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CMS Expansion to Bundled Payments
Jimmy Lei
HCS/455
July 14, 2014
AuRiesheaua Bell

CMS Expansion to Bundled Payments There are many articles that discusses different issues in health care reform. Recently, an article discussed about how hospitals, nursing homes and healthcare providers are ready to join Medicare’s test of bundled payments. According to the CMS website bundled payments is defined as, “Four broadly defined models of care, which link payments for multiple services beneficiaries receive during an episode of care.” (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, 2014) The models consists of different focuses, which include acute care inpatient hospitalization, retrospective and prospective arrangements. The idea behind bundled payment is to increase quality of care and lower costs for Medicare. The fee for service model has been scrutinized by many who believe that it has perverse incentives for organizations to not efficiently provide care. According to the article, a reported 100 organizations are currently participating in the program; however the success of the organizations are unclear. The bundled payment initiative was introduced in 2013 under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as an effort to shift financing of healthcare away from paying for each procedure. The bundled payments initiative is still in its infancy, so results are not solid; however many experts and officials say that it holds promise. Currently the initiative is in the experimental phase, which will help to identify and create an alternative to the fee for service model. The other topic the article discusses is accountable care organizations, also known has ACO. An ACO is comprised of doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers, who come together to administer high quality care to their Medicare patients. The goal of an ACO’s coordinated care is to