Accountable care organization formation is associated with integrated systems but not high medical spending.
By David I. Auerbach, Hangsheng Liu, Peter S. Hussey, Christopher Lau, and Ateev Mehrotra
Health Affairs, October 2013
“[P]roponents hope that ACOs will deliver better quality and outcomes … and have lower costs. Independent analysts have projected savings for ACOs [endnote 3], and a recent evaluation of an ongoing private prototype has found evidence of savings and quality improvement [endnote 4].”
Endnote 3: “Congressional Budget Office, Budget options, volume 1: health care: CBO;2008 Aug…..”
Endnote 4: “Song Z, …, et al. The “Alternative Quality Contract,” based on a global budget, lowered medical spending and improved quality. Health Aff (Millwood). 2012;31:1885-94.”
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/32/10/1781.abstract
Comment:
By Kip Sullivan, J.D.
The “accountable care organization” is the latest health policy fad to captivate lawmakers. The term was invented at a meeting of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission on November 9, 2006. Despite the vague definition of ACO, and despite the absence of any evidence supporting claims made for ACOs, Congress included in the Affordable Care Act provisions authorizing the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to initiate an ACO program. CMS has designated some 250 entities as Medicare ACOs.
The two sentences quoted above indicate that even as of mid-2013, seven years after the ACO label was invented and four years after Democrats inserted ACO provisions into the legislation that was to become the Affordable Care Act, ACO proponents must either leave their praise for ACOs undocumented or misrepresent the research on ACOs. The authors of these two sentences chose the latter approach. They cited a study by the Congressional Budget Office which found that ACOs would have almost no impact on Medicare spending, and they cited a study of an ACO-like entity in Massachusetts which found the entity is generating higher, not lower, total health care spending.
The two sentences quoted above are from a paper by David Auerbach and colleagues designed to determine where the 250 Medicare ACOs are forming. They reported they are more likely to form where provider consolidation is higher, notably the Midwest and the Northeast. Because the paper simply asked where ACOs are forming, there was no need for the authors to praise ACOs. However, as the quote above indicates, the authors chose to do so. And, given the state of the research on ACOs, they were reduced to exaggerating one study and misrepresenting another in order to “document” their praise.
The first study cited by Auerbach et al. was the 2008 report to Congress by the Congressional Budget Office. In that report, the CBO analyzed 115 health care reform proposals or “options.” Option number 37 was the ACO, although CBO didn’t label it that way. CBO called it a “bonus-eligible organization.” The CBO stated: “Under this option, groups of providers meeting certain qualifications would have the opportunity to participate … in Medicare as bonus-eligible organizations (BEOs). The concept of BEOs is similar to the accountable care organization models proposed by some researchers” [p. 72]. After describing the BEO in the terms CMS would use several years later when it announced its definition of an ACO, the CBO concluded: “This option would reduce Medicare spending … by $5.3 billion over the 2010-2019 period” [p. 73]. http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/events/2009/3/11%20aco/cbohealthoption37.pdf
Auerbach et al. should have known that five billion dollars is a minuscule portion of a decade of Medicare spending. The 2010 National Health Expenditure Accounts estimated total Medicare spending over the 2010-2019 period would be more than 7 trillion dollars — $7,135,000,000 to be more precise (my calculation using the numbers shown for Medicare in Table 3
http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/downloads/proj2009.pdf) If we divide $5.3 billion into $7.135 trillion, the savings CBO said ACOs would achieve turns out to be less than one-tenth of one percent of Medicare spending.
The second paper Auerbach et al. cited – a 2012 paper published in Health Affairs by Song et al. – has already been the subject of two letters published in Health Affairs as well as a comment by Don McCanne on this blog https://www.pnhp.org/news/2013/june/academyhealths-ill-judged-choice-of-the-2013-article-of-the-year. The letter writers (I was one of them) pointed out an extremely obvious defect in the Song paper: The title of the paper claimed the ACO-like entity was saving money when the text stated it wasn’t. Despite the two letters and Don’s comment, Auerbach et al. chose to misrepresent the Song paper, and the editors of Health Affairs let them do it.
Auerbach et al.’s misuse of research is not an isolated example. Over the last several decades, a culture of permissiveness has developed within the US health services research community. This culture tolerates exaggeration and misrepresentation, especially when the exaggeration or misrepresentation promotes the managed care ideology that dominates the health policy debate in this country. As we contemplate how President Obama and the Democrats find themselves burdened by an Affordable Care Act that is not affordable, we should begin our analysis with this question: What role did the US health policy community play in causing policy-makers to think ACOs would make the ACA affordable?