A Nurse Practitioner's View

With all the  recent  discussion on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) being heard before the Supreme Court, I wanted to discuss one of the programs that was borne from the ACA. The  Centers for Medicare & Medicaid  (CMS) define Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) as "... groups of doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers, who come together voluntarily to give coordinated high quality care to their Medicare patients. The goal of coordinated care is to ensure that patients, especially the chronically ill, get the right care at the right time, while avoiding unnecessary duplication of services and preventing medical errors." Wow, this sounds great so far, and seems to be congruent with nurse practitioner-partnered care, what could be wrong with this model? Read on. The "ACO Professional" is  defined , "...as a physician (as defined in section 1861(r)(1) of the Act) or a practitioner described in section 1842(b)(18)(C)(i) the Act (that is, a p...