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How grant writers can use HRSA’s Uniform Data System (UDS) Mapper system: a post in honor of Service Area Competition (SAC) season

HRSA’s Uniform Data System (UDS) Mapper is powerful but also incredibly hard to use, and I suspect most people get stymied by its clunky user interface—and give up. The difficulty of using the UDS Mapper inspires me to write a guide describing how we tend to use it. “Giving up” is a legitimate reaction to software with a poor user experience and user interface, but giving up won’t help a HRSA needs assessment get done, and it won’t move your organization closer to being funded. Healthcare organizations like Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) in particular need to use the UDS Mapper. However frustrating the UDS Mapper may be, the UDS Mapper also collects healthcare indicator data not available anywhere else, and for that reason it’s useful not just in HRSA or healthcare proposals, but a wide range of other proposals.

If you look closely at the UDS Mapper’s output, you’ll see what I mean in terms of HRSA collecting data others don’t. The curiously named set of columns for the “health center penetration rate” in particular can yield insights into local areas; are people who are low income or living in poverty managing to access healthcare? I’m not aware of other places that collate such data. The Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) tab similarly gathers data not readily available elsewhere.

Right now, it’s also Service Area Competition (SAC) season, which means mabt FQHCs need to use the UDS tool, along with others like it, to prepare their SAC applications. We’ve written about the SAC experience in a bunch of places, including here, and we encourage organizations that are applying for SAC or other HRSA funding to contact us.

I developed the UDS Mapper guide to be used internally, but it occurs to me that others may find it useful, so I’m uploading it here. Questions or comments? Leave them below. This draft of our guide isn’t the last word.

Click here to download the guide.

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Modern HIV prevention and education grant-funded programs

Astute healthcare-related nonprofit and public agency managers who follow grant opportunities have probably noticed how many of those grant opportunities use specific, somewhat coded language to express whatever it is that they want (read a lot, and you’ll start to see patterns in RFP verbiage). We’ve written many modern HIV prevention and education grant-funded programs, and, consequently, we’ve gotten very good at designing how those programs should be pitched to funders—the most common being the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). Still, HRSA Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFOs) are often opaque about how exactly the applicant is supposed to provide services and what precisely the applicant should do. The purpose of being opaque may be so that applicants can signal their underlying competence and knowledge.

Many HIV-services programs can be divided into two categories, although the categories can overlap: prevention/education and treatment. We’re going to focus on the former, at least in this post, though some grant-funded programs will ask for both components. A typical grant-funded project purpose for a program designed to provide prevention and education is something like “reduce HIV transmission via outreach and engagement.” The target population will usually be persons at high risk for HIV/AIDs, but who are known to not be HIV+. Federal funders like vaguely bureaucratic terms like “persons” over more human terms like “folks;” the more bureaucratic and less human a proposal sounds, the more funders will typically like it.*

The applicant agency should typically propose a project that will use peers of the high risk population—that is, people who are “culturally and linguistically like the target population”—to do outreach, engagement, and education. A common term for such a position is a “Community Health Worker” (CHW). CHWs are often paired with Registered Nurses (RNs) or similarly licensed clinicians: the CHW goes out, finds the target, high-risk population, talks to members of the target population, and gets them to be tested.

This involves some combination of on-the-spot rapid HIV testing to see if the high-risk person might already be positive, along with education and the like if they’re not. Education includes things like “why using PrEP is a good idea,” “how to avoid sharing needles,” etc. The CHW will encourage the at-risk person to reduce risky behaviors (e.g., sharing needles, or unprotected sex with multiple random partners, and the like). This kind of outreach effort is sometimes done with a mobile outreach unit, often a van, that’s owned/leased and operated by the applicant. In some grant programs, it’s possible to buy the van with grant funds, but, even when the van isn’t covered, leasing and operating costs (e.g., gas, maintenance, insurance, etc.) should be eligible grant costs.

In addition to culturally and linguistically street-based education and rapid HIV testing in the outreach van, CHWs try to get who are found to be HIV+ via rapid test a follow-up laboratory confirmation test. If the lab test confirms the person is HIV+, the CHW tries to get help that person get into treatment. Persons who are positive should in particular be targeted for entry into services.

