ACO-REACH: A Threat to Medicare

                                           ACO-REACH: An Immediate Threat to Medicare

July 22, 2022 

Wall Street, with federal approval, is privatizing and destroying Traditional Medicare. The program acronym, ACO-REACH, is a contraction of “Accountable Care Organization Realizing Equity, Access, and Community Health .” Read on to see why ACO-REACH is already harming accountability equity, access, and community health.

 Background: In 2016, the Trump administration introduced a program that contracts with private entities to do Medicare’s job of paying the bills of people enrolled in traditional Medicare. Medicare pays these middlemen a negotiated amount to cover a given number of patients. They can keep up to 40% of this money to do what traditional Medicare does with only a 2% overhead.

 The Biden administration is continuing the essential elements of this program as the REACH program. The Medicare and Medicaid Center for Innovation has announced that it plans to force all seniors into this program by 2030, completely privatizing Medicare. Wall Street will eliminate Traditional Medicare, leaving a system with all the problems of private insurance that is much more expensive than even Medicare Advantage.

Consequences of ACO-REACH:

• Even if you prefer traditional Medicare, you must enroll in a privatized plan.

• ACO-REACH assigns you to a primary care provider you may not want or even know.

• Incentives will maximize profit by denying the care you need, and inappropriate denials of care may cause you harm.

• You as taxpayer and enrollee must pay for an expensive, inefficient system that prioritizes profits over patient care outcomes.

• It will be all the more difficult to create an efficient and high-quality universal, publicly funded health care system, a system that serves the health care needs of you and your family regardless of your income, employment, age, residence location, or marital status.

What you can do:

1) Write, call, and email your members of Congress telling them to demand hearings on ACO-REACH. Find their contact information at congress.gov/members.

2) Speak up at town halls during the August recess.

3) Write letters to the editor.

4) Share this information with friends, coworkers, neighbors, and groups to which you belong.

5) Learn more at Physicians for a National Health Program (pnhp.org) and https://bit.ly/3PHu4hm.

By Richard Staggenborg MD and Mike Huntington MD