Obamacare pilot project lowers Medicare costs

Obamacare pilot project lowers Medicare costs

By BRETT NORMAN | 7/17/13 5:00 AM EDT


An ambitious program under the health law to change how care is paid for lost nearly a third of its participants after the first year, but not before all were able to boost the quality of care provided to patients in an experiment that some experts say holds promise to bring down health care costs in the long run.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced Tuesday that all 32 health care organizations had hit performance benchmarks for improving care in the Pioneer Accountable Care Organization program, and 13 had done so while substantially lowering Medicare costs. In part, that was by reducing hospitalization and rehospitalizations, CMS reported.

By health care standards, the savings claimed were relatively modest — $87.6 million in 2012. And two participants reported increasing costs by $4 million. Overall, for the 669,000 Medicare enrollees in the program, costs rose by just 0.3 percent compared with 0.8 percent for typical Medicare patients.

“These results show that successful Pioneer ACOs have reduced costs for Medicare and improved the quality of care for their patients,” CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner said in a statement. “The Affordable Care Act has given us a wide range of tools to realign payment incentives in Medicare and Medicaid, and these efforts are already paying off.”

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http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/obamacare-pilot-project-medicare-costs-pioneer-aco-94303.html