09-20-2025, 06:44 PM
The Economics of the Health Maintenance Organization and Health Technology Progress
George Keith Watson
American Public University
PBHE315 I003 Winter 2024
Instructor: Maryam Pirnazar
Date Due: March 31, 2024
Introduction
When discussing the economics of the Health Maintenance Organization (HMO), the first question needing an answer is how exactly do HMO’s make money? The simple answer requires contributions of patients to exceed the costs of healthcare services provided. This requires accurate risk analysis for each member so that the required contribution levels, either generally or individually, can be determined to sustain profitability. For this purpose, early and ongoing diagnostic information gathering is the best advantage. Predictability is the key to risk assessment and therefore to risk management. However, the current and historic norm for health services involves primarily symptom driven diagnosis, making the initial diagnosis and treatment possible only once the patient experiences symptoms of a disease or disorder and decides to go to a physician or hospital to be diagnosed. This results in higher treatment costs generally, and consequently higher insurance premiums generally.
It is therefore true that healthcare insurance companies experience higher revenue streams due to the predominant symptom or medical event driven diagnosis pattern of industry activity, and higher levels of financial activity are good evidence of financial health. It is somewhat doubtful then that HMOs, or healthcare insurance companies generally, which are also investment firms, will support advancement and deployment of technology which will reliably reduce their business activity and revenue levels. A conflict of interest is therefore apparent respecting support of the emerging and inevitable personal technology which enables early detection and diagnosis of treatable health conditions in the financial incentives driving HMOs. The purpose of this paper will be to examine this structural conflict of interest of the Health Maintenance Organization to shed light on its likely effect on the pace of investment and progress in development and deployment of personal health monitoring technology.
The Health Maintenance Organization et al
Health maintenance organizations have existed for more than a century in the United States (Morrison, 1990), but until the HMO act of 1973 there were no federal laws allowing certification of particular organizations claiming this status and no financial support from the government for initial development of nonprofit HMOs. The federal government sees the HMO as an organization which can consolidate management of healthcare by providing case management and oversight, creating competition between providers through its competent selection of those providing the best value to the insured. The intended benefits of HMOs included reduction of unnecessary procedures, a problem plaguing the medical insurance industry at the time, as well as the ability to meet increasing demand (Britanica, 2024).
In its most common form, the HMO structures medical service delivery by requiring that the patient select and use a primary care provider (PCP) from the network of those it has contracted with. Use of specialists, which are generally much more expensive than general practitioners, is controlled by requiring referral from the PCP rather than allowing the patient to select and visit one themselves (Enabnit et al, 2023). Use of providers which are not in the HMO network is either not covered by the insurance policy or results in imposition of high deductibles or co-pays.
Cost control policies of HMOs include emphasis on preventive care, reducing the costs of diagnosis and treatment compared to detection and treatment only after medical issues become symptomatic. The negative financial effect on providers of elimination of unnecessary services and lowering revenue by requiring emphasis on preventive care is balanced by the guaranteed patient stream that the in-network requirement creates, as well as by expansion of the customer base through cost controls. Utilization management is also frequently imposed to control costs, including payer authorization for particular types of services. This reduces both physician and patient choice, but the benefit again is lower premiums. The HMO is also in a position to conduct case reviews to determine specific costs and effectiveness of diagnostics and treatment procedures performed, and can select or deselect provider organizations on this basis. Some go as far as to design treatment plans for particular diagnoses, similar to the clinical practice guides in standardizing care, and many require active case management by the insurer as a condition of participation (Enthoven et al, 2019).
The insurance company, which an HMO fundamentally is, does better when the estimate of risk it can set premiums or prepaid amounts based on is higher than the actual risk. Further, the cost, like the risk, is distributed across many members, those less fortunate in a particular period being cushioned in the effects of health downturns by those who are more fortunate. Over the long term, the health insurance company has incentive to lower the risks overall for its member pool, so it has incentive to favor better quality care that is earlier and more effective in the long term. Other incentives include the freedom of the insured to leave if the treatment or services provided are perceived as inferior to what they can get through another insurance or HMO organization, although this is option not present in the employer provided plan.
