Knowledge@Wharton Health Economics Research Article

Cross post from Conservative fools

'Multi-tasking Writ Large': Is Health Care Reform a Prescription for Trouble?

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=312......

Using two decades of data, Wharton health care professors Lawton R. Burns and Mark V. Pauly recently dissected the cost-cutting component of the Affordable Health Care Act, also known as Obamacare. While the title of their research paper, published in Health Affairs, was "Accountable Care Organizations May Have Difficulty Avoiding the Failures of Integrated Delivery Networks of the 1990s," the authors had offered another, shorter title: "Doomed to Fail?"

Burns and Pauly have teamed up before. In 2002, they analyzed health care initiatives in President Clinton's first administration that failed to become law. Subsequent books and articles looked at integrated delivery networks (IDNs), Clinton-era precursors to Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). The new article compares current Obamacare ACO delivery models to IDNs in the 1990s in terms of their ability (or inability) to improve health care quality and lower costs.