Today marks the end to the eight year reign of President Barack Obama and the birth of the Trump Administration tenure. Yet, so much in the health policy and reform domain remains unclear and on the come.
Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in March of 2010 the implementation of the delivery system side of the reform to restrain if not reduce healthcare spending has been vested primarily in a range of variably sophisticated ACOs and other participants in a tapestry of value based healthcare arrangements from bundled payments to patient centered medical homes and even the more risk savvy cohort of Medicare Advantage operators.
What is clear is change is on the horizon; yet just what the nature of that change will look like will probably reveal itself over the next several months and perhaps even years. For our discussion of what appears to be the emerging indicia of a ‘TrumpCare‘ chassis, Health Innovation Media principals share insights via: ‘On @PopHealthWeek: #Trumpcare What We Know @fsgoldstein @efuturist @2healthguru‘ and ‘A #TrumpCare Roundtable with @efuturist, @fsgoldstein and @2healthguru‘.
Clearly the era of ‘accountable care‘ and the provider organizations designed to explore and implement their local market vision of an entity that delivers accountability is not likely to come to an end as President Trump occupies the White House. In fact, though I have been deeply skeptical of the rather hollow ‘repeal and replace‘ mantra absent a material Republican replacement option, I am somewhat encouraged by the tempered optimism proffered by Ezekiel Emanuel, M.D., Ph.D., Former Chief Health Policy Advisor to the Obama Administration, to an informed audience at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco earlier this month.
Meanwhile, I doubt the Trump Administration and his HHS and CMS appointees (Rep Tom Price and Seema Verma, respectively) once confirmed will advocate for an era of ‘unaccountable care‘ with a return to unbridled to fee-for-services medicine. Thus, I bank on the continued evolution and deployment of ACOs as progressive risk bearing entities and continuing clinical integration plays. However, we shall see!
We do indeed live in interesting times!
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