and other health plans that they may restrict what physicians tell Medicare or Medicaid patients about treatment options. Another problem exists in suing health care plans. The house recently passed a bill of rights for patients to sue their managed health plans and whether or not that should be expanded, but it still has some hurdles to overcome before it becomes law. The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 made significant changes to Medicare, since its inception in 1965, by adopting market-driven reforms in an effort to balance the federal budget. Finally the last topic I would like to discuss is possible policy changes that might improve HMO’s and the services they provide. One thing that might improve HMO’s is to provide longer coverage for patients to secure faith between HMO’s and their patients. The selective-contracting system has some good ideas, but I think if you made some changes with who they provide service to and how they decide what coverage is provided needs to be more lenient. Another thing that might help restore quality in HMO’s is if they provided more resources to their patients. Legislation should be passed to benefit those who use HMO’s and Medicare plans because people who make monthly payments for service are usually punished by a raise in costs. Sometimes people pay premiums for 15 to 20 years and may never even use health care. This is unfair because over time costs go up monthly due to denied treatment and bad treatment, because HMO’s are forced to raise their costs to cover these mistakes. According to Chip Kahn, President of the HIAA has concerns, “that legislation also contains new, unnecessary mandates that would raise costs for Medicare beneficiaries’ confidence in the government’s commitment to the Medicare+Choice program.” [2] The big concern is whether or not government really understands the great difficulty in trying to control HMO&...
