Research Paper on:
Power of Managed Care

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
to afford either without health insurance. Secondly, this fact affects every facet of healthcare, affecting everything from how many nurses a hospital hires to what sorts of drugs pharmaceutical companies  develop. Due to the nature of the evolution of the health insurance industry in America, it has become virtually synonymous with the advent of corporate medicine. A brief look at  the recent history of the health insurance industry explains this relationship. In the 1980s, the health insurance industry experienced the emergence of managed care and saw the creation of  literally hundreds of health insurance plans, the majority of which were formulated by a new element in the industry, health maintenance organizations (HMOs)(Robinson 11). The emergence of this corporate  entity in healthcare radically changed the healthcare landscape in the US and forced traditional health insurers, that is, indemnity insurers, to reduce their costs (Robinson 11). Over the last several  decades, the senescence of managed care has been accompanied by a simultaneous decrease in the number of competing health plans, as small firms have succumbed to larger ones (Robinson 11).  Some of the health insurance industrys "biggest names have disappeared within a huge trend towards mergers and acquisitions (Robinson 11). In the early 1980s, many people predicted that the  staff or group model HMOs would provide all health care by the mid-1990s, but, in actuality, such HMOs have been declining in number and in 2000 represented only a small  percentage of total enrollments. As this demonstrates, the health insurance industry, which has been dominated by managed care organizations (MCOs), is in a state of flux and continual evolution.  The next "big thing" in this regard appears to be the increasing importance of consumer-directed healthcare plans (CDHPs), according to an August 2004 article in Medicine & Health (Future of