even greater curtailment of healthcare costs.
At the federal level, one of the approaches that they have taken is the enactment of Accountable Care Organizations or ACOs. In 2011, with Senate Bill 7, Texas also created something that is very similar. At its roots, an ACO aims to reduce healthcare costs by focusing on preventative care rather than focusing on the traditional pay for service structure that currently exists. An ACO doesn’t completely do away with the current structure, but it does add bonuses for keeping costs down limiting costs and the patients that are involved healthy keeping patients healthy. This causes an increase in the quality of care, even though “quality” is an very ephemeral term when used in medicine. The ACO is able to focus more on preventing diseases from ever starting, because at the outset most diseases don’t cost massive sums of money to treat. Physicians also use resources efficiently in order to make sure that everyone is getting receivers the most equitable care possible and that costs are still kept low compared to traditional treatments.
An ACO must still meet very stringent quality of care requirements in order to ensure that they don’t skimp on absolutely essential care. These quality controls are what primarily distinguish an ACO from an HMO. While mainly people are very interested to see what ends up happening with healthcare once an ACO is involved, many people are also worried that ACOs could lead to a race to the bottom in terms of mergers. The This type of large-scale mergers has happened before, such as the merger between Baylor and Scott & White in Texas. However,, but these would be accelerated in a world in which ACOs become very popular. This has the a detrimental effect on the eventual cost to the patient; though it might provide more quality care, because at this point, if one ACO is the only game in town there is only one ACO they are able toit can charge whatever rat...