Managed Care Ethics

As your fourth assignment toward completion of the Session Long Project you are asked to review the paper by A. Mains, A. Coustasse, K. Lykens: Physician Incentives: Managed Care and Ethics and answer the questions below.
Consider this idea from the paper: “Medicine is a moral enterprise. Because MCOs are involved in the delivery of medical care, they too, are moral entities. However, MCOs are also businesses.”
Their economic views include not only minimizing costs for individual patients and third-party payers but creating profit for its officers and shareholders. Individual and group physician practices are businesses but they contain less shareholders requiring a profit. It is true that managed care attempts to allocate regulating decisions, which indicates an ethical way to do business. Managed care areas of quality and access
A robust science of the doctor–patient encounter and relationship can guide decision making in health care plans (Goold & Lipkin, 1999; Gordon & Rost, 1995; Levinson & Roter, 1993). However, physicians should focus on continuity: in their relationships with individual patients, between their patients and other clinicians and with the organization as a whole. Trust is most genuine when a relationship has a history of dependability, support, generosity, and good will. Continuity encourages trust, provides an opportunity for patients and providers to know each other as people and provides a foundation for making decisions with a specific individual. It allows physicians to be better advocates for their patients and allows patients some power by virtue of the personal relationship they have with this physician (Goold, 1996; Goold & Lipkin, 1999; Hjortdahl & Laerum, 1992; Sofaer & Hurwicz,