In an HMO, the payer and provider are combined into a single organization which structures the services delivered thereby limiting consumer choice. In an ordinary retail transaction, the customer pays and the provider or seller receives payment. This relationship gives one party incentive to lower payments while seeking better products and services, and the other party incentive to improve products and services efficiently to increase economic gains in competition with other providers in the marketplace. HMO structuring of the relationship between the healthcare provider and the receiver of the products and services available creates an intermediary which is not actually the provider but rather a party that structures delivery of products and services to a presumably incompetent customer. Under the theory of specialization, we are all incompetent customers respecting trade we engage in for the products and services of other specialties, so the healthcare patient’s dependence on the seller is not economically unusual. Factors that necessitate an insurer or risk distribution organization and competent supervisory authority over the seller or provider include the complexity of the subject matter, making tools and resources expensive, and the high level of academic and practical training required, also contributing to a high level of expense. The most important factor recommending the HMO is the high level of personal, social, and especially economic damage that are inherent in both the reasons to use the service and in the potential negative outcomes of the service itself.
Because the customer’s abilities in the healthcare service evaluation process generally are highly limited, there is a drive for for value or outcome based qualification of providers and insurers by competent, independent authorities, which governments are presumed to be. Quality and cost competition are effected in HMOs through their selection of providers to contract with to deliver services, which they can set standards for while using such standards as advertising to potential patients. Case management strategies implemented by HMOs, which include integration of case records from different providers used for particular health event and ongoing care needs, allow quality, appropriateness, and value or results review, thereby providing oversight which in theory produces competition between providers and provider organizations. This oversight could be provided by governmental agencies and would be a natural function for them, but in the United States the push from the conservative end of the political spectrum results in privatization of the function. According to a study review published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, this method of assuring competition does contribute to lower costs, including up to 20% shorter hospital stays, emphasis on preventive services, and reduction in use of expensive diagnostics, although there is doubt regarding its effectiveness in delivering improved value (Miller, 1994)
The Role of Information Technology
How does a healthcare service evaluator accomplish this task of determining the value provided by a particular service? Perceived value creates demand if the price can be paid. By the same means that the customer can: accurate, timely, competent, and relevant information, including historical. This is where information technology inherently enters the competition for providing assurance of best quality for price through both facilitating early detection and intervention and evaluation of results. Ongoing health status monitoring with local sensors, including worn, implanted, and environmental, and local digital recording and analysis available as needed by insurers, providers, and governmental agencies is the required solution (Smith et al, 2023). Earliest detection and competent diagnosis are both optimized when it is designed and applied correctly.
The foundational hardware, operating system, and software development libraries needed for development of the needed applications are all free or inexpensive. An obstacle is created, however, by the inherent complexity and therefore expense of developing competent, relevant, and usable analyses of the subject matter. Collection and timely delivery of relevant health related information and analysis to providers will be an expensive and ongoing technology development issue which includes software, hardware, and the sensors themselves,. Even knowing what to monitor for can require prior diagnosis, placing the developer in a potential catch-22.
Another obstacle to development of information technology solutions is the requirement of careful, detailed communication between not only medical specialties, a known issue in managed care, but between medical experts and information technology developers and experts. This requires investment and cooperation of the stake holders, for which there is much incentive on the information technology side but qualified motivation on the healthcare side. At the extreme is the projection that the rapid development and deployment of such technology will replace the healthcare practitioner, at least in the area of diagnosis. It will at least lower the labor and resource commitment level of such work and result in significant reductions in revenue for treatment of the same conditions. Self interest of the healthcare practitioner therefore works directly against incentives for development and adoption, while in the necessary communication processes they are in control of a necessary resource, both expertise and experience providing healthcare services.
The managed care organization needs to be involved to facilitate and perhaps require the communication required, but they have significant disincentive from investing in a change which will in the forseeable future lower the relevance of their primary product through potentially dramatic reduction in severity and frequency of health impairments. Sakeholder buy-in is an important internal political factor in success of any potentially disruptive technological innovation. Without active support of HMOs in integration of the information value of emerging mass market health monitoring technology using their service design and supervision roles, the value of such innovation is unlikely to be realized in more than incremental forms. Without government intervention, one can reasonably anticipate resistance to the change potential of this technology.
