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History
Introduction and history
Health maintenance organizations, commonly referred
to as HMOs, represent one increasingly popular form
of managed health care. One of the goals of managed
health care is to help contain the skyrocketing cost
of health care in the United States. HMOs aim to deliver
health care services for a less expensive prepaid fee
by coordinating all medical treatment and eliminating
any unnecessary or inappropriate services.
While health maintenance organizations are being heralded
as a new alternative to traditional fee-for-service
insurance coverage, the idea of prepaid health care
can be traced to the beginning of the 20th century,
when lumbermen and mill owners organized their own prepaid
group coverage. Their efforts resulted in the establishment
of the Western Clinic in Tacoma, Washington, which,
for a reasonable fixed price per month, provided full
health care benefits!
In the 1930s and 1940s, industrialist Henry Kaiser
formed an association with Dr. Sidney Garfield to provide
prepaid health care coverage to Kaiser shipbuilding
and contruction employees and their families. In 1945,
he established the Kaiser Medical Care Program, which
was offered to the community at large and which became
the predecessor of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plans.
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