The American Health Care System

TLDR

America's private and public third‑party payers, burdened by rising costs, support managed‑care plans that aim to reduce expenses but impose constraints on doctors' autonomy and restrict patients to network physicians. They accelerate promotion of integrated delivery‑financing plans that impose new constraints on physician‑patient encounters. No additional information.

Abstract

America's private and public third-party payers, squeezed by health care costs that continue to soar at rates well above inflation, are persuaded that "managed care" plans will produce demonstrable savings as compared with the current cost trends of traditional fee-for-service medicine. They are accelerating their efforts to promote plans that integrate the delivery and financing of care and that apply new constraints on encounters between physicians and patients. The key constraint for doctors is the limitation placed on the autonomy of their clinical decisions. The constraint for patients is the requirement that they see only physicians who are members of . . .