 the term managed care or managed health care is used in the united states to describe a variety of techniques intended to reduce the cost of providing health benefits and improve the quality of care ("managed care techniques"), for organizations that use those techniques or provide them as services to other organizations ("managed care organization" or "mco"), or to describe systems of financing and delivering health care to enrollees organized around managed care techniques and concepts ("managed care delivery systems"). ...intended to reduce unnecessary health care costs through a variety of mechanisms, including: economic incentives for physicians and patients to select less costly forms of care; programs for reviewing the medical necessity of specific services; increased beneficiary cost sharing; controls on inpatient admissions and lengths of stay; the establishment of cost-sharing incentives for outpatient surgery; selective contracting with health care providers; and the intensive management of high-cost health care cases. the programs may be provided in a variety of settings, such as health maintenance organizations and preferred provider organizations.managed care programs. national library of medicine. the growth of managed care in the u.s. was spurred by the enactment of the health maintenance organization act of 1973. while managed care techniques were pioneered by health maintenance organizations, they are now used by a variety of private health benefit programs. managed care is now nearly ubiquitous in the u.s, but has attracted controversy because it has had mixed results in its overall goal of controlling medical costs.[Â±https://nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/vodold/mngdcare.htm what is managed health care? by christine tobin, mba, rn, cde] proponents and critics are also sharply divided on managed care's overall impact on the quality of u.s. health care delivery. ==history== dr. paul starr suggests in his analysis of the american health care system (i.e., the social transformation of american medicine) that richard nixon, advised by the "father of health maintenance organizations", dr. paul m. ellwood, jr., was the first mainstream political leader to take deliberate steps to change american health care from its longstanding not-for-profit business principles into a for-profit model that would be driven by the insurance industry. in 1973, congress passed the health maintenance organization act, which encouraged rapid growth of health maintenance organizations (hmos), the first form of managed care. managed care plans are widely credited with subduing medical cost inflation in the late 1980s by reducing unnecessary hospitalizations, forcing providers to discount thei
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