A marketing solution: managed care woes?

Abstract

Two interrelated problems are included among the causes of managed care woes: the dramatic increase in unhealthy lifestyles together with the results these have had on health services utilization and expenditures; and the dramatic increase in consumer demand for "lifestyle" or quality of life (QoL) enhancing products and services. Together these are helping to drive managed care toward a crisis, in both commercial and government-sponsored insurance survival prospects. Aside from the frequently mentioned problem of our aging population and the shifting balance between the number of healthy young workers paying in, vs. unhealthy or older workers spending out, these problems greatly exacerbate the double-digit inflation that has become a recurring characteristic of health insurance premiums, and threaten the very existence of managed care.