Why ACOs Won’t Work
Doctors: ACOs aren’t designed or equipped to transform physician behaviors on the scale that will be needed.
Patients: There is no preferential pricing, discounting or other way for ACOs to steer patients to the most effective providers.
ACO Management: Even the most optimistic assumptions come up with relatively small reductions to annual health-care spending nationally.
Clayton Christensen, et al in the WSJ.
I think it’s fairly obvious that Obamacare has been a disaster and will only cause more problems!
There are some ideas that appear intuitively good on paper and resonate with audiences in a classroom discussions. Who wouldn’t support the idea of providers of care being held accountable?
Unfortunately, some of these ideas were never though through under real world conditions and will fail when implemented. I’m afraid the concept of ACOs is one of these.
All this should have been obvious from the beginning.
I think that the implementation of ACOs isn’t very realistic, although I don’t think they are bad ideas. Changing people’s behavior is not realistic, unless the culture under a system changes over a generation or two.
Devon, Communism sounds fantastic on paper.
There are millions upon millions of Russians and Chinese that are too dead to protest otherwise.
The idea is great, in my opinion. Tie provider payments to the quality of care provided. The trouble is that evidence-based medicine is decades away from an exact science. Hell, the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) has been working towards this for years. Their Perioperative Nursing Data Set (PNDS) is now in its third iteration, and they are just now starting to collect nationwide data on nursing care.
However, we are trying to fix provider payments to patient care metrics that no one understands at this time. I think ACOs can work, but only after medicine becomes an exact science—which may be never.