The Corporate Transformation of Health Care : Part 2: Perspectives and Implications (Policy, Politics, Health and Medicine Series)

This new volume illuminates the growing corporate in-roads into the health care system and its probable consequences, especially for physicians and other practitioners. Its fourteen contributors examine both the delivery and supply functions in the health sector in America. Ambulatory care, hospitals, health maintenance organizations, and health promotion activities are each critically dissected. A major thrust of the investigations focuses upon implications for the medical profession, principally how the increased scrutiny over clinical decision making by corporate purchasers and payors threatens the traditional role and relative autonomy of physicians. Varying theoretical perspectives are debated, with an additional Canadian perspective offered.