Another Medicare Pilot Program Failure
Just to remind everybody, the Obama administration has put all its hope for cost control in pilot programs (as in, “we’ll find out what works and then go do it”). Here’s the latest:
The study included 242,417 patients (163,107 in the intervention group and 79,310 in the control group). The eight commercial disease-management programs did not reduce hospital admissions or emergency room visits, as compared with usual care. We observed only 14 significant improvements in process-of-care measures out of 40 comparisons. These modest improvements came at substantial cost to the Medicare program in fees paid to the disease-management companies ($400 million), with no demonstrable savings in Medicare expenditures.
Am I supposed to be surprised at this result? It is what I would have expected.
Bruce, you have so little faith!
In this case, lack of faith is rationally based.
Of course it was a failure. You can’t design efficient production from inside the Washington DC Beltway.
And yet, the Administration’s response will be to fund more pilot programs.