Privatized "Big Brother"
Employers, Health Insurers Increasingly Use Care Managers To Review Physicians’ Treatment Plans, Ensure They Conform to Evidence-Based Practices
Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report
September 25, 2007
A growing number of employers and health insurers are using care managers, or integrated health managers, who “essentially audit an employee’s health care and look for ways to both improve outcomes and save money,” the Wall Street Journal reports. According to the consulting firm Deloitte & Touche, there are more than 200 care managers in the U.S. who provide “programs designed to save employers and health plans money by reviewing employees’ health care claims and targeting high-cost cases for special management,” the Journal reports.
Care managers often review physicians’ treatment plans to ensure they are following established evidence-based practices and help coordinate care for people with serious illnesses. Based on the reviews, “the companies then may nix certain drugs or procedures,” the Journal reports.
Critics say that some of the programs “intrude into the private relationship between patients and their doctors and that they add yet another layer of bureaucracy, while saving money mostly by denying or switching specific drugs and procedures,” according to the Journal. Other critics say that care managers can be inflexible and ignore differences between individual patients and the judgment of physicians and nurses.
Cecil Wilson, immediate past chair of the American Medical Association, said, “The patient’s physician should ultimately be the one in charge,” adding that cost-saving should not be the main goal of care managers (McQueen, Wall Street Journal, 9/25).
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/Daily_reports/print_report.cfm?DR_ID=47740&dr_cat=3
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
Big Brother is watching you. Only he is not from the government. He is an agent of the Invisible Hand.
Intrusive micromanagement of health care today is not coming from an oppressive government, but rather it is an innovation of the free marketplace.
Rather than micromanaging health care, the stewards of a government-administered single payer system would macromanage the funds to pay for health care. Health care micromanagement decisions would be left to patients in consultation with their health care practitioners.
Of course, oversight of the spending of public funds would be essential to be certain that they are not inappropriately diverted through fraud and abuse. But that would be at arms length and not through disruptive intrusions.
Again, the private industry is foisting off on us yet more of its primary product: wasteful administrative excesses.