In Career Center Contact Us Features Main Page Hill in the News 1999 Annual Report Myths and Medicine Perception is often reality but not always. Managed care is a case in point. It may be the most hated service that millions of Americans are choosing to purchase. For those who saw the movie, you may recall she was being forced by her HMO to go the emergency room.
Perception is wrong again.
Under the old unmanaged non-system, patients were left adrift to seek expensive episodic care through emergency rooms. I know this from personal experience when, in the 1980s, I ran the largest emergency physician group in the country, treating over one million patients a year. It is the managed-care community that has recognized patients are served better and less expensively when asthma treatments are incorporated into home care, education provided to patients and families, and the latest drugs used. Even consumer polls reinforce this disparity between perception and reality in managed care. Michael Millenson of the Chicago Tribune conducted over a year of research into the managed-care backlash to explain this disparity between perception and reality.