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Dr. K's avatar

The ACO model has effectively been a disaster. The "excess payments" for keeping patients healthy have, by in large, not materialized. ACO's have all of the issues of the now-defunct (except for traditional Medicare) indemnity insurance model with no particularly notable upside.

As with almost all such flawed-from-the-beginning government overreaches to control medical care, the understanding of patient health on an individual basis (which might make it work) is completely missing -- replaced with population health measures which are completely defined by being "easy to count" and having almost nothing to do with the health of anyone. One cannot care for a population, and as von Eye has shown beautifully, knowing everything about a population tells you nothing about an individual. In the end the $$ are just reduced because that is what the government does (look back at their forced collapse of the subacute care and home nursing care sectors over the past 25 years).

Another of those "sounds good to politicians" and "rewards big players" but virtually inimical to good patient care initiatives. Part of this is the lack of PCPs, but much of this is far more structural than that.

Interestingly, and unexpectedly to me, the rise of concierge care, which is essentially primary care without the government, has been extraordinary with patients generally far happier. Someone should learn from this...but they will not.

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Mary Ann's avatar

The best thing anyone could do is stay far away from doctors. The most recent proof of this advice is the past two years of misinformation by doctors advising their patients take an ineffective and unsafe experimental biological, injecting pts with a spike priories is Frankenstein medicine and most of them knew it! Use urgent care doc in the boxes with pa’s and np’s. They are as good as a doctor if not better.

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