Managed Care for Elderly
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* Re “Put Medicare Into Managed Care” by Thomas Higgins, Commentary, Aug. 2: One can only wonder what the qualifications of a “utility executive” are on medical care delivery. In medical care, everybody is a self-appointed expert.
Briefly, his statement that managed care “doesn’t appreciably reduce benefits or quality” indicated only that he’s bought the HMO sales pitch. Has he never heard of delays, denials and multimillion-dollar lawsuits?
Worse yet, he equates medical care for young healthy workers with that of sick elderly people. Any statistician could show Higgins that the majority of medical care expenses occur in the last year of life. Passable care for the young and healthy is inadequate care for those with real disease.
Of course, HMOs avoid this by simply denying care and thereby accelerating the death process. Death is very cheap.
When he personally gets seriously ill, he’ll want a real doctor, not a drone from an assembly line, to take care of him.
FRANK R. DI FIORE MD
Newport Beach
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