managed care

managed care, type of health insurance and system of delivering health care services that is intended to minimize costs. Managed care is specific to health care in the United States.

History of managed care

The origins of managed care in the United States can be traced to the late 19th century, when a small number of physicians in several U.S. cities began providing prepaid medical care to members of fraternal orders, unions, and other associations of workers. Each member of a participating association paid a small annual fee to the physician and thereby gained unlimited access to the health care services the physician provided. In the early 20th century, railroad, mining, and lumber companies organized their own medical services or contracted with medical groups to provide care for their workers. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, prepaid contracts between employers and employee associations were relatively common. Starting in the 1970s, the federal government and many large private companies began encouraging their workers to join prepaid forms of health care groups. Despite this encouragement, however, prepaid group practice grew slowly. In the mid-1980s, employers increasingly turned to managed care to contain the spiraling cost of providing health care benefits to workers. During the 1990s, managed care enrollments soared. Today, the vast majority of privately insured Americans, and a sizable fraction of those in the government-sponsored Medicare and Medicaid programs, are covered by some form of managed care.

Defining managed care

Despite the large number of persons enrolled in managed care programs in the United States, it is difficult to precisely define managed care. The definition of the term has changed significantly through time as the concept of managed care has evolved. In the early 21st century, managed care was broadly defined as any organized system of health care that attempted to reduce or eliminate services that system representatives deemed ineffective or unnecessary; this provided a way to hold down costs while at the same time maintaining high-quality health care.

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Managed care organizations

Most managed care is carried out in one of two basic types of health care organizations: health maintenance organizations (HMOs) or preferred provider organizations (PPOs). Managed care organizations use a variety of methods of financing and organizing the delivery of health care to control costs. Specifically, managed care relies primarily on three strategies for success: selective contracting, innovative economic incentives, and utilization review.

To develop selective contracts, managed care organizations use health care claims data to compare the prices that different hospitals and physicians charge for the same treatments in order to identify the lowest-priced providers. In highly competitive health care markets with many providers, large managed care organizations with hundreds of thousands of enrollees can selectively contract with individual hospitals and physicians and receive substantial discounts for the provision of health care to their members. The providers are willing to give deep discounts to these organizations to avoid losing large numbers of patients. Providers also can retain or build a greater market share by giving these discounts. From the late 1990s, competition in many urban markets was reduced, affecting prices and quality of health care, as a result of mergers and acquisitions of hospitals and the integration of health care delivery systems.

Managed care organizations frequently provide innovative economic incentives to patients and physicians to encourage them to select less costly forms of health care. For example, organizations may require patients to obtain preauthorization before using hospital emergency rooms to receive care for specific conditions. They also may discourage patients from using higher-priced health care institutions such as costly teaching hospitals for routine care. Costs are also regulated by controlling physician salaries, which may be fixed initially and later adjusted up or down annually based on performance, rewarding those physicians who contain costs and punishing those who do not.

To conduct utilization reviews, many managed care organizations have established sophisticated internal computer information systems that monitor provider prices and the quality of health care received by their enrollees. Many have also developed a variety of utilization review programs that include elements such as preadmission screenings (to determine the necessity of a treatment or procedure and whether it is appropriate for a hospital or other setting), surgical second opinions, and ongoing reviews of high-cost cases (such as patients with HIV/AIDS and those receiving complex cancer care).

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Advantages and drawbacks

Managed care tends to decrease or eliminate individuals’ incentives to overuse services. It generally reduces patient out-of-pocket expenses and other financial barriers to health care. Managed care also has the potential to achieve better coordination of patient services. Given that most managed care organizations use the primary care physician to direct and structure the patient’s total treatment, in theory the services provided should be more logical, customized, and prompt than they would be under other systems. Managed care, through its use of internal computer information systems, also has the potential to monitor the quality of care and assess the performance of both individual patients and their physicians more efficiently. Finally, some managed care organizations provide transportation services for patients between their homes and the facilities where they receive care. These services may be vital for patients with major disabilities, especially those who live in areas without any public transportation.

Managed care, however, also poses a number of formidable problems. For example, managed care organizations may design and direct their marketing programs to attract only generally healthy populations. They may overtly and covertly discourage enrollment of individuals who are likely to be users of costly health care services. Because patients with disabilities and chronic disease may be frequent users of specialists and other high-cost medical services, managed care organizations may view them as undesirable patients. In addition, managed care organizations typically use primary care physicians as “gatekeepers” to control access to care. These physicians may not have the necessary experience or expertise to address the unique needs of people with diverse physical and mental disabilities.

With their emphasis on primary care and cost containment, managed care organizations may not provide people with disabilities, chronic disease, or psychological trauma adequate access to needed specialists who are qualified to diagnose and treat their conditions. For example, managed care organizations may stop referrals to psychiatrists, who tend to provide more comprehensive treatment than other mental health professionals. In addition, the complexity of managed care organizations’ referral procedures and complaint and grievance processes, and the materials that describe these aspects of managed care, may create tremendous barriers for individuals with cognitive or learning disabilities. Because managed care organizations deal primarily with the needs of healthy people, they may use definitions of “medical necessity” that work against some individuals. For example, they may apply criteria that call for “substantial improvement” or “restoration of function” as conditions for the authorization of treatment, medication, or medical equipment. This may discriminate against individuals with certain types of physical or mental disabilities who cannot meet these standards.

Managed care organizations also may have narrow short-term business perspectives that ultimately result in decisions that harm patients. Because many of these organizations operate on a for-profit basis and so must generate an appropriate return on equity to their owners or shareholders, administrators may be under great pressure to hold down short-run costs. To do so, they may deny patients access to ongoing ancillary services, such as speech, physical, and occupational therapies, or they may withhold costly medical equipment from individuals who need them. These patients may suffer in the long term because of these shortsighted decisions.