[PEN-L:9521] Re: Re: Re: Shades of Summers

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Devine wrote:

>what about the recent study (reported in the LAT) that indicates that
>not-for-profit HMOs do a much better job than for-profit ones?

When I interviewed Steffie Woolhandler, one of the authors of that
study (which appeared originally in the Journal of the American
Medical Association), she said that nonprofit HMOs are increasingly
behaving like for-profit ones. Kaiser, for example, responding to
complaints from its corporate paymasters, recently wrote to its
doctors saying that they weren't getting people back to work fast
enough. Steffie says the industry standard is that a woman with a
radical mastectomy should be back at work in a week.

Doug