Word: hmos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Less Is Much More In the years since the reviled health-maintenance organizations (HMOs) were at their peak, all manner of fixes have been proposed to the health-care system, from small tweaks to wholesale overhauls. There's pay-for-performance: compensation depending on doctors' success in keeping costs down and getting patients well. There's episode care: a fixed price for a procedure like a heart bypass that covers everything from pre-op to surgery to full recuperation. Most broadly, there's global care, which provides access to a diverse team of caregivers who cover all of a patient...
...HMOs spread and the ranks of the uninsured grew, however, TV handed out fewer lollipops to the medical profession. In 1994, at the peak of the Clinton health-care fight, NBC announced ER, on which overwhelmed County General hospital treated the underinsured masses who didn't have access to preventive medicine. As Anthony Edwards reminisced to the New York Times, "It was the beginning of the era when the emergency room became primary care...
That won't be easy to change. The 1990s managed-care boom was supposed to incentivize HMOs to keep us healthy, but it slashed needed as well as unneeded care in a frenzy of willy-nilly cost-cutting and short-term profit-taking, triggering a national backlash. And if Congress gets into the details of what would be reimbursed under a new fee-for-quality structure, the same interest-group politics that have distorted and ultimately paralyzed the current system could dominate the new system; that's why Obama has proposed to depoliticize those decisions through an independent agency similar...
...time to publicly admit that the health-care system in America is broken. Costs are rising at an unacceptable rate - more than doubling over the last 10 years, which is nearly four times the rate of wage growth. Too many patients feel trapped by health-care decisions dictated by HMOs. Too many doctors are torn between practicing medicine and practicing insurance. And 47 million Americans worry what will happen to them or their children if they get sick...
...allow - but not require - insurance companies to provide coverage for practitioners, nurses and nursing facilities. During the 1980s, when fee-for-service plans were more prevalent, Davis says Christian Scientists had riders that allowed them coverage with more than 300 carriers. But with the rise of health maintenance organizations (HMOs), they have found it more difficult to convince insurance companies to cover their "spiritual care...