Word: health
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...despite these efforts at curbing Roxbury's swollen sickness rate, no one is pretending that the Harvard health plan is solely--or even primarily--designed to help the poor. The 6000 poor patients who will join the program will make up only 20 per cent of the plan's membership. The other 80 per cent--24,000 people --will be people who now have Blue Cross or other kinds of private insurance...
...angry liberals pressed them hard enough, the plan's administrators could come up with reasonable excuses for including so many affluent patients at a time when the poor are sicker and more desperate. Other health plans, Pollack might say, are famous for their "social conscience," and only 10 per cent of their patients are poor. So if the Harvard plan takes 20 per cent of its patients form Roxbury it must be twice as socially concerned...
From the beginning, the Harvard Health Plan has deliberately tried to make itself into a model. Tapping the medical wealth of the Boston area, the plan's designers could have cut several corners and come up with special features that would work well --in Boston. In the face of that temptation, the plan's reluctance to cut corners and develop special techniques shows how seriously it takes its role as a national health-care model...
...result of the drive towards the mainstream has been a simple model of a community health care system. Not a utopia, not a complete restructuring of medical capitalism, but a practical set of instructions that other hospitals and insurance companies can follow...
Part of the reason for the health plan's national ambitions may come from the backgrounds of the men who direct it. Before he came to Harvard, Pollack had served as professor of administrative medicine at Columbia and director of Nelson Rockefeller's Committee on Hospital Costs in New York. In his years in New York, Pollack used to buy medi- cal service plans for three million people. By the time he came to Harvard in 1965, Pollack says he "came with a national outlook...