Wiktionary
alt. (context medicine healthcare English) medical services which are planned, directed, and controlled—especially by a health insurance company—in a manner designed to maximize the efficiency of the delivery and financing of health care. n. (context medicine healthcare English) medical services which are planned, directed, and controlled—especially by a health insurance company—in a manner designed to maximize the efficiency of the delivery and financing of health care.
Wikipedia
The term managed care or managed healthcare is used in the United States to describe a variety of techniques intended to reduce the cost of providing health benefits and improve the quality of care ("managed care techniques"), for organizations that use those techniques or provide them as services to other organizations ("managed care organization" or "MCO"), or to describe systems of financing and delivering healthcare to enrollees organized around managed care techniques and concepts ("managed care delivery systems").
...intended to reduce unnecessary health care costs through a variety of mechanisms, including: economic incentives for physicians and patients to select less costly forms of care; programs for reviewing the medical necessity of specific services; increased beneficiary cost sharing; controls on inpatient admissions and lengths of stay; the establishment of cost-sharing incentives for outpatient surgery; selective contracting with health care providers; and the intensive management of high-cost health care cases. The programs may be provided in a variety of settings, such as Health Maintenance Organizations and Preferred Provider Organizations.
The growth of managed care in the U.S. was spurred by the enactment of the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973. While managed care techniques were pioneered by health maintenance organizations, they are now used by a variety of private health benefit programs. Managed care is now nearly ubiquitous in the U.S, but has attracted controversy because it has had mixed results in its overall goal of controlling medical costs. Proponents and critics are also sharply divided on managed care's overall impact on the quality of U.S. health care delivery.
Usage examples of "managed care".
It is absolutely bone dry, and if you go out and look at the console or whatever you call it, you will find that the snow is not melting on it at all, because it has been sitting out in the U-Stor-It ever since your mother moved to the managed care facility and it has equilibrated to the ambient temperature which I think we can all testify is well below zero Celsius.
Daniel Levitz was a Park Avenue physician with a big office, high overhead, and a dwindling patient base, thanks to managed care.
I spend most of my time on the phone to the bastards in managed care, trying to give these borderlines as much time as they need as inpatients here.
The nursing homes and 'managed care' retirement centers started having problems with taking care of their old folks.
The world of HMOs and managed care was taking a toll on skilled specialists, who had seen their incomes plummet in the past decade and their patient care practices controlled by accountants.