Managed Care

The Changing Face of Medicine.

Americans in the 1980s were increasingly confronting the relatively new concept of "managed care." The interests of physicians, especially doctors' interests in controlling their own work and setting their own prices, originally shaped medicine in the United States. Traditionally, patients paid their doctors directly on a fee-for-service basis rather than by salary or capitation (that is, per patient per year). Until fairly recently, physicians were one of the few occupational groups able to resist being drawn into industrial and bureaucratic organizations as were other self-employed professionals. Rising health-care costs and the realization that health care was big business forced changes. Unprecedented competition in the health-care industry resulted in major shifts in power in the 1980s as hospitals, physicians, the federal government, and insurers fought for their share of medical business....

[The entire page is 1036 words long]

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