Republicans would have the public believe that the Obama administration plans to control runaway health care costs by means of rationing and death panels. Such drastic remedies may be a logical outgrowth of Obama’s bureaucratic, top-down approach to health reform if and when it fails sometime in the future. But right now the technocrats re-engineering America’s health care system are optimistic that they have found the solution, or at least a big piece of it. The future, they say, belongs to ACOs — accountable care organizations.
The premise behind ACOs is that the delivery of health care in the United States is too fragmented. Patients bounce between hospitals, doctors and a host of other players, most of whom do not know what the other is doing. As a consequence, there are too many tests and diagnostic procedures, too little critical information communicated from one provider to another, and too little timely follow-up.