But funders usually also want all high-risk persons who are engaged by the team to establish a medical home and, for HRSA, this means at a Federally Qualified Health Center’s (FQHC). In the real world, many FQHCs aren’t excited by the prospect of new, high-risk, and difficult-to-serve patients, but HRSA and other funders want to hear that this is going to happen.

HIV+ persons obviously need care, and consistent care, both to ensure their own safety and to reduce the likelihood of community transmission. Modern, consistently applied HIV treatments haven’t, to our knowledge, been shown to conclusively, completely, continuously prevent HIV transmission, but they can make the virus nearly undetectable in the body, which likely reduces transmission (if there is evidence one way or another, please cite it in the comments). PrEP in the high-risk, but uninfected population, in combination with effective, consistent usage of anti-HIV drugs in the infected population, is a potent combination to reduce HIV prevalence, which is why almost all modern HIV-prevention programs want this approach, whether they say so directly or not.

The peer-to-peer outreach approach, in which the organization hires CHWs with the “street cred” to engage the target population, ensures that the target population is more likely to accept some level of engagement, education, and behavior changes to reduce risks. The peer positions receive training in HIV and how HIV prevention works, and then go into the community to seek high-risk, hard-to-reach persons. Applicants should also propose more general outreach efforts focused on social media. Virtually all targeted persons will have smart phones; even most homeless people do, today.

The approach we’ve discussed above can be described in more detail or less detail—for example, what specifics will the educational effort cover? How long will CHWs seek to talk to each person who is reached out to?—but the basic structure has been consistent for years.

Continue reading Modern HIV prevention and education grant-funded programs

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The latest Service Area Competitions (SAC) from HRSA are here, and the FQHC Shuffle

2020 was a peculiar year for many reasons great and small, one of the small reasons germane to grant writers and Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) being that HRSA deferred Service Area Competitions (SAC), allowing FQHCs to skip the typical application, or re-application, process. For those of you unfamiliar with FQHCs, they’re the nonprofit healthcare providers that are designed to accept any patient, regardless of ability to pay, and that specialize in Medicaid patients, or helping the uninsured sign up for Medicaid. FQHCs and their counterparts, FQHC Look-Alikes, have significant advantages over typical nonprofit or for-profit primary healthcare providers in that they get higher reimbursement rates from Medicaid, protection from medical malpractice lawsuits, access to the 340B low-cost medication program, and a few other advantages—including eligibility for Section 330 grants via the SAC process, which offer between hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars per year in funding. Every (or almost every) geographical area in the country is supposed to be covered by a SAC and most FQHCs must submit a competitive SAC proposal every three years to keep their Section 330 grants.

Delaying SACs seemed like a reasonable idea during the pandemic, and their return is likely to herald some changes. We talk to lots of FQHCs, and it seems that some of the incumbents are weaker than they were, or discombobulated by the pandemic. Others, however, seem to have been strengthened, particularly those that moved expeditiously to telemedicine, which let them keep up their patient loads, while others have struggled with telemedicine. It’s often not apparent from the outside what’s happening on the inside of FQHCs. Some that may seem weak are likely strong, and vice-versa. That’ll make this SAC season unusual and interesting, and I’d not be surprised to see larger-than-average turnover in SAC grants. Because each SAC covers a specific geography, any new applicant is by definition trying to take over the designation from an existing grantee. We’ve heard the SAC process called “the FQHC shuffle.” Most FQHCs succeed in getting their SAC proposals approved and Section 330 grants renewed, but a significant portion don’t; most of us wouldn’t want to play a game we don’t think we’ll win.

We’ve worked with FQHCs on both sides of the SAC shuffle: incumbents worried about upstarts, and upstarts interested in taking over the incumbents’s service area and Section 330 grants. Losing a Section 330 grant can be an FQHC’s death knell: while SACs typically compose less than 20% of an FQHC’s budget, and often less than 10%, they often function as the glue holding the organization above the water level. Lose the SAC, and the overall revenue decline may be small, but that revenue may also be the revenue that keeps the organization in the black. During uncertain times like the present, an alert organization may be able to make progress that would be more difficult in other times.

Three of the eight planned FY ’22 SAC NOFOs have been issued so far: you can see whether your organization’s service area is up for renewal in HRSA’s massive SAC lookup table. The rest will be issued in the coming weeks or months. Is your FQHC or would-be FQHC ready to act?

