Question

In 2 paragraphs please tell me what you have learned from this course. The course is Managed Care Policies and Implications.

Answer 1

The term managed care or managed healthcare is used in the United States to describe a group of activities intended to reduce the cost of providing for-profit health care and providing American health insurance while improving the quality of that care ("managed care techniques"). It has become the essentially exclusive system of delivering and receiving American health care since its implementation in the early 1980s, and has been largely unaffected by the Affordable Care Act of 2010.

The growth of managed care in the U.S. was spurred by the enactment of the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973. While managed care techniques were pioneered by health maintenance organizations, they are now used by a variety of private health benefit programs. Managed care is now nearly ubiquitous in the U.S, but has attracted controversy because it has had mixed results in its overall goal of controlling medical costs.Proponents and critics are also sharply divided on managed care's overall impact on U.S. health care delivery, which ranks among the best in terms of quality but among the worst with regard to access, efficiency, and equity in the developed world.

The overall impact of managed care remains widely debated. Proponents argue that it has increased efficiency, improved overall standards, and led to a better understanding of the relationship and quality. They argue that there is no consistent, direct correlation between the cost of care and its quality, pointing to a 2002 Juran Institute study which estimated that the "cost of poor quality" caused by overuse, misuse, and waste amounts to 30 percent of all direct healthcare spending. The emerging practice of evidence-based medicine is being used to determine when lower-cost medicine may in fact be more effective.

Critics of managed care argue that "for-profit" managed care has been an unsuccessful health policy, as it has contributed to higher health care costs (25–33% higher overhead at some of the largest HMOs), increased the number of uninsured citizens, driven away health care providers, and applied downward pressure on quality (worse scores on 14 of 14 quality indicators reported to the National Committee for Quality Assurance).