An increasing number of major purchasers of health services now consider capitation to be the preferred method of payment for individual physicians and small group practices. This paper is a primer on capitation payment plans for small risk pools. It describes some of the basic economic issues that purchasers and providers face when negotiating small-panel capitation contracts, including sources of risk, techniques of risk reduction and risk sharing. An empirical section analyses the experience of a plan that took a chance with the law (law of large numbers) and lost.
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