Although the pandemic is receding, we’re still living in a strange time: the nonprofit winners have a lot of cash; some nonprofits, however, are gone. The next generation of nonprofit startups haven’t wholly started up yet. This is a propitious time to pursue change. We’ve been talking to a lot of callers about what’s happening in the present and what the future might hold.

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Telemedicine and the unstated reason it can save money for Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) and other providers

You may have read that Walgreens is is shuttering some of its in-store clinic, because the clinics are expensive to operate and, in addition, telemedicine services are taking off. Telemedicine competes with minute clinics, urgent cares, and some primary care offices; right now telemedicine is being vended through a variety of platforms, some of them independent of traditional medical providers (Teledoc is a relatively famous one), while others are affiliated with traditional providers, like FQHCs. The most interesting aspect of telemedicine services might be the one, unstated reason why they’re popular.

The official push towards telemedicine is justified by greater convenience and lower cost. So far, so good: those things are real, as is the nominal improvement in patient satisfaction, but the hidden reason is also revealing: a lot of in-person medical visits aren’t medically necessary and are generated by non-medical desires. Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler talk about this in The Elephant in the Brain: Chapter 13 describes how a lot of medicine seems to be generated by patients wanting reassurance from high-status people (doctors) and doctors wanting to enjoy the status that comes from people seeking out their expert knowledge. To be sure, “a lot of medicine” is not the same as “all medicine,” so you need not leave comments about broken bones being mended or cancers being treated.

A lot of medical office visits are costly for patient and doctor, so telemedicine can reduce the waste. In effect, telemedicine often ends up being triage: the distant provider tries to figure out whether something is genuinely wrong with the patient, and whether that thing needs to be seen in person. Almost all primary care providers have seen lots of patients who come in more for hand holding and an encounter with a sage doc than treatment of underlying condition. I haven’t seen studies describing exactly how many medical visits are really boredom, fear, craziness, improbable uncertainty, and the like, but anecdotally it seems to be high, and Hanson and Simler cite estimates in the 20 – 50% range. This is the sort of thing most of your healthcare provider friends won’t admit to strangers or acquaintances, but they may admit it to close friends or after a couple drinks. FQHC CEOs, who we work for, will sometimes admit this to us, their trusted grant writers (in our own way, we are the “trusted sages” in these conversations, reversing the roles).

So telemedicine can save money because it lets people with common colds, loneliness, and similar real or imagined ailments have a doctor, nurse practitioner, or physicians assistant tell them that they’re okay, bill them maybe less than they’d be billed for an in-person office visit, and then the provider can hang up and talk to another person who is also likely okay. Many people with chronic conditions also just need reassurance, direction to a specialist, or a prescription refilled. That can be done in a few minutes over the phone or via a videoconference. Because it’s socially undesirable and even unacceptable to admit that a lot of medicine is not what we typically think it’s about, not much can be done to substantially improve the system at current levels of technology, but offering telemedicine can be an improvement. HRSA has noticed something like this and is now pushing for FQHCs to offer telemedicine. Healthcare now consumed about 18% of GDP, in a $20 trillion economy, or about $3.7 trillion dollars. There’s enormous pressure on almost every player to try and lower costs as a consequence of these unbelievable numbers. One way or another, the average worker is paying about one in every five dollars earned into medicine—whether that dollar is paid to insurance companies, hospitals, or levels of government via taxes. Strangely, though, regulators are letting hospitals merge and form local monopolies and oligopolies, which is an important exception to the lower-cost trend. Telehealth, however, is right on trend.

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Funders sometimes force grantees to provide services they don’t want to: FQHCs and Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT)

We often remind clients that those with the gold make the rules. Accepting a government grant means the applicant must sign a grant agreement, in which the applicant agrees not only to provide wherever services were specified in the proposal, but also abide by a myriad of regulations and laws. While many applicants will tussle with a funder over the budget, there’s rarely any point in trying to modify the boiler plate agreement—just like one can’t modify Apple or Facebook’s Terms of Service.

In addition to the specific terms of the grant agreement, grantees quickly become subject to other influences from the funder—when the Godfather makes you an offer you can’t refuse, you know that eventually you’ll be told to do something you’d otherwise not much want to do. While a federal agency is unlikely to place a horse’s head in a nonprofit Executive Director’s bed, the grantee might end up having to provide an unpalatable service.