A government’s interest in such development is well established in the available professional literature. The U.S. healthcare system is twice as expensive as other technologically developed countries and does not deliver value as well (Enthoven et al, 2019). According to one study:
"Despite attempts to decrease health care costs and improve care quality in the U.S. through strategies such as HMOs, the U.S. health care system is still the most expensive of any health care system in the world, encompassing approximately 18% of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). (Falkson, 2024)"
This by itself is strong evidence that the structuring of healthcare financing and delivery created by the HMO and managed care organizations generally is not working, meaning that the alignment of interest which it attempts to accomplish either is not happening or is the wrong approach. Can new technology which distributes power to the client, patient, or user independently of existing supply structures alter the incentive structure sufficiently to accomplish the stated, democratically determined goals of the HMO? According to stated goals and policies, the United States is already committed to supporting this goal.
The Affordable Care Act is one example of a major government initiative which expanded business for HMOs and other healthcare insurance providers while attempting to control costs. Expansion of coverage to the quarter or so of previously uninsured individuals in the United States should have the long term effect of lowering costs for the same reason that ongoing healthcare information collection and monitoring will, specifically, early detection and treatment is facilitated in people who did not previously receive regular medical check-ups. Control of costs has major governmental attention dedicated to it currently since it is a significant payer of insurance premiums through ACA subsidies. The federal government could step up and require adoption of technology that will reduce costs dramatically while improving the value delivered.
Social Issues of HMOs and Technology
There are three primary categories of such technologies. The most obvious in the health care context is that which actually performs diagnostic functions. This function is classified as medical and therefore is subject to approval and regulation of each device including it by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and equivalent regulatory agencies in other countries. The second is the technology which limits its value to providing information gathered from the client. This can be provided to the client or the healthcare provider or both, but since it does not diagnose or attempt to treat any disease or disorder, it is exempt from approval and regulation as a medical device by the FDA. The third and most advanced category is the device which both diagnoses and treats conditions present in the client. Any device which is used to treat a medical condition is categorically regulated as a medical device.
As a contributor to upstream issue detection and management, worn or implanted digital health monitoring technology, produced and available inexpensively on a mass scale, has the potential to at least reduce healthcare inequities, another federal government priority. Lower socioeconomic status increases risk and expense of treatment lowering likelihood of favorable outcomes, meaning there is an established higher risk of health issues in that part of the built environment which is available to lower income populations, an issue which managed care organizations generally have failed to address so far, likely due to the higher risk that such populations inherently entail (Tao et al, 2016).
Health risk can also arise from behaviors, but wealthier people actually have greater access to and protections of alcohol, tobacco, and substance abuse opportunities. Diet and exercise discipline combined with smart a resource selection depends more on knowledge than wealth, which can be variously acquired for free using the internet rather than just through formal education. Knowing exactly what the likely problems are early and having competent advice on options to best address them at least narrows the medical service quality gaps, and competent, low cost digital technology, due to the ubiquity of inexpensive, high quality networked personal computers and cell phones, has the potential to provide quality of service beyond the reach of any traditional healthcare practice. Where health is maintained at a higher level in which the individual is also more attuned to evidence indicating its compromise, medical events are less likely and significantly less acute.
The Insurance Business’s Technology Investment Options
An insurance company’s financial health depends on one other major revenue source. According to one investment research firm, “It would be possible for the insurance company to take the $3 million premium money received and just stick it in a safety deposit vault. It would also be a bad idea, because there are reasonable ways of investing that money to make more money.” (Gleeson, 2019) This implies that Health Maintenance Organizations have incentives to maximize their asset investment base, derived from their premiums. To do this, they must compete to attract paying customers. Since the organization and rules of the HMO determine in large part the services available to clients along with the costs of particular services, maximizing the value of the services available to particular client segments is in the HMO’s best interest financially and therefore is a presumed goal. With respect to competitive plan structuring, including new technology which increases healthcare delivery value while reducing costs would be a good idea. Since insurance companies are also investment firms, investment in technology which increases healthcare delivery value while reducing costs would therefore be a wise choice for the pool of cash developed from insurance premiums.
Whether the client will agree to the monitoring, however, is questionable, although the client benefits from as much relevant monitoring as is possible. Security of the information gathered is a major issue, along with trust that the information will not be used inappropriately or sold for profit. Incentives of reduced rates, possible due to the lower level of uncertainty of the risk taken on by the HMO, would promote adoption or acceptance by the potential patient. The question of whether the information gathered can be secured, and whether security of the information can be guaranteed to the patient, will be a major incentive killer if it is not available. Another issue is that the security requirement will increase technology development complexity and costs, if it is even possible with the current mass marketed digital technology base, slowing deployment. If custom digital hardware designs need to be securely developed along with the kernel software to interface with it’s resources, the cost of development, and probably manufacture as well, increases by an order of magnitude.
