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This book is a must for physicians and other persons who have special interests in health maintenance organizations (HMOs) as practitioners, administrators, regulators, or researchers. It is a comprehensive review of what is known and what is not known about HMOs and their performance. Crammed into the 468 pages are references to more than 900 published works and numerous charts and tables. (There are no lists of charts and tables, which would have been useful additions.) The mass of details, data, and careful references allows the reader to pursue specialized studies and to reach independent conclusions. In addition, summaries are provided at the end of each substantive chapter and in the concluding chapter that provide the author's view of what the data mean, how certain he is of the conclusions he reaches, and what additional information needs to be collected and research undertaken to understand better the nature of HMOs and their performance. The book begins with discussions of the definition of HMOs, the dimen¬ sions of performance that should be used to judge them, and the impor¬ tance of self-selection in judging HMOs. What follows is a series of chapters dealing with HMO perform¬
Byrnes et al. (Wed,) studied this question.