Managed Health Care :: essays papers

Managed Health CareOf the approximately 257.8 million individuals currently living inthe United States of America, every champion of them has a need foreffective, affordable and accessible health anxiety coverage andservices. Within the past thirty to forty years, the scope and personify of health cathexis coverage and services has drastically changed,altering the manner in which health care was previously managed.There are several factors that have affected the cost of healthcare coverage over the course of the past two to three decades.One of these factors is the introduction and rapidly increasingenrollment in managed health care indemnity plans. Managed carehealth insurance plans can, in most cases, help to alleviate therising costs of effective medical coverage. Another essentialfactor that has affected health care costs is the invention andimplementation of immature medical technologies. As prominentresearchers and economic analysts have discovered, there is adistin ct and direct correlat ion between advancing medicaltechnologies and rising health care costs. Medical innovation has beenproven time and again to be an cardinal determinant of health carecost growth. It would appear that managed care health insurance plans,which attempt to lower health care costs, and highly expensive newmedical innovations and procedures are at cross purposes, pullingagainst one another in very discordent directions. Market-levelcomparisons have found the cost growth of health care in markets withgreater managed care penetration to be generally slower than that ofnon-managed care health insurance markets. However, managed care isunlikely to prevent the circumstances of gross domestic product spent on healthcare from rising unless the cost-increasing nature of new medicaltechnologies changes.Managed care health insurance plans differ greatly fromindemnity fee-for-service, or FFS, insurance plans. Since theearly 1970s, rapidly growing enrollment in manage d care healthinsurance plans has transformed the health insurance market inthe United States. Virtually nonexistent in most markets threedecades ago, managed care health plans covered 63 percent ofthe nations employees by 1994. Managed care incorporates arange of features that allow the insurer greater influence inthe process of care delivery. Managed care plans aggressivelycontract for lower prices from physicians and hospitals andattempt to force the use of health care services bymonitoring providers and changing provider incentives. Healthinsurance providers that operate under the fee-for-serviceconcept grant the consumer practically more license of choiceconcerning doctors and treatment programs, thus freeing theconsumer of any feelings of discontent with interferinginsurance companies. Consumers of indemnity plans, however,pay a price for that freedom by way of drastically higher rates and