Access to Care and the Evolution of Corporate, for-Profit Medicine

Abstract

Access to health care was the centerpiece of federal health policy and legislation in the 1960s and 1970s. Government programs designed to improve access focused on health-manpower shortages and maldistribution, the development of public, rural, and urban ambulatory-care centers, and the health-insurance gap for the aged and the poor. The major defects in these efforts appear to have been a failure to consider a comprehensive approach to financing health care and a lack of long-range planning concerning the supply of and need for manpower. Consequently, in the 1980s the public and private sectors are preoccupied with cost containment and an . . .