Medicare and HMOs -- The Search for Accountability

doi:10.1056/NEJMp0810149

Volume 360:2048-2050		May 14, 2009		Number 20

Medicare and HMOs — The Search for Accountability

Richard Kronick, Ph.D.

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PubMed Citation

Twenty-five years after the introduction of health maintenanceorganizations (HMOs) as an alternative to fee-for-service Medicare,the promise of these private plans — that competitionamong them would lead to improvements in the quality and efficiencyof health care delivery — remains largely unfulfilled.Some analysts see this failure as a reason to scrap them. However,given the inherent limitations of fee for service, a bettersolution would be for the new administration and Congress tomake one more attempt to extract value from private health plansby holding them accountable for the quality and cost of thecare they . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Source Information

Dr. Kronick is a professor and chief of the Division of Health Care Sciences, Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, La Jolla.