Word: healthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sick man who consulted his physician had roughly a fifty-fifty chance of benefiting from the encounter. The doctor's cheery manner and solicitous style were compensation for the uncertainty of a cure. "Medicine originally was mainly talk," says Sidney Wolfe, a physician who directs the Public Citizen Health Research Group in Washington, "and very little effective diagnosis and treatment...
...costs have risen, the past decade has seen an explosion in prepaid, "managed" care. More than half of all physicians work in some kind of group practice, most commonly a health-maintenance organization. Patients pay a flat annual fee in exchange for care that is provided by HMO member doctors. As private corporations, many HMOs can be quite profitable -- so long as their patients do not get too sick. The number of patients enrolled in HMOs has doubled in the past five years, to 32 million, often at the urging of cost- conscious employers. The goals: efficiency through greater competition...
...questions, it's certainly difficult to bill for that period of time," says cardiologist Alexander. "Lawyers and accountants don't have third parties or government agencies looking over their shoulders to determine whether their billings are fair." Patients understandably take a spare-no-expense attitude toward their health, but that is not a philosophy likely to keep a medical company in the black...
Physicians and patients who are not part of an HMO have found their lives affected too. The government (as the largest health insurer) and the private insurance companies have tried to cap medical costs by deciding in advance how much a particular treatment should cost and balking at anything above that amount. Many doctors can no longer decide how often they see a patient, when one can be hospitalized, or even what drugs may be prescribed. Those decisions are now in the hands of third parties, hands that have never touched the patient directly...
None of this will happen overnight. But it's not naive or unpatriotic to applaud Mikhail Gorbachev's courage and to toast his good health. George Bush is not the only one who'd better not catch cold...