Meet Ms Managed Care (This is who CNN had on to spin Sicko)

[Fridays Child]

Meet Ms Managed Care
David Woods

Managed care in the United States is under attack from politicians, the press, doctors, and the public. Karen Ignagni tells David Woods how she is trying to improve its image


Karen Ignagni sees herself as a consensus builder

Karen Ignagni heads an organisation that is one of the most visible and vulnerable in Washington–visible because it represents about a thousand managed care companies, and vulnerable because managed care is under constant attack from politicians and the media.

Managed care is a system of fixed prepayment for comprehensive healthcare coverage in which the companies providing it control costs by curbing use. Another definition is that it is the application of standard business practices to the delivery of health care in the best–or, depending on your point of view, the worst–traditions of untrammelled American free enterprise. More than 140 million Americans are now covered by some kind of managed care arrangement.

Karen Ignagni might reasonably lay claim to the title Ms Managed Care. As executive director of the American Association of Health Plans (AAHP), she handles both the high profile and the low esteem of her industry with grace and diplomacy. During the summer she spoke to a group of a hundred or so academic doctors at Philadelphia's Thomas Jefferson University Hospital–a segment of the medical profession especially opposed to managed care because it sees the system as being uninterested in research and tertiary care. Acknowledging that managed care sceptics abound "in government, in academe, in board rooms, and in the health professions," she said that she and her organisation are in the firing line day and night.

More at http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/315/7109/623/k

[rurallib]

1. If managed care worked like it is advertsed it wouldn't be

under fire day and night now would it,Ms. Ignagni, you fucking twit.

[Fridays Child]

2. Yeah, she's a whirling dervish-class spinner and perfectly put together, from head to toe...

...creepily Stepfordesque, in demeanor.

[ConsAreLiars]

3. And once more the Corporate whore Media finds a Corporate whore Shill

to provide the Corporate line to us proles. When was the last time anyone ever saw someone deserving of a "working class hero" trophy given more than a minute or two, and not followed by spinmasters, by these anti-human bloodsuckers?

[Fridays Child]

4. File under marriages made in hell. eom