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Something really quite extraordinary happened this week: NAACOS, the Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Accountable Care Organizations, published, in the august journal Health Affairs, a study based on research that NAACOS leaders had commissioned from Dobson DaVanzo & Associates, a healthcare economics consulting firm. And, as Healthcare Informatics Managing Editor Rajiv Leventhal noted in his report, “Medicare’s largest ACO (accountable care organization) initiative—the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP)—generated gross savings of $1.84 billion for Medicare from 2013 to 2015, nearly double the $954 million estimated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS),” according to the NAACOS/Dobson DaVanzo & Associates study.
And here’s what’s extraordinary about that: this is the first time in my memory that I’ve seen a national association of provider organizations commission independent research that directly contradicted federal government findings and statistics. Could this be the start of a major conflict over the direction of the MSSP program? The potential for actual conflict here is quite real. But first, let’s look at what NAACOS and Dobson DaVanzo found. As Leventhal noted, “The study, which used similar scientific methods as a 2018 peer-reviewed paper by Harvard researchers published in The New England Journal of Medicine, found that MSSP ACOs reduced Medicare spending by $541.7 million during the 2013 to 2015 timeframe, after accounting for shared-savings payments earned by ACOs.”