ABSTRACT

A distinguished health policy analyst, however, prophesied that there would soon be ten or fifteen “super-meds” in the country that would soon control the whole health care delivery system. In the early 1990s, however, health care expenditures exceeded $750 billion, but neither the health care system nor the economy had blown up. Caution is required in forecasting health care costs. Nixon saw in Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) a way to slow the rate of health care cost expansion. A financial crisis is probably the best harbinger of major health care reform. Hospitals may retain their strategic role as the hub of the community’s health care delivery system, but only to the extent that they succeed in becoming the centerpiece of a coordinated group of diversified delivery organizations. Former Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan began to correct a serious error that Congress and the administration made in the early 1980s when they practically dismembered the National Health Service Corps.