Master had spent 20 years as a doctor at a community health center in Uphams Corner, a multiethnic neighborhood just a half mile from where he grew up. Feltin, the daughter of French Jews who hid her from the Nazis, worked in a nearby clinic. Both had used a similar model of doctors and nurse practitioners especially to help elderly homebound and nursing-home residents. CMA's success has won plaudits from both doctors and advocates who are normally suspicious of managed care. Green was impressed that a woman with such severe quadriplegia had gone 10 years since an auto accident without bedsores.
Most insurance companies are adversaries of their clients.
Allan Bergman, of the Washington-based Institute on Disability and Managed Care, says Master has proved that managed care can work for people who have the most to lose from a system that restricts benefits and treatments. There's nothing magical about it. He just rearranged the furniture. Big HMOs watch. The chance to prove the CMA model could work for more people would come from bigger HMOs that quietly were watching Master's success and wanted to learn from him.