Peter Wehrwein's blog

Last May, two health advocacy groups filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights at HHS accusing four insurers selling plans in Florida of discriminating against people with HIV/AIDS by putting the drugs for treating the condition on the top tier of their formularies.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health have followed up that complaint with their own research into what they are calling “adverse tiering.” The researchers, Douglas B. Jacobs and Benjamin D. Sommers, reported their results in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine.

The Harvard researchers looked at silver-level plans listed in the federal health exchange in 12 states, six with insurers mentioned in the complaint (Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, South Carolina, and Utah) and six of the most populous states without any of those insurers (Illinois, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia).

Three more organizations have exited CMS’s Pioneer accountable care organization (ACO) program, leaving just 19 of the original 32 participants in the fold for the elite program’s third year.

The Franciscan Alliance in Indianapolis, the Genesys Physician Hospital Organization in Flint, Mich., and the Renaissance Health Network in Wayne, Pa., in the southeastern part of the state, are leaving the Pioneer program, according to a list posted on the CMS website this afternoon.

Sharp Healthcare in San Diego had announced in August that it was dropping out.

So last week it was all doom and gloom about Pioneer ACOs.

The buzz in health care wonkdom was all about 9 of the 32 organizations defecting from a program supposedly designed for the best and brightest of American health care organizations — with maybe more to follow. Accepting downside risk was just too perilous. Lags in getting data from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) were undermining cost and quality control efforts. And the contradiction of being responsible (aka accountable) for the costs of Medicare enrollees but having no direct control over where they receive care — a central feature of the ACO model — was simply untenable.

But this morning CMS attempted to change the doleful Pioneer ACO tune with a long-awaited announcement of cost and quality results from 2012, the first year the Pioneer ACOs were in operation.