Payment by Capitation and the Quality of Care

Capitation and decapitation have nothing to do with each other, but you could hardly tell the difference when observing the intense debate over the value and risks of capitation in health care payment. Those who favor capitation seem to regard it as the sine qua non of effective containment of health care costs; those who oppose it suggest that it will spell nothing less than the end of medicine's commitment to patient advocacy and the Hippocratic oath. Meanwhile, health care coverage for more and more Americans is paid for in this way. Between 1987 and 1995, for example, the number . . .