Social Work Commons^™

Managed Care: The Questionable Triumph Of Financial Management, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Managed Care is a generic term for a broad and constantly changing mix of health insurance, assistance and payment programs which seek to retain quality and access while controlling the cost of physical and mental health services. The introduction of managed care fundamentally transforms the traditional “agency” relationships on which modern social work was built. Little research on its impact on social services is currently available. The managed care model, with its distinctive external patterns of accountability, raises serious questions about the continuing viability of the “social agency” model of practice to which social work has been committed for most …