The lack of security of medical records generally reflected in news reports of ransomware, denial of service, phishing, and other types of breaches, are only part of the issue. An implant, for example, must be read, meaning it needs a WiFi connection to a reader. Even in cases where ongoing monitoring of the patient by the provider is not required, it will be most convenient to the user if the information were collected and analyzed to the extent possible in a worn or carried device, such as a watch or cell phone. This requires ongoing or periodic communication between the device and the implant, or between the worn sensors and the device. Such communication is inherently vulnerable to surveillance. The development of the Internet of Things creates multiple avenues of attack in the WiFi enabled home, office, or vehicle. Assuming the security problems are solvable, the typical HMO could be supportive due to the reduction of risk and the reduction of unknowns in the patient’s risk assessment. Without a solution, security can be the fallback objection allowing them to hide their actual economic motives.
With respect to legal liability, both the HMO and the healthcare provider benefit from the increased certainty and the earlier diagnosis potential provided by ongoing data collection. However, any sensor configuration selected is necessarily limited in the health state revealing variables that it can monitor, and no worn or carried digital technology can run a real-time model of an entire patient’s physiology. Such technology would potentially allow the strategic selection of a limited, least invasive sensor set while providing the maximum in analytic power, but it is still currently a laboratory dream solution. Therefore, selection of that which is to be monitored and which aspects of the patient’s internal state to model is critical to realization of the technology’s most general value in the short term, and also critical to potential liability issues for undetected abnormalities and early disease states. The power of the technology, power implying more comprehensive modeling and greater breadth in sensor capabilities for collection of potentially relevant information, is key to reducing risk and increasing effectiveness.
An economic analysis of the short term and long term benefits of adoption of such technology requires a survey of the current developments in mass producible and relatively inexpensive sensor configurations, along with a survey of free to inexpensive software packages and components that can be exploited or integrated into the patient analysis in the field and more comprehensive study in the office or laboratory. One example of progress in this field is the development of various real time sensor strategies for early detection of various cancer biomarkers (Liu et al, 2020). However, this subject is beyond the scope of this paper.
The Health Care Economics Perspective
The migration of income producing health service opportunities from the symptom driven diagnosis model to a predictive one, in tandem with the development of an abundance of medically relevant data collected at the source, could well be a profound one economically for both the health care practitioner and managed care organizations like an HMOs. Increased effectiveness of treatment options combined with lowered costs due to earlier detection and diagnosis will be the market driving benefits to the consumer, so if the economy is functioning properly respecting competition for customers, it is presumable that better technologies will be introduced as they are made available. So far, however, the United States has resisted the trend among technologically advanced countries to apply cost-effectiveness analysis on a macro economic scale for the purposes of policy formation (Kim et al, 2021). However, since the HMO will make considerably less money if it provides the better healthcare value with both less risk and lower direct revenue, and therefore presumably lower premiums, it will likely not support such developments unless it is forced to by competitive pressures or by new legal requirements.
Managed care itself is structurally distinct from the traditional supply and demand driven market model practiced in the United States and elsewhere. It introduces a distribution of risks and benefits from economic activity which is considered appropriate for an industry which is essential to public welfare and economic performance generally, along with being itself high in risk level. Once a government institutes such a system of privatized socialism, however, it is obvious and presumable that the usual market dynamics will be altered and the generally beneficial effects of competition for business in this sector will be subverted by the profit motive itself. The government designing and enforcing such a rule system has responsibility for the consequences, and therefore could be held accountable for the progress that should be happening, and that is available due to ongoing research and development, progress which is profitable to enterprises either generally or in other markets. The usual solution of regulation to curb the deleterious selfish behavior of private interests dominating the subject market is ineffective because it does not promote the necessary investments, it merely limits
many undesirable ones.
Market Forces Impacting this Issue
The question of which market forces have an impact on this issue depends on your definition of “market force”. In traditional economic analysis, supply and demand are the two primary market forces affecting prices, customer availability, profitability, and volume of business for a particular product or service. For instance, innovation in product design increases supply of competitive products which will reduce demand for current functionally inferior ones. Scientific research provides information needed for design of improved and innovative medical procedures, requiring training of professionals in their application for those professionals to remain competitive in their vocations, thereby remaining in demand. Since better information technology providing previously unavailable relevant information and analysis will lower both risk levels for a community and the expense of health maintenance through early diagnosis and treatment, there are market forces driving its adoption.
