Managed Competition

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

What is “managed competition,” the blueprint for reforming the health care system that has been endorsed by President Bill Clinton and key elements of which former president George Bush incorporated into the scheme he introduced last year? As applied to practitioners, its central idea is to divide physicians and hospitals into competing economic units, called “accountable health partnerships,” that would contract with insurance-purchasing cooperatives to provide standardized packages of medical benefits for fixed per capita rates. Thus, managed competition would hasten the demise of fee-for-service payment, require providers to bundle their care into defined benefit plans, and by remunerating providers . . .