A case in point is HRSA’s relatively recent (and divisive) endorsement of Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) for treating opioid use disorder (OUD). Since HRSA is the primary FQHC funder, it is essentially their Godfather and has great influence over FQHCs. In the past few years, HRSA has strongly encouraged FQHCs to provide MAT. The CEOs of our FQHC clients have told us about HRSA pressure to start offering MAT. It seems that, even after several years of cajoling, only about half of our FQHC clients provide MAT, and, for many of these, MAT is only nominally offered. Other clients see offering MAT as a moral imperative, and we’ll sometimes get off the phone with one client who hates MAT and then on the phone with another client who sees not providing MAT as cruel.

“MAT” generically refers to the use of medications, usually in combination with counseling and behavioral therapies, for the treatment of substance use disorders (SUD). For OUD, this usually means prescribing and monitoring a medication like Suboxone, in which the active ingredients are buprenorphine and naloxone. While Suboxone typically reduces the cravings of people with OUD for prescribed and street opioids (e.g., oxycontin, heroin, etc.), it is itself a synthetic opioid. While MAT replaces a “bad opioid” with a “good opioid,” the patient remains addicted. Many FQHC managers and clinicians object to offering MAT for OUD, for a variety of medical, ethical, and practical reasons:

  • Like its older cousin methadone, as an opioid, Suboxone can produce euphoria and induce dependency, although its effects are milder. Still, it’s possible to overdose on Suboxone, particularly when combined with alcohol and street drugs. So it can still be deadly.
  • While MAT is supposed to be combined with some form of talking or other therapy, few FQHCs have the resources to actually provide extensive individual or group therapy, so the reality is that FQHC MAT patients will likely need Suboxone prescribed over the long term, leaving them effectively addicted. We’re aware that there’s often a wide gap here between the real world and the proposal world.
  • Unless it’s combined with some kind talking therapy that proves effective, MAT is not a short-term approach, meaning that, once an FQHC physician starts a patient on Suboxone, the patient is likely to need the prescription over a very long time—perhaps for the rest of their life. This makes the patient not only dependent on Suboxone, but also dependent on the prescriber and the FQHC, since few other local providers are likely to accept the patient and have clinicians who have obtained the necessary waiver to prescribe it. Suboxone users must be regularly monitored and seen by their prescriber, making for frequent health center visits.
  • As noted above, prescribed Suboxone can, and is often, re-sold by patients on the street.
  • Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, most FQHC health centers prefer to look like a standard group practice facility with a single waiting room/reception area. Unlike a specialized methadone or other addiction clinic, FQHC patients of all kinds are jumbled together. That means a mom bringing her five-year old in for a school physical could end up sitting between a couple of MAT users, who may look a little wild-eyed and ragged, making her and her kid uncomfortable. Since FQHCs usually lack the resources for anything beyond minor paint-up/fix up repairs, there is simply no way around this potential conflict.

Given the above, many FQHC CEOs remain resistant to adding the challenges of MAT to the many struggles they already face. Still, the ongoing pressure from HRSA means that most FQHCs will eventually be forced to provide at least a nominal MAT program to keep their HRSA Program Officer at bay. The tension between a typical mom and her five-year old against a full-fledged behavioral and mental health program is likely to remain, however. Before you leave scorching comments, however, remember that we’re trying to describe some of the real-world trade-offs here, not prescribe a course of action. What people really want in the physical space they occupy and what they say they want in the abstract are often quite different. You can see this in the relentless noise around issues like homeless service centers; everyone is in favor of them in someone else’s neighborhood and against them in their own neighborhood. Always pay attention to what a person actually does over a person’s rhetoric.

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Washington Post’s story on rural health care ignores Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) — huh?

Eli Saslow recently wrote a 3,500-word Washington Post story about rural healthcare in “Urgent needs from head to toe’: This clinic had two days to fix a lifetime of needs.” Although it reads like a dispatch from Doctors Without Borders in Botswana, Saslow is describing rural Meigs County TN. Rural America certainly faces significant unmet healthcare needs, but this piece has a strange omission: it doesn’t mention Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs).

The Tennessee Primary Care Association reports over 30 Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) operating over 200 health clinics in the state, most in rural areas—including at least four in or near Meigs County! FQHCs are nonprofits that receive HRSA Section 330 grants to provide integrated primary care, dental care, and behavioral health services to low-income and uninsured patients. FQHCs also accept Medicaid and, in rural areas, are usually the main primary care providers, along with ERs.

