Word: hmos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...comes down to whether consumers are willing to pay for increasingly costly health care or subject themselves to a form of medical rationing. That's the core issue to emerge from two surveys, released Wednesday, centered on patient and doctor experiences with HMOs. The doctor data, compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation together with the Harvard School of Public Health, found a high degree of physician dissatisfaction with a system that continually questions their professional judgment. Among the results: 79 percent of doctors reported trouble getting approval for a drug they wanted to prescribe; 69 percent had difficulty getting approval...
...safer, cheaper option. Johns Hopkins University, for example, one of the nation's top breast-surgery centers, does mostly outpatient work and reports fewer infections and happier patients. As it turns out, women are as likely to have drive-by mastectomies in fee-for-service plans as in HMOs. Moreover, HMOs tend to give women more mammograms and clinical breast exams; such early-detection methods can help avoid the need for surgery altogether. The upshot: new safeguards that both political parties seek won't change much in the real world. But that doesn't mean such body-part legislation...
Woolhandler said the trend of withholding quality data will prove harmful to patients who count on their HMOs for care...
...quality of the info available in the future is likely to be less than it is now," she said. "It's almost impossible to get information on HMOs that refuse to release their data...
Woolhandler said that while she and her co-author are interested in pursuing the subject further, such studies have been made more difficult recently by HMOs' refusal to hand over data about their care...