Stats on HMOs: The whole story?
June 1, 1997
Stats on HMOs: The whole story?
If you can believe a survey out of Illinois, consumers are, overall, ecstatic with health maintenance organizations (HMOs).
According to Sachs/Scarborough/Health Plus, consumers in Boston, Cincinnati, San Diego, and Denver are particularly happy with HMOs: Nearly 85% in each of those cities report overall satisfaction with this type of health care organization. The numbers are nearly as good in Detroit, Columbus, Sacramento, and San Francisco, where slightly more than 80% of respondents reported they were happy with HMOs.
These figures are particularly interesting in light of consumer complaints about the current health care system. And, the positive report out of Boston is especially surprising. A group of physicians there is circulating a petition through hospitals and doctors’ offices that calls for an end to for-profit takeovers of medical facilities and an open discussion about what it sees as the deterioration of quality in the Massachusetts health care system.
Petitioners among the state’s best docs
According to The Boston Globe, the doctors who drafted the petition aren’t a radical fringe-group set to overthrow the system. Instead, they represent some of the top physicians in the state, including Bernard Lown, MD, a Nobel Prize winner; Thomas Graboys, MD, a leading Boston cardiologist; Mitchell Rabkin, MD, CEO of CareGroup, a corporation formed by the merger of Boston’s Beth Israel and Deaconness Hospitals; and David Himmelstein, MD an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Med School.
Himmelstein, the Globe reports, was fired by U.S. Healthcare last year after he criticized that HMO for trading quality for higher profits.
Why, then, are the numbers from Boston so good? The doctors circulating the petition may have the answer: "For the public, who are mostly healthy and use little care, awareness of the degradation of medicine builds slowly; it is mainly those who are expensively ill who encounter the dark side of market-driven health care," their statement reads.
There’s even a bit of evidence in the Sachs/ Scarborough survey to back up the doctor’s claim. The two areas in which HMOs suffer in the ratings is in hospital quality and emergency care. About half of patients in all markets expressed dissatisfaction with HMO emergency care, and many in New York, Atlanta, and Miami aren’t thrilled with HMO hospital quality.
More evidence that the Massachusetts doctors might be right: Survey participants in Florida, home to many elderly retirees, are among those least satisfied overall with HMOs and especially with the quality of doctors. About one-third of residents in Orlando, Tampa, and Miami say they’re dissatisfied with the roster of HMO physicians.
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