Federal law requires FQHCs to provide services under a sliding-fee scale, with a nominal charge for very-low-income patients—in theory, at least, FQHCs never turn patients away due to lack of ability to pay. Similarly, federal law requires ERs to treat everyone, regardless of income and/or insurance status. Unlike ERs, however, FQHCs provide a “medical home” for patients. There are over 1,400 FQHCs, with thousands of sites, both fixed and mobile, to better reach isolated rural areas like Meigs County. We should know—we’ve written dozens of funded HRSA grants for FQHCs, including many serving rural areas like Meigs County.

The story’s hero is Rural Area Medical (RAM), a nonprofit that appears to set up temporary clinics under the free clinic model. Free clinics emerged from the runaway youth health crisis of the late 60s, starting in the Summer of Love in San Francisco—I was on the board of a free clinic over 40 years ago and understand the model well. While there are still over 1,400 official free clinic sites, free clinics largely depend on volunteer medical staff, may not accept Medicaid, and have insecure funding because they rely on donations (often from their volunteers) to keep the lights on. To operate, a free clinic must necessarily devote much of its resources away from direct services to maintaining volunteers and fundraising, like any nonprofit that depends on volunteer labor (think Habitat for Humanity).

Unlike FQHCs, free clinics patients don’t have a designated primary care provider (PCP), since a given doc or NP might be volunteering or not on a given day—like an ER, free clinic patients lack a true medical home. Free clinics aren’t generally eligible to participate in the federally subsidized 340B Discount Pharmacy Program, so patients don’t have access to long-term, low-cost medications. Free clinics, while once the only source of healthcare for many uninsured, have now mostly been overtaken by FQHCs, much as the days of the independent tutor ended with the coming of public schools. We’ve worked for a few free clinics over the years, and most were struggling to stay open and provided erratic services. Their executive directors could feel which way the wind is blowing and consequently many were trying trying to become FQHCs.

I wonder: has RAM applied to become an FQHC and open a permanent site in Meigs County? I don’t know anything about Meigs County, and it’s possible that the local FQHCs are incompetent or poorly run and could use some new competitors. HRSA just had a New Access Points (NAP) competition, with over $200 million to found and fund new sites. If the the healthcare situation is dire in Meigs County, applying for NAP grant makes much more sense than setting up shop for a weekend. Does RAM refer patients to local FQHCs? That may be a more efficacious long-term solution than the superman approach of flying in, saving the day, and flying out (imagine if education worked the same way, with itinerant teachers stopping by to give a lecture on geometry one day, Shakespeare’s sonnets the next, and the gall bladder the day after).

The original story is great as human interest, but it doesn’t go into root causes. Some consulting organization created the “Five Whys” strategy or methodology, which holds that, for any given problem, it’s often not useful to look at a single moment or cause of failure or inadequacy. Rather, systems enable failure, and for any given failure, it’s necessary to look deeper than the immediate event. Some of the other underlying problems in this story include the American Medical Association (AMA), which controls med school slots, and the individual medical specialty associations, which control residency slots. The U.S. has been training too few doctors and doing an inadequate job getting those doctors into residency for decades. Detail on this subject is too specific for this piece, but Ezekiel Emanuel has a good article on the subject; med school needs to be integrated with undergrad and needs a year lopped off it. The way medical training works right now is too expensive and too long, creating physician shortages—especially in the places that need physicians most. The supply-demand mismatch raises the costs of physician services and mean that physicians charge more for services than they otherwise would.

Rural areas have also faced decades of economic headwinds, with young adults moving to job centers, leaving an aging-in-place population that needs many support services; declining tax base from manufacturing leaving for emerging countries; the opioid epidemic; and so on. While I wouldn’t expect Saslow to fully cover such factors, context is missing and at least a passing reference to FQHCs would make sense.

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“Health insurance security” and FQHCs

I hesitate to post this, because it’s a bit more political than the topics we typically cover, but it’s explanatory more than partisan: “The 2018 Elections Were Not About Obamacare–They Were About Health Insurance Security.” In it, Bob Laszewski describes how “In March of 2016, there were 20.2 million people covered in the individual health insurance market,” but by “March of 2018 the count was 15.7 million.” Why? Because individual market “premiums and deductibles are sky high–for all but the lowest income participants.” Consider this data:

In Northern Virginia, for example, the cheapest 2019 Obamacare individual market Silver plan for a family of four (mom and dad age-40) making a subsidy eligible $65,000 a year costs $4,514. That plan has a $6,500 deductible meaning the family would have to spend $11,014 on eligible health care costs before collecting other than nominal first dollar benefits.

