this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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The author of this article has a clear bias and lets this bias lead their perception of accountable care organizations (ACO), despite it being perhaps the only existing lever within our system by which preventative and population health measures can actually be adopted. This complete misread of ACO and VBC (value based care) makes it difficult to view anything else the author says with credit. Which is a shame, because a fair deal of this history I'm familiar with and I completely agree that UHG is a fucking capitalistic nightmare plague on US healthcare costs.
Genuinely curious:
Is the author saying that ACO and VBC were decent ideas that got UHG’s fingers grafted into the legal structure, or are they just saying that ACO and VBC are bad in general?
And I knew that we had some awful structures within our healthcare system, but I LOATHE UHG and didn’t realize that they OWN our medical system. Disgusting.
To me it sounded like they were saying ACO and VBC are both bad. In fact, it kinda felt like they were attributing their creation to UHG as some kinda malicious moneymaking scheme.
What's aco? urgent care?
Accountable care organization. VBC = value based care.
I know how to read an abbreviation... Looking to understand what they actually do within the corruption scheme
I'm not sure how to answer your question in a manner which doesn't touch on the same points the author brings forward. Was something they said unclear or are there parts of my comment which you'd like me to elaborate upon?
What job do they actually do?
You suggested they are not corrupt. I am trying to understand where you are coming from?
Explaining what an ACO and what VBC are is far outside the scope of the educational burden I'm willing to take on. Instead, have some links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accountable_care_organization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-based_health_care
You attempted to discredit author of the article over him being critical of these concepts but are unwilling to explain how they benefit patients. I see promises being made but I also see steep administrative costs also, which is the critical defect in the US healthcare system.
Based on wiki pages, it appears that these are just another model that serves as band aid on fundamentally flawed system with a lot room for corruption to continue.
This is the essential flaw in having the whole system designed and operated by people whose specialty is extracting the labor value from other people's effort, and skittering away with it like an 1800s movie villain with a big sack of money with a "$" on it.
😢
She tried to paint ACOs as the brainchild of UHG specifically, as a means to extract wealth from an existing system. That ignores the current state of ACOs and the many which are able to reduce overall healthcare costs and in many cases reduce administrative costs. Yes, the US healthcare system is broken. Yes, it's very simple to view this as a "band aid on a fundamentally flawed system" and yes, there's still room for "corruption to continue". None of that is in conflict with what I stated. I merely took issue with the framing that UHG is responsible for the creation of ACOs and VBC as that's just factually incorrect, and it suggests the framing that ACOs are not providing any value to the system or being useful in any way- this is contradicted in the article I linked as well as plenty of other published literature by organizations which are notably not UHG.