Louis Morgenier Highlights the Benefits of the MSSP

One of the great aspects of the Medicare Shared Savings Program is that it provides an important opportunity directly to physicians, said Louis Morgenier, chief executive officer of Physicians ACO, LLC.

Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

What have we learned from the Medicare Shared Savings Program so far?

It’s a great program and Medicare is making great strides in introducing it across the country. I think with this round of applications there will be something like 660 ACOs. At last count I think there were 440 last year with some 20% of Medicare beneficiaries being assigned to ACOs and the head of Medicare says there should be 50% of Medicare beneficiaries assigned to an ACO by 2018, which I think is an incredible accomplishment by CMS.

I think that they’re giving directly to physicians a great opportunity, particularly to primary care physicians, to help to control the costs of patient expenditures for Medicare fee-for-service and it’s nice that they’re not giving it to some Wall Street company or to some insurance company. They’re giving the opportunity directly to physicians. For example, some of them I’ve put together, they have a total benchmark of a couple hundred million dollars, and we have say 12,000 or 15,000 patients. And Medicare is just giving us that business and handing it to us on our lap. It’s really a phenomenal opportunity.

Furthermore, it’s only one-sided risk to get started if you’d like to. I think it’s a great opportunity so that if you save money, you can get half of it. Of course, you know if you hit quality measures on your second year and things such as that. But overall I think it’s a really great opportunity.