Research Paper on:
Managed Care and Physician Responsibility

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
that the physician is best able to make decisions for patient care, but often due to the advent of managed care, administrators make some serious decisions. This has caused great  controversy in the field as doctors are frustrated when they must report every decision, and have it evaluated, by an outside administrator. It is thought that doctors should be able  to make decisions about health care and the patient should be able to access insurance coverage easily. The topic is important because it gets to the very heart of  the problems in health care administration today. With managed care as a large part of health care, physicians are often not able to make decisions as they are stuck with  rules and regulations and someone else who must oversee cases. The current policy related to the problem comes in a variety of forms. Sometimes called utilization review, for example, the  physicians hands are tied in respect to recommending and following through on treatment. Permission for certain procedures must be granted. Who is ultimately responsible for the patient when managed  care plans intervene to shift power away from doctors to care administrators? In effect, the insurance company is. A student writing on this topic may want to propose that the  physician should have more power than presently granted. II. Solutions In trying to come up with solutions, one should first explore a variety of alternatives.  There have been many models of patient care throughout the years. The libertarian model enhances patient autonomy and is a recent preference; the paternalistic model has been around since the  time of Hippocrates and Plato (Balint & Shelton, 1996). Here, the physician knows best for the patient and prescribes treatment. The patient is supposed to obey. The Beneficence-in-Trust proposal is