HMOs — A new management model from the United States

Perhaps the most remarkable event in the US medical market in the last ten years has been the astonishing growth of the new kinds of health‐care delivery systems that are collectively known as health maintenance organisations (HMOs). Indeed, they are now posing a serious threat to the conventional insurance sector which has traditionally covered most Americans. According to data collected by the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Minnesota research foundation, InterStudy, some 18.9 million people were enrolled in an HMO in June 1985, so that the 400 HMOs then in existence accounted for roughly nine per cent of the health‐care market. Today's figures are undoubtedly higher, and one New York investment company expects that ‘by 1990, 75 million people, or 30 per cent of the population, will be members of HMOs’, with the organisations achieving ‘membership expansion and revenue growth of 30–40 per cent a year’