August 31st, 2011

From Kaiser Health News:

Expensive technologies like proton beam therapy and hot chemo baths are among the reasons America’s health care spending is rising at an unsustainable clip and making the federal deficit so hard to tame.

But two of the nation’s top health care economists are expressing doubts that accountable care organizations— one of Obama administration’s most-hyped mechanisms to save money — will be able to overcome the medical system’s lust for the new new thing.

Established through last year’s health law, ACOs are networks of doctors and hospitals that would collaborate to provide quality care at lower cost, with the motivation of keeping a share of the savings they deliver to Medicare and private insurers. Medicare has been working for months to get the program running by next year.

In a paper delivered last week at a Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Harvard’s Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra warned that ACOs may not want to rein in the use of expensive technologies that haven’t been proved superior to old-fashioned approaches, since the new stuff is often a major lure for patients.

Read more from Kaiser Health News