Republicans Respond To New ACO Rules: They’re Too Long!

This morning, the Obama administration released new regulations that could yield significant efficiencies and savings for the American health care system. Under the new rules — the result of the Affordable Care Act — providers will be encouraged to form Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) that will accept a “a flat fee for all care related to a particular patient or condition.” “If they could deliver high-quality care in a cost-effective way, they could keep the money they saved,” the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff explains. “The hope is to do nothing less than change the basic business model of American medicine from making money by getting patients to spend more money to making money by saving patients money.”

ACOs have been supported by both Democrats and Republicans, but providers balked at the administration’s draft proposal earlier this year, calling the rules unworkable and overly stringent. Hospitals and doctors complained that they would need to invest “many millions of dollars” to meet proposed criteria but would see little chance of return under rules for bonus payouts. As a result, today’s final rules “make it easier for doctors and hospitals to participate by cutting in half the number of performance measurements, removing the electronic health records requirement and eliminating financial risks for some groups.” The administration essentially deregulated its draft regulations, making “significant concessions” to providers in order to coax “doctors and hospitals to come on board” with the new payment structures. It estimates that ACOs “could save the government up to $940 million from 2012 through 2015,” and could start to shift the nation away from the unsustainable fee-for-service health care system.

But Republicans — who had initially criticized the administration for proposing overly stringent regulations — responded to the new rules with mockery. The Senate Republican Policy Committee’s analyst Chris Jacobs, published a post titled “Improving Quality — Through Regulations???” in which he poked fun at the page length of the new rules:

It’s precisely this kind of “analysis” that discredits Republicans as credible partners or critics of health care reform and suggests that they will stick to their “overegulation” rhetoric even when the administration deregulates its own rules.