Managed care and economic dynamics.

Abstract

Over the past several decades, health care delivery in the United States evolved in an environment lacking marketplace constraints. The unforeseen result was the current health care crisis--uncontrolled costs, shrinking access, and redundant technological capabilities. Managed care is a strategy to impose fiscal constraints on health care delivery. A diagrammatic analysis of the economic dynamics between consumers and producers in an open marketplace is compared with that of patients, providers, and payers under the health care scheme that produced the health care crisis and under managed care. Patient demands, expectations, and needs for health care are not subject to fiscal constraint under managed care since the dislinkage between consumer and payer still exits. Managed care does not impose true open marketplace fiscal constraints on health care delivery. Furthermore, any solution to the US health care crisis that used true marketplace fiscal constraints would necessitate fundamental changes in societal values concerning individual rights to health care.