That same family, but making too much for a subsidy, as 40% of families do, and a typical family in the affluent Virginia 10th, would have to spend $19,484 in premiums plus a $6,500 deductible, for a total of $25,984 in eligible costs before they would collect any meaningful benefits.

Those are shocking numbers, no? Yet we rarely see them, or numbers like them, in the larger media landscape. Many people have individual experiences of such things, including me; I’m covered by a small group employer plan, not an individual market plan, but my own deductible is now about $5,000. Two years ago, it was $4,500, and when I had a minor procedure to fix a toe I’d dropped a pan on, I spent $4,500 out of pocket almost immediately. Not only that, but when I saw podiatrists to get fee quotes on the procedure, most could not or would not give them to me. Even people who say they want to pay in cash often cannot find out how much a particular service will cost. When I inquired about the price of an office visit, most receptionists were confused but could eventually get an answer, and prices varied hugely, from as little as $40 to as much as $350. Why? I don’t know.

Oh, and the podiatrist billed my insurance for something like $12,000, beyond the $4,500 I paid, and she got $900 out of the insurance company. So her net benefit from the procedure was $4,500 in cash (from me) plus $900 from the insurance company. It is almost impossible to read this paragraph and not think, “Something is horribly wrong here.”

And I am not alone: almost anyone not covered by a very large employer plan, Medicaid, or Medicare has had similar experiences.

There is also an absurdly common misconception among normal people: that “insurance” is what matters for healthcare. Insurance is only part of the puzzle, but “insurance” is only as good as the healthcare we can access with it. Many doctors, for example, don’t accept Medicaid patients. So someone on Medicaid who counts as “having insurance” may not have access to care. Laszewski points out that many people “have insurance” (which is fine), but if the insurance never kicks in for the average person, then it is not functioning like true insurance, but not as the pay-all system that health insurance means to most Americans.

Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), which are federally funded nonprofits, have supersized in part because of the strange path of the US healthcare markets. Either by accident or design, FQHCs have become the default Medicaid providers in many parts of the country at the same time that the ACA significantly expanded Medicaid eligibility. Policy wonks in DC, along with some politicians, know that “insurance” is not the same as “health care” (as I myself said above). Even if politicians don’t know that, many of their constituents and voters who are on Medicaid know it. FQHCs are a partial solution, because they accept Medicaid patients and self-pays on sliding fee scales. FQHCs have also become front-line purveyors of Patient Navigation services (which link patients with Medicaid or ACA plans). Still, FQHCs usually do not have enough slots for everyone who seeks care, and waits can be long; FQHCs also often have trouble recruiting clinicians and in particular specialties like OB/GYN and psychiatrist.*

So the convoluted and intertwined health insurance and care access problems remain; the present situation likely cannot hold forever; and I do not know what will happen, politically speaking. But I would surmise that, if a family of four making $65,000 a year must pay $10,000 or more in true costs for healthcare before some manner of insurance kicks in, something has to give.

Single-payer is popular in some American political circles, though it’s not my preferred outcome and seems unfeasible financially; I’d rather see price transparency and mandatory health savings accounts coupled with true insurance for catastrophic care. Unfortunately, no one but me and a handful of healthcare wonks desire this outcome, or something adjacent. It’s hard to explain in a soundbite and normal voters have no idea what “price transparency and mandatory health savings accounts coupled with true insurance for catastrophic care” means. It doesn’t map well onto political ideologies. In healthcare, no one wants to talk about or admit to trade-offs. We write many grant proposals for FQHCs, but we never mention trade-offs. Seliger + Associates is a grant writing firm, so we’re firmly in the proposal world. All FQHCs should be in the proposal world when writing HRSA or SAMHSA or foundation applications. In the real world, however, just saying it’s so, doesn’t make it so. Trade-offs are real and pervasive. It may be socially undesirable to acknowledge them, but they are real.

