Manage Care Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Manage Care - Essay Example Both organizations and individuals in the U.S. managed care system are faced with a challenging situation. First of all, the requirement for high quality care, doubled by the social responsibility to patients, is counterbalanced by an increasing pressure to lower costs and to remain afloat financially. For this reason, numerous health care providers are doomed to fail from a business perspective, being forced to close. More and more practitioners will perform as part of groups or systems, but the process of integration will not impose itself in the short term. Based on these considerations, it can be asserted that no standard model will emerge as dominant. The Institute of Medicine released few years ago a report that red-flagged the poor quality of health care in the US (Institute of Medicine 2001). A number of facts that contributed to this situation were identified, and special emphasis was put on the structure of the present health care payment system. Traditionally, doctors and medical institutions are paid regardless of the quality of the health care they provide, leading to no financial incentives or, in the case of certain clinical situations, even to disincentives for quality. These findings lead to an increasing demand to link payment to performance. The concept of pay-for-performance