Managed care myths

Managed care is a health insurance program that contracts healthcare providers to reduce

healthcare costs for their members. Managed care is made of healthcare providers like nurses,

surgeons, hospitals, insurance companies, and the patients with an agreement to limit the health

care providers the patients can access and thereby driving patients to these health care providers.

The practice of managed care began over 100 years in the US in Washington when lumbering

employers offered their employees medical service at specific providers at a reduced cost. Today

many people are registered to the managed care organization dotted across the world, such as

Cigna, Anthem, and governmental insurance programs like Medicaid (Shmueli et al., 2015).

However, many myths and misconceptions are associated with this form of healthcare, many of

which are not valid. These myths affect the practice both positively and negatively. This paper

shall discuss one of the prevalent managed care myths and issues associated with it.

One of the myths associated with doctors rushing through office appointments with

patients and thereby offering low-quality healthcare. This myth has been around for a long time

now and affected managed care organizations’ branding as an inefficient organization compared

to the traditional fee for service care. This myth came about due to the negative perspective that

people had about the doctors that worked for managed care organizations, which pointed towards

the fact that these doctors were competing for patients. The competition for patients made the

doctors deal faster with patients visiting their offices for them to be capable of treating many

patients who meant high income. This aspect resulted from the fact that the doctors that seemed

to be treating a lot of patients were deemed to be efficient, and hence they continued to receive

more clients compared to those with few clients. The other fact that supports this myth’s

prevalence day is that some doctors ignored some procedures and tests when dealing with