Everybody is talking about the new report from the Congressional Budget Office, which stated that CMMI raised federal spending [1]. CMMI, the innovation center of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, was created to research and develop various payment models to achieve the triple aims: care, health, and cost.
Everyone is slightly missing the point; for sure, 𝐰𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐭. The report does not say that all CMMI models were useless and wasteful. It acknowledges that some of the models were effective in saving money. Unfortunately, the effect was smaller than the operational cost of CMMI - see the table below. Furthermore, the report didn't account for the results from MSSP, as MSSP is "technically" not a CMMI model.
Of course, CMMI could have better spent its budget. According to the report, during the first decade of its history, it spent $7.9 billion on its employees, model infrastructure, and evaluations. I am not an expert on this matter, but I guess there could have been a lot of "reporting burden," which may have incurred hefty expenses for those government contractors.
We can view R&D as either "cost" or "investment." I vote for the latter.
I wish people did not interpret this report as saying we do not need CMMI or further experiments. 𝐖𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐛𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬.
[1]