Experts to Medicare: Don't make the same pilot errors twice

The New York Times: Congress created the new $1 billion-a-year Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation to experiment with new — and possibly better or more efficient — ways to pay for and deliver health care as part of the overhaul law. But, the Center's efforts won't be Medicare's first attempts at innovation. Four experts who are veterans of an earlier pilot program are warning the agency not to make the same mistakes that sunk an earlier demonstration project — called the "Medicare Health Support Program" — in a new article in the journal Health Affairs. "The experience showed how difficult it could be for Medicare to save money on such programs, especially when the government pays hefty fees for help from private health plans and other companies specializing in disease management. The companies involved complained of serious problems with the program's design." One issue was that the program attempted to care for too many people who were already very sick (Abelson, 7/7).

---

This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.