Health Affairs, 23, no. 6 (2004): 35 doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.23.6.35 © 2004 by Project HOPE	New Online   Pay Cuts For Medicare Docs   Access To Care Woes   Public Coverage More Efficient   Empowering Consumers

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Physician Practice

PROLOGUE

Physician Practice: Next Steps

PROLOGUE: Lingering visions of the ideal health maintenance organization (HMO) still color policymakers’ perceptions about the less organized provinces of the health system. It is still fashionable to argue that the object of policy should be to nurture competition for consumers’ allegiance between high-performance health plans. In fact, though, relatively few such plans exist. Evidently, a rare and fortuitous combination of circumstances is needed to incubate the kind of large multispecialty medical groups on which true HMOs are built. Meanwhile, most medical encounters still take place in rougher settings, and despite policymakers’ apparent lack of interest in the average neighborhood . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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