The ACO REACH offering was billed as the first value-based offering from CMMI to explicitly support health equity–but our analysis shows that the tool used to measure social risk would shift resources away from dense, urban cities with high Black and Latino populations to largely rural areas in the South.

After a rushed launch and hurried application timeline, CMS announces fewer than half ACO REAH applicants have been invited to participate in the latest value-based model for Medicare beneficiaries.