Fee for Service Care Versus Managed Care
Some researchers feel that our society has unrealistically demanded the health care system to maximize quality while lowering the costs of health care services. That if we demand this change, there is no way we are realistically considering the cost of health care. I understand that everyone wants to receive the best therapy without paying a large amount of money. When you think about this idea, this plan would take time to execute. One of the cons of living in a country like the United States is that we citizens expect to have things right when we want them. I totally agree that we deserve the best services at the lowest prices. But how should we go about executing this plan? We will have to balance the plan between two approaches, the fee-for-service care and managed care. As well as their similarities and differences, these health care styles have their up and their downs. So to make the American people happy, we would have to find an intersection that could increase the quality given and the lower the cost being paid by the client. We, as citizens, should be entitled to these conditions because many people cannot afford these therapy sessions that are terribly needed. By finding this meeting ground, we will set the stage for a better health care system and possibly a healthier people. Until the 1980s, mental health services were generally purchased under traditional fee-for-service approach. In this way, practitioners controlled both the supply and the demand sizes of service delivery (Cummings, 1995). The practitioners would determine what the client needed, how and when to treat them, and how long therapy would last. Individual practitioners billed insurance carriers on a fee-for-service basis, and there was little encouragement for practitioners to reduce costs by increasing their efficiency and effectiveness. The numbers of healthcare professionals entering the marketplace was large, so the general idea was that fees would plummet. Contrarily, the
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