Can ACOs improve healthcare while reducing costs?

We asked a diverse group of health-care policy experts to discuss, in an exchange of emails, whether ACOs are an answer to what ails the health-care system. Our panelists: Donald M. Berwick, who stepped down Dec. 2 as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; Tom Scully, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator from 2001 to 2004 and Jeff Goldsmith president of Health Futures Inc., a health-care consulting firm, and an associate professor of public-health sciences at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville.