Effective alliance--hospital partnering: beyond price

By looking beyond alliances and groups as simply a "vendor" of group purchasing contracts, a hospital can realize significant additional value beyond acquisition price. Doing so takes an attitude conducive to partnership on both sides. When this occurs, the value delivered from these services can often exceed the savings from the group contracts themselves.     

NSSM 200 and the world population explosion

This paper was published in the wake of Pope John Paul II's encyclical 'Evangelicum Vitae', which condemns abortion and contraception. The author describes how, in the mid-1970's, the Vatican blocked the implementation of President Nixon's 'National Security Study Memorandum 200', which was intended to combat global overpopulation. The author explains that excessive population growth is considered threatening to U.S. security interests, and concludes that "papal security-survival along with the influence of fundamentalist Protestant opposition to birth control is now pitted against the U.S. and world security-survival."     

Managed care operations and plan design

Plan design has come a long way from the days when all one had to do was figure out the right deductible, coinsurance and out-of-pocket amounts and consider some questions about competitive practice and employee perception. Today one must also consider systems capabilities, strategic fit, provider requirements and consistency of the logic supporting each payment decision.