Significant Historical Event/Impact on Health Care Organizations: Managed Care
Erich Hayman
Monday, May 19, 2008
University of Phoenix
HCS/530, Health Care Organizations
Professor David A. Olsen, MHA Significant Historical Event/Impact on Health Care Organizations “By 1995, managed care plans had become the dominant form of health insurance and enrolled 73 percent of all Americans who were covered by employer-based health benefits (Jenson, Morrisey, Gaffney, and Liston, 1997)” (Mick & Wyttenbach, 2003, p.6). “In comparing the development of the U.S., British, and Canadian health systems, Carolyn Tuohy (1999: 7) argues that “key features of health care systems are ‘accidental’ in the sense that they were shaped by ideas and agendas in place at the time a window of opportunity was opened by factors in the broader political system” (Oliver, 2004). Health care systems to date are in response to centuries of learning and ethical development. “In the period before managed care (Marcus Welby medicine) patients were ineffective purchasers since they had little or no information on their treatment needs or on their physicians” (Feldstein, 2001). Original managed care systems were introduced to control escalating health care costs. “…managed care represents a series of responses to certain realities within the U.S. health delivery system – some are historical, both ancient and contemporary; others are social and are based on the premises of limited availability or limited resources; and some are human – the product of corruption and greed” (Liberman & Rotarius, 1999). “Without creative repackaging of the idea of prepaid health plans, the form and timing of the conservative response to the excesses of the medical establishment would almost certainly have been quite different” (Oliver, 2004). “By the start of the 1970s, however, tensions develop between “a medical