Quick Byte: ACA jump-starts 61,000 demo projects

Since 2010, the Affordable Care Act’s Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation has run, financed, or partnered on 61,000 demonstration projects, allowing people and institutions to try new things and scale up what works, according to The New York Times article “A Bipartisan Reason to Save Obamacare.”¹

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A YMCA course called the Diabetes Prevention Program is the first preventive program to qualify for scale up. According to the report, the U.S. health system previously was willing to pay an extra $16,000 to treat someone with complex diabetes but wouldn’t cover a $500 program [for group classes in changing eating habits] to prevent the disease. The YMCA’s diabetes program saved Medicare $2,650 per person over 15 months, while substantially reducing the risk of future diabetes.

Reference

1. Rosenberg T. A Bipartisan Reason to Save Obamacare. The New York Times. January 4, 2017. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com. Accessed January 10, 2017.