.

On the other hand, finding an incentive to better distribute physicians may be a subtle way of improving physician incomes and health outcomes and reduce costs.

I want to make it clear once again, this is not a tirade against nurses or midwives. Nurses have saved my backside too often not to be collaborative and old school midwives working in labor and delivery taught me everything I know about delivering a baby.

I am questioning how we make policy in the face of a web of data and mess of potential starting points from which to approach the data.

Breast Feeding: Froelich & CDC

This is another old post from The Physician Executive that I expect is still relevant because old habits like supplemental feeding in hospital nurseries die a hard death when they are the path of least resistance. It was originally published on June 16, 2018

Edwina Froelich, founder of La Leche League, passed away last week. La Leche League used to state that the three main obstacles to successful breast-feeding were doctors, hospitals and social pressure.

My experience has been one of utter frustration with maternity nurses, who should know better, but frequently feed their wards sugar water for no reason. Some kids can get hypoglycemic, but certainly not three quarters of the nursery. Some kids may lose weight, but that is a normal phenomenon, with the natural history of birth being a decline in weight and return to birth weight by day 10. It is not abnormal to lose weight, but it is abnormal to get formula or D5 on day 1.

These practices appear to me (on an anecdotal basis) to be widespread in places I have worked in the US, but they would be unacceptable in other places of which I have some knowledge: Montreal, England, or France. I understand from a cousin in Dubai that at least one hospital reflects the US’s breastfeeding dysfunctions, so I am sure there is tremendous variation from country to country, especially by socio-economic class.

The harm done is that by allowing alternatives to breast feeding, we don’t give a woman a reasonable chance of establishing her breast milk in the first place. To establish breast feeding, you need an infant sucking on a nipple, which provides the hormonal stimulus to produce milk in the first place. The more concerned you are that the breast milk may “not be enough”, the more you assure the fact.

The problem with personal observations is the tendency to generalize. Finally, the CDC surveyed hospital infant feeding practices, as reported in MMWR. American hospitals persist in providing alternatives to breast feeding to infants, such as sugar water and formula. I am sure that most well-meaning maternity ward nurses will explain that they are trying to make sure babies gain weight or not become hypoglycemic. Unfortunately, entire wards of infants are not likely to suffer from the risk factors for hypoglycemia and weight loss in the first three days is a natural phenomenon that does not get babies in trouble if skilled observation and timely intervention is available.

So breast feeding suffers for entire populations as we chase the shadows of unusual and uncommon poor outcomes that rattle us to the point that it is easier to just chuck formula into every crying newborn’s mouth.

Hopefully there will be more Edwinas around to take up the cause.