Abstract

Managed care has brought wide-ranging changes to the health care system. Some of these changes have been well publicized. Among them are the financial pressures that have resulted in numerous mergers of health care institutions, the restriction on the ability of patients to select their physician of choice, and the ever diminishing number of days that patients are permitted to stay in the hospital. Individual physicians, too, have been affected. For example, they are under pressure to see more patients per unit time and to use fewer resources. Utilization review and payment methods may make them reluctant to undertake the full set of diagnostic tests and therapeutic interventions when they might otherwise have done so.