The Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) makes incentive payments to groups of clinicians and health care organizations known as accountable care organizations (ACOs), which assume responsibility for the quality and costs of their attributed patients. The MSSP was intended to generate savings while maintaining or improving quality. Analyses based on early estimates of ACO performance have found that the program was associated with net losses to traditional Medicare between 2013 and 2021.
In a new research letter in JAMA Health Forum, Dr. Amelia Bond, associate professor of population health sciences, Dr. Dhruv Khullar, associate professor of population health sciences, and colleagues from the Division of Health Policy and Economics provided updated estimates of MSSP’s budgetary impact between 2012 and 2023. This longitudinal evaluation of the program’s effects found that, in contrast to the findings of prior work, MSSP was associated with net savings of $4.3 billion to 13.4 billion to traditional Medicare during this period. Per the new research, MSSP generated net savings in most years, though the introduction of regional benchmarks and changes in health care spending during the COVID-19 pandemic likely resulted in relatively lower savings after 2019. These findings may be of interest to policymakers considering the budgetary effects of value-based payment reforms.
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