At the American Hospital Association’s annual meeting, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator Seema Verma told attendees that the surest method of squeezing additional savings out of Medicare would be for providers to take on more financial risk.

Rather than reducing expenditures, upside-only ACOs have increased Medicare’s costs and “may be encouraging consolidation in the marketplace, reducing competition and choice for our beneficiaries,” she noted.

“While we understand that systems need time to adjust, our system cannot afford to continue with models that are not producing results,” Verma remarked.

But forcing ACOs to assume risk would likely be a non-starter, according to an industry survey conducted by the National Association of Accountable Care Organizations (NAACOS), that could turn into a mass exodus from CMS’s Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP).

According to NAACOS, 71% of providers and healthcare executives indicated they would opt to leave MSSP if they were forced to assume financial risk.

Get the full story here, from Healthcare Finance senior editor Susan Morse.