Research Paper on:
Managed Care Research and Ethical Issues

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
The problems of rising health care costs have been the bane of physicians, hospital administrators, employers and certainly the uninsured (or underinsured) for nearly three decades. Various measures  have been enacted, some with little or no effect; others have had only the effect of exacerbating the problem. Thankfully, the Clintons health care reform proposals were rejected when  they were, as they certainly could only have turned a bad situation into a living nightmare of exponentially-spiraling costs beginning at their already too-high level.  What we have tried, it seems, is everything except an approach that will work. This statement means that despite efforts to contain costs and make health care  more accessible to all Americans, our efforts largely have been cosmetic and temporary at best. HMOs now are listed as the responsible parties for 97 percent of all Americans  who have insurance coverage and are not covered through other means such as government programs or the still-uncommon Medical Savings Accounts (MSA). One  persistent feature of the approaches that do not work is that they have been based on research centered on that portion of the population that soon will not constitute the  majority group in the United States. When considering other population groups, the disparities are even greater. The purpose here is to assess the ethical validity of current efforts  to find a workable means of access to health care. Why HMOs Exist As a percentage of gross national product, health care spending  was 6 percent in 1965. That figure had risen to 14 percent of GNP by 1993 (Lindsey, 1993), even though GNP itself also had increased dramatically: by 1994,