DELIVERING LONG-TERM CARE IN A CHANGING ENVIRONMENT: THE IMPACT OF MANAGED CARE IN THE UNITED STATES

Abstract

Long-term care has increasingly been subject to mechanisms to manage care in order to control costs and meet institutional demands for cost containment and efficiency. Fundamentally, managed care seeks to limit access to services that are deemed costly, intensive and/or long-term. However, long-term care by definition requires continuity of care across diverse service sectors. In order for managed long-term care to work, these sectors must be well integrated and able to share information about client needs. In this paper we examine the growth of managed care in the long-term care sector. We have collected data from long-term care agencies in adjoining counties (one urban, the other suburban) at three points in time (1997, 1999, and 2001) and are in a position to describe changes in the types of agencies providing long-term care, and the degree of managed care penetration in our sample. We also collected data on administrators’ evaluations of managed care, and their perceptions of the effect of managed care on services and service system integration. We conclude by discussing the future of long-term care.

Citation

Scheid, T.L. and Zablotsky, D.L. (2003), "DELIVERING LONG-TERM CARE IN A CHANGING ENVIRONMENT: THE IMPACT OF MANAGED CARE IN THE UNITED STATES", Jacobs Kronenfeld, J. (Ed.) Reorganizing Health Care Delivery Systems: Problems of Managed (Research in the Sociology of Health Care, Vol. 21), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 125-140. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0275-4959(03)21007-3