Word: minnesota
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Oddly, Choice Plus was not created in reaction to any bitter consumer backlash. Minnesota law requires all managed-care plans to be nonprofit, so there was no suspicion that patients were being shortchanged for the benefit of Wall Street. And 87% of the state's citizens tell pollsters they are satisfied with their medical care. But workers did grumble about cumbersome approval procedures, the need to change physicians whenever companies changed medical plans, and limited choices...
Executives, meanwhile, feared they would lose control of health-care costs. In Minnesota as elsewhere, HMOs are merging at such a pace that some analysts think the three that currently have 78% of the business will soon have all of it. They "would own all the doctors and hospitals and could charge us whatever they wanted," says a company official. Well before things got to that pass, companies' premium bills were rising rapidly, and no one could quite explain why. "We were writing checks into a system where we didn't know what we were getting for services in return...
...managed care? Its success is by no means assured. Some executives say privately that the plan would have to grow to twice its present size--112,000 enrollees--in order to spread costs over a wide enough base to stay viable. That means attracting more companies, and even in Minnesota the idea is too radical to prompt more than a kind of nervous interest. Then too, Minneapolis-St. Paul is somewhat unique because of its close-knit business community and well-educated work force. So far, the only feeler from out of state about establishing a similar plan has come...
...couldn't these incentives tempt doctors to give patients the cheapest rather than the best treatment--just as conventional HMOs are savagely criticized for doing? Maybe. Minnesota executives are convinced that the only long-term way to keep costs down without limiting services is to educate patients to take responsibility for their own care by following healthy habits as well as choosing and cooperating with the right doctors. Choice Plus is designed above all to give patients the information they need to do that...
...there is a heaven. We create it every day when we protect a child, help an adult and revere our home, the earth." GEORGE A. ERICKSON New Brighton, Minnesota...