Americans love to hate Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs). But popular opinion of managed care is based more on myth than performance. More important, Americans fail to realize the inevitable clash between what they want and what they are willing to pay for.
References
1.
Institute of Medicine. Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century.Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2001. This influential report proposes a design for improving the quality of health care.
2.
MechanicDavid. “The Managed Care Backlash: Perceptions and Rhetoric in Health Care Policy and the Potential for Health Care Reform.”Milbank Quarterly79 (2001): 35–54. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of what triggered the managed-care backlash.
3.
MechanicDavidMcAlpineDonna D.RosenthalMarsha. “Are Patients' Office Visits with Physicians Getting Shorter?”New England Journal of Medicine344 (2001): 198–204. This study documents the enormous gap between the rhetoric and reality of doctor visits during the era of managed care growth.
4.
SkocpolTheda. Boomerang: Health Care Reform and the Turn Against Government.New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Skocpol provides an insightful analysis of the defeat of the Clinton health care plan, with lessons for the future.
5.
StarrPaul. The Social Transformation of American Medicine.New York: Basic Books, 1982. This Pulitzer Prize-winning volume explains how medicine developed its professional dominance in the 20th century.
