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In yet another sign that the huge debate stirred up by Donald M. Berwick, M.D., and Richard Gilfillan, M.D., by their publication on Sep. 30, 2021 of their blog in Health Affairs online, “Medicare Advantage, Direct Contracting, And The Medicare ‘Money Machine,’ Part 2: Building On The ACO Model,” is far from being quieted, yet another pair of prominent healthcare policy leaders has come out with an extremely strong rebuttal to that September blog. This time, the two leaders are Michael E. Chernew, Ph.D., who is the Leonard D. Schaeffer Professor of Health Care Policy and director of the Healthcare Markets and Regulation (HMR) Lab in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, and Chair of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), and J. Michael McWilliams, M.D., Ph.D., who is the Warren Alpert Foundation Professor of Health Care Policy and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is also a general internist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a Visiting Scholar at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics, and a senior advisor to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI). Chernew and McWilliams on Jan. 24 authored a blog in Health Affairs online, in its “Forefront” section (formerly the Health Affairs Blog), entitled “The Case For ACOs: Why Payment Reform Remains Necessary.” Essentially, Chernew and McWilliams use their blog space to refute just about everything that Berwick and Gilfillan had stipulated last September, regarding the value of accountable care organizations (ACOs) and the Global and Direct Professional Contracting Model (GDPC), arguing for the value of those models, and also carefully separating them from the elements of the Medicare Advantage program that Berwick and Gilfillan had savaged last autumn.