Is Seattle’s Group Health Cooperative a Model for the Future?
Seattle’s Group Health Cooperative has been around for 60 years and offers many of the features that have been proposed as necessary for health care reform.
The Seattle Times reports on the cooperative and wonders if it could be a model for America’s health care in the future.
Yet 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, medical staff, clinics and customers.
And that “just doesn’t happen overnight,” Kreidler said. “Group Health has had 60 years” to gain 600,000 members.
What’s more, though Group Health is well-regarded for delivering cost-effective, quality care, it hasn’t avoided such problems as ever-rising premiums and periodic financial losses.
Still, even critics of the co-op option under discussion by Congress and the administration agree that Group Health’s approach to health care is worth emulating.
It hasn’t always been that way.
Founded in 1947 by maverick-minded physicians and supporters, Group Health was the first organization in the nation to offer both insurance coverage and comprehensive medical care. The integrated approach was so radical at the time that the King County Medical Society — derisively referring to the co-op as “Group Death” — denied membership to its physicians and blacklisted its patients.
Doctors have a history of trying to block alternative ways of delivering health care just as they did with chiropractors.
It will be important for any health care reform to insure that doctors have much more competition. A free market is the best way to achieve that.
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