The most likely political outcome will be more kludges on top of existing kludges. Fortunately, “price transparency” would fit this general paradigm. Unfortunately, there seems to be no political constituency for it. I cannot say what will happen next. I did not think Obamacare would happen, and I was wrong about that. I also did not realize that the feds would re-purpose FQHCs in the way that they have, as Medicaid providers, yet here we are. In healthcare, it seems, almost anything is, or has become, possible.


* This is largely due to barriers to entry imposed by existing doctors and especially the powerful American Medical Association. Many things could be done to increase the supply of doctors, including integrating med school into undergrad; shortening med school; allowing foreign doctors to practice without residency; or creating a special one-year residency for foreign doctors. None, however, are on the political horizon.

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Preventive care doesn’t save money, bankruptcies aren’t widely caused by lack of insurance, and FQHCs

Preventive Care Saves Money? Sorry, It’s Too Good to Be True” tells you everything you need to know in the headline, though you should of course read the article. The point is important because a lot of Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) funding for Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) is premised on the idea that more primary preventive care will save money and slow the seemingly inexorable rise in healthcare costs. There’s an intuitive, seductive logic to the argument: it seems like it should be true that prevention is superior to treatment.

But we, collectively, don’t actually know if most healthcare is good for most people most of the time. The Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler book The Elephant in the Brain has a chapter on medicine that demonstrates most medical care is actually wasted and unnecessary. We still pursue costly, low-importance care for status reasons that are too long to describe in this post, but interested readers are directed to the book. The idea that preventive care doesn’t reduce costs and may do little to improve health is congruent with the Hanson-Simler idea that most healthcare is not actually about health.

In other healthcare news, at least one expert wonders: “Are Hospitals Becoming Obsolete?” One hopes so: many are dysfunctional and won’t reveal prices to patients, leading to wild cost inflation and the “mystery bill” phenomenon many of us, myself included, have been subjected to. In healthcare, it seems that the prices are the problem, and most healthcare players are working to maintain price opacity. At the same time, there’s very little political or media noise about this issue.

Americans read and hear a lot about insurance issues and almost none about prices and transparency. Mandating price transparency would be a huge win for patients and, maybe, for cost. Yet politicians of all stripes show little interest in this obvious (and very cheap) policy choice. I don’t know why. I have only a very small platform, but I’m going to use it to propose price transparency. Small-scale studies like “Research finds nearly 8-fold price differences at Minnesota hospitals” show that the price of healthcare varies enormously. But it’s hard if not impossible for patients to gather information about pricing (as I discovered recently).

When you get a shockingly high mystery bill, just try getting an explanation about why the price is the price. I have. Good luck. Hospital bureaucracies are enough to make one wonder if single payer really is next: the healthcare experience for many Americans is already so close to the DMV, why not just go all the way?

I’m not advocating for single payer as a political position: this is a non-political space devoted to analyzing grant writing, grant source research, and grant makers. But it is worth analyzing how the world works, how that relates to larger political questions, and what those larger questions mean for practitioners on the ground.

In the first section of this essay I wrote about primary preventive healthcare access doesn’t appear to lower costs. That’s a common idea that doesn’t appear to be true; there are other things we think we know that just aren’t true. During the ACA debate, for example, many claimed the medical bills bankrupted vast numbers of people. Turns out it just ain’t so:

The fraction of bankruptcies caused by medical events is just 4 percent. And even among those bankruptcies, it seems that medical bills may be less of a problem than the other things associated with an illness, such as lost labor income. […]

That jibes with what’s evident in the bankruptcy data since Obamacare passed. If medical bills really were driving so many people into bankruptcy, then we would have expected filings to plummet after 2013, when millions of people gained health insurance coverage. Instead we see a smooth decline from the recession-era peak.

So if we’re worried about poverty, as many of us in the nonprofit world are, health insurance access may not be the most important way to tackle that issue. The data on bankruptcy filings from 2013 to the present are particularly compelling. It may be that lost income is the bigger issue for people who get sick. Or some other factor may be at work. It’s hard to know.

Perhaps the best way to save money and improve health as an individual is to quit eating sugar and get sufficient exercise. Those things would also be good for the larger society, but “we” (the mandarin know-it-alls like myself and those who dictate healthcare policy) have no way to make that happen. Despite decades of effort—much of it misguided, granted—we have no way of improving people’s habits on the macro level. It turns out that “American Adults Just Keep Getting Fatter:” “New data shows that nearly 40 percent of them were obese in 2015 and 2016, a sharp increase from a decade earlier, federal health officials reported Friday.” Obesity is not a perfect proxy for health, but it’s a useful starting point.

