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Managed Competition in Health Care Reform: Just Another American Dream, or the Perfect Solution?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Uwe E. Reinhardt
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Extract

Throughout the post-World War II decades, the United States has wrestled in its own unique style with a problem that is shared by all modern societies: how to achieve a reasonably equitable distribution of health care, without losing control of total spending on health care, and without suffocating the delivery system with controls and regulations that inhibit technical progress.

Because an equitable distribution of health care inevitably requires at least some government regulation, and because government regulations tend to impose rigidity on any system, it is widely believed in the United States (and elsewhere) that a trade-off actually exists between fairness in the distribution of care and the health system’s ability to innovate. This troublesome trade-off bedevils American policy makers to this day.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , Summer 1994 , pp. 106 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1994

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References

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