Impact of Managed Care on the Patients’ Rights and Care Received

Managed Care in the United States
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Impact of Managed Care on the Patients’ Rights and Care Received
Healthcare has been one of the major concerns in the United States in the past years. The government in the United States has partnered with other non-governmental organizations to provide better healthcare services to the citizens. In the effort to improve the healthcare sector, the government introduced healthcare organizations. The primary concern of managed care is to reduce the cost of treatment on the patient and still maintain quality services (Boudreaux et al., 2014). More emphasis is placed on early intervention and preventive care rather than providing care to the sick or injured patient. Managed care organizations coordinate with individual’s primary care providers to provide more information about patients since they spend more time with them as they administer care services. Managed care has succeeded in its primary mandate of subsidizing healthcare costs in the US (Kongstvedt, 2012). However, despite the patients’ improvement in terms of healthcare provision and provision of insurance service on medication, managed care has hurt patient’s rights and quality of care received.
Managed care works as a health insurance which seeks to make contracts with healthcare providers and patients so that they can offer healthcare for members at lower costs. However, this care program limits the patients’ rights in their choice of physicians; therefore, the quality of care provided suffers (Koh & Tan, 2011). The patients have limited choices to select on where they would like to receive their treatment. If managed care organization stops its services, individuals who insured under the organization must shift to other healthcare providers, something which interferes with the mode of treatment. Thus, it becomes unfair even to the care providers who feel that their patients are not receiving quality healthcare they deserve at the expense of saving money (Boudreaux et al., 2014). This has attracted claims from employers who also complain of inadequate treatment for injuries or illnesses. Thus, managed care, however, well does not live up to its primary objective of providing a holistic care on the individuals’ overall healthcare needs
Moreover, managed care has hurt patients’ right and quality of care received in the sense of conflicts arising from healthcare providers which leads to low quality of healthcare provision services (Kongstvedt, 2012). As much as primary care providers want to benefit from the best healthcare services on their patients, they are, on the contrary, encouraged to provide the least financial support to obtain higher financial benefits (Koh & Tan, 2011). This practice associated with managed care brings conflict between the care providers and the organization because the organization...