ObamaCare: Not Promoting Quality Care As Planned

At The Health Care Blog, Jeff Goldsmith and Bruce Henderson of Navigant Healthcare offer a grim assessment of ObamaCare’s performance that is worth quoting at length: The historic health reform law passed by Congress and signed by President Obama in March, 2010 was widely expected to catalyze a shift in healthcare payment from “volume to value” through multiple policy changes. The Affordable Care Act’s new health exchanges were going to double or triple the individual health insurance market, channeling tens of millions of new lives into new “narrow network” insurance products expected to evolve rapidly into full risk contracts. In addition, the Medicare Accountable Care Organization (ACO) program created by ACA would succeed in reducing costs and quickly scale up to cover the entire non-Medicare Advantage population of beneficiaries (currently about 70% of current enrollees) and transition provider payment from one-sided to global/population based risk. Finally, seeking to avoid the looming “Cadillac tax” created by ACA, larger employers would convert their group health plans to defined contribution models to cap their health cost liability, and channel tens of millions of their employees into private exchanges which would, in turn, push them into at-risk narrow networks organized around specific provider systems.  Three Surprising Developments Well, guess what? It is entirely possible that none of these things may actually come to pass or at least not to...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs