Managed Care Research Paper

Long before it was officially called the HMO, managed care can be traced back to as early as the 1920s to the mid-1940s. The first example was the Western Clinic in Tacoma, Washington, it had its own providers and a variety services for a monthly premium payment of $0.50 per member. That later expanded to 20 other sites in Oregon and Washington. That same year a physician, Dr. Shadid, in Oklahoma, established a health cooperative for farmers in small towns who don’t have access to physicians. More physicians over the country started providing more medical services for different companies. Other major medical prepaid groups came out during these times like the Group Health Association in 1937, the Kaiser- Permanente Medical program in 1942, the Health Cooperative of Puget Sound in Seattle in 1947, the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York in New York City in 1947, and the Group Health Plan of Minneapolis in 1957. The Health Maintenance Organization, HMOs for short was approved in 1973 by President Nixon. The HMO was formed by the government to make affordable healthcare to everyone since individual health insurance plans for companies were becoming costly to provide to their employees. HMOs provided a fixed prepaid monthly premium in exchange for medical services given in a network of providers. The HMO Act was supposed to enable major growth of managed health care, legislation assisted a $375 million to help the expansion and required employers who had 25 employers or more to give the option of an HMO to their workers. Health care
A Brief History of Managed Care | NCD.gov. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.ncd.gov/publications/2013/20130315/20130513_AppendixB

P.D. Fox and P. R. Kongstevdt, “Chapter 1: An Overview of Managed Care, “in The Essentials of Managed Health Care, 5th edition, ed. P. R. Kongstevdt (Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Publishers, 2007). Retrieved from