KHN: Kaiser Health News

By Sarah Barr, Matthew Fleming, Shefali S. Kulkarni, David Schultz and Christian Torres

The reviews and polls are already starting to come in: The Supreme Court’s ruling last week did not have an immediate significant effect on public opinion of the health law. But that doesn’t mean that supporters and opponents won’t continue to try to shape voters’ views until election day.

We contacted people knowledgeable about marketing. We asked them how  President Barack Obama and presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney could spin the ruling to their advantage.

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ACOs by state (Source: Leavitt Partners)

Accountable Care Organizations are the hot new health care trend, and there’s a new study out by Leavitt Partners trying to quantify just how hot they really are.

ACOs, as defined in the 2010 health law, are a delivery model that offers doctors and hospitals financial incentives to provide good quality care to Medicare beneficiaries while keeping costs down.

But that program hasn’t even launched yet, and already there are 164 “ACO entities” in the country, according to the Leavitt report. Leavitt Partners is a consultancy started by Michael Leavitt, a former governor of Utah and secretary of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush.

To get their count of ACOs, Leavitt Partners examined news releases, media reports, trade groups and conducted interviews and considered a health system to be an ACO if it either self-identified as one or was “adopting the tenets of accountable care.”  The report included systems working with private payers rather than Medicare.

Of the 164 “ACO entities” found, 99 were sponsored by hospital systems, 38 by physician groups and 27 by insurers. They were located in 41 states, though there were vast regional differences. Poor and rural regions were found to have little ACO growth.

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Health exchanges – online marketplaces often compared to sites like Expedia or Travelocity because they’ll give consumers a range of health insurance options – are vital to the success of the federal health law. So policy experts and industry officials are eagerly awaiting a proposed federal rule, due out any day, on how the exchanges will work.

In the meantime, in anticipation of the rule from the Department of Health and Human Services, buzzwords are flying: federal fall-backs, plan certification, measureable milestones and state flexibility. We asked several health policy experts what they will be looking for in the proposed regulation. Here are their edited responses.

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