Much of this essay won’t make it into the proposals we write for FQHCs and other primary care providers. Proposals are about mythology, not actuality, unless the funder specifically demands reality (most don’t). But it’s good for applicants to keep the grant world and proposal worlds straight. Reading widely and deeply is still one of the open secrets of good grant writers—and good writers of all kinds. The information is out there. Whether you choose to access it is up to you.

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SAMHSA’s Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment (SBRIT) and FQHCs

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) just issued the FY ’18 Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA): it has $35 million for five-year grants up to about $1 million per year for assessment/referral to substance abuse treatment—and, most interestingly for our discussion, FQHCs are listed among the laundry list of eligible applicants.

SAMHSA is pointing the way forward for many substance abuse providers: become an FQHC. This may seem odd, because FQHCs are supposed to be primary health care providers, while substance abuse treatment is not considered primary healthcare and is usually provided by narrowly focused agencies. But the depth of the opioid epidemic, in tandem with the overall growth of healthcare funding, means that many substance abuse providers are being pushed towards becoming FQHCs—even as many FQHCs are also being encouraged to expand into substance abuse treatment. And we know that, when it comes to the Feds, “encouraged” is often a euphemism for “get ‘er done.”

Many FQHCs, of course, don’t want to be substance abuse providers—but, as programs like SBRIT show, the amount of money available may be too tempting to refuse. Right now, it’s also tough for FQHCs to stretch their Section 330 grants to provide fully integrated behavioral heath services, including substance abuse treatment. HRSA occasionally issues Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) for FQHCs to enhance behavioral health services, but the operative word is “occasionally,” and there’s not enough HRSA funding for behavioral health services.

Few, if any, of our FQHC clients, have had SAMSHA grants and most are reluctant to apply. This may be a case of grant “tunnel vision” in which FQHCs focus on HRSA in the same way that public housing authorities (PHAs) often tether themselves to HUD grants. The wider grant universe, however, provides opportunities for diversity that can help organizations weather shifts in funder priorities. And to paraphrase a salesman’s advice given to William Holden’s Joe Gillis in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, “As long as the lady is paying for it, why not take the Vicuna?”

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HRSA makes it hard to target Ryan White Part C EIS “New Geographic Service Areas” applications

FQHCs and other HIV services providers have likely seen the recently issued HRSA “Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program Part C HIV Early Intervention Services Program: New Geographic Service Areas” NOFO and thought, “looks promising.” As usual, though, a potential applicant ought to first check the eligibility criteria. In this case, on page 3 the NOFO cryptically says, “[See Section III-1 of this notice of funding opportunity (NOFO), formerly known as the funding opportunity announcement (FOA), for complete eligibility information.]” Okay. That section says:

Newly proposed service areas must not geographically overlap with existing RWHAP Part C EIS service areas as defined in Appendix B in NOFO HRSA-18-001, HRSA-18-004, and HRSA-18-005.

Okay. So if you up those other NOFOs you’ll find a long table of current providers; the table isn’t organized in a coherent fashion, except by state. There’s no map or list of potentially qualifying zip codes, only a list of current providers and some poorly described service areas for their Ryan White Part C EIS grants. In many places, like big cities, it’s hard to tell which areas/neighborhoods might qualify as new service areas.

Still, the NOFO also listed a webinar, which occurred today. Despite knowing that bidders conferences are a usually waste of time, I participated anyway, and when the presenters finally finish regurgitating the NOFO I asked, “Will HRSA produce a map of areas that it currently considers underserved? That would help a lot, especially in dense urban areas like New York City.” The leader said, “No. The NOFA does not identify specific areas that are underserved. It’s up to the applicant to demonstrate need in a particular service area.” HRSA won’t produce a map showing allowed areas or even a map of currently served areas. Applicants just have to guess. Thanks, HRSA. Helpful as usual.

If you’re interested in the New Geographic Service Areas program and you read the Q & A when it’s released, you may find the question from yours truly. I sometimes tell students that formulating good questions can be as hard as giving good answers. In this case, the answer would’ve been more useful than the question—had it been forthcoming.