Does Group Health hold answers in health-care debate?
The Obama administration last week endorsed health cooperatives like Group Health as a potential alternative to a government-run insurance plan whose aim is to create competition among insurers and slow soaring health-care costs.
even some of Group Health's most ardent admirers warn that replicating the co-op would be difficult — and replicating it quickly practically impossible. Sixty-two years after its founding, Group Health remains one of just two major health cooperatives in the nation. The other is HealthPartners of Bloomington, Minn.
Creating health co-ops, after all, could involve building or assembling new organizations from scratch, including management, ...
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The social outlook of the doctors is critical also. You can't transplant doctors indoctrinated with a culture of greed into a socially oriented care facility and get even the Group Health model of survival. If co-ops worked, we would have more of them.