Oregon's coordinated care organizations: a promising and practical reform model

Abstract

Continuing its path of Medicaid program innovation, Oregon recently embarked on a major reform that gives regional coordinated care organizations (CCOs) global budgets and accountability for the physical, behavioral, and dental care of the state's Medicaid beneficiaries (Howard et al. 2014). There are some who maintain that the state's bold reform initiative is overly aggressive in scope and unrealistically optimistic in schedule and may prove to be a costly debacle to the state of Oregon. We argue that the Oregon CCO model is not only bold in its aims and timetable but also realistically achievable.