Customer demand refers to what is more generally understood as the customer’s selection from options satisfying what they want within the constraints of what they can afford. This can be measured through various means including analysis of sales volumes of particular products or services at particular price levels. A more subjective approach but one more geared toward prediction, is the customer survey. According to Gallup, Inc. “Gallup 2020 data show that only 19% of Americans are "very satisfied" with the quality of medical care in the U.S., a figure that has remained largely constant over the past two decades.” (Vibhas, 2020) Further, “... compared with other developed nations, the U.S. ranks highest on chronic disease burden, lowest on access to care and lowest on health system quality -- despite annual national health spending of $3.6 trillion ($11,172 per person).” (Vibhas, 2020) This clearly implies a lack of competitive options available and explains the popularity of self-help health promotion nutrition and exercise systems and gym franchises like Planet Fitness. They are competing successfully against the healthcare industry. Prevailing costs and quality of available healthcare are factors reducing the perceived value of the products and services that the HMO provides and those that it structures, reducing customer demand and likely delaying use.
One very noticeable effect of the COVID-19 epidemic on economic development has been the installation and deployment of available remote work and other remote access technologies, including pervasive development in the retail sales sector. Healthcare is no exception to this COVID-19 imposed progress. Gallup, Inc. reported recently, “… COVID-19 has accelerated much-needed change, such as the digital and technological transformation that many healthcare organizations were trying to actualize before the crisis.” (Vibhas, 2020) This includes the general availability of remote, video enabled checkups, a.k.a. telehealth or telemedicine, and physician access, which before the epidemic would have been a rare and possibly expensive alternative. This implies that change in healthcare delivery modes and practices encounters a considerable amount of resistance unless there is an emergency requiring it.
Affordable Care Act Impact on HMO’s & Health Insurance
Before the Affordable Care Act (ACA) went into effect in 2014, health maintenance organizations, which are healthcare insurance companies, based premiums on risk assessment for individual patients or for employees as a group. This was based on information gathered from the patient and from their medical records, the medical history being what they refer to as “experience” with the individual patient. Patients could be denied insurance on the basis of a preexisting condition alone using this method. This is reasonable business practice since control of risk exposure is essential to the success of an insurance company. It is not, however, reasonable from a general population healthcare point of view.
The ACA created numerous legal requirements increasing the risk that HMO’s and other health and medical insurance companies carry, expanding coverage dramatically in the United States and increasing premiums generally, although also providing generous subsidies for premiums for those earning less than 400% of the federal poverty level, which is currently $60,240 for a single person and $124,800 for a family of four (ACoA, 2024). These new requirements include a prohibition against rejecting individuals with preexisting conditions, which was about 27% of the U.S. population under 65 years of age, or roughly 52 million people (Robinson, 2024). This adds to the risk assessment burden since the premiums charged generally must take into account the additional risk taken on by insuring individuals with this risk factor. This increased risk was already assumed by health insurance companies providing group plans for employers since preexisting conditions could not be used to exclude an individual employee. If someone with a minor preexisting condition looses this type of coverage, they generally had to go without healthcare insurance, since a diagnosis of even a minor ailment, such as early stage osteoarthritis, would likely eliminate the possibility of obtaining insurance.
Although this policy protected the short term profitability of healthcare insurance companies, in the long term it tended to raise premiums due to the likely patient behavior responding to it. The legality of general denial of insurance on the basis of prior existing conditions before the ACA took effect works as a disincentive to obtaining medical diagnosis generally until symptoms are functionally limiting or unbearable, or emergency level. This dramatically increases medical costs for the segment of the population which cannot maintain employer provided healthcare insurance, or for whom such policies were inadequate coverage, since the expense of treatment increases by an order of magnitude in these cases compared to that possible with early detection. Rather than treatment of stage 1 lung cancer, for instance, if the patient delays examination long enough, the insurance company now must pay for stage 3 or 4 lung cancer, stage 4 being metastatic and incurable. Here the short term financial priority requiring year-to-year profitability maximization proves to be more expensive in the long term, raising medical expenses and generally increasing the level of functional medical compromise in the population.
Conditions that previously qualified for exclusion include arthritis, stroke, pregnancy, asthma, heart disease, and cancer (Robinson, 2024). Asthma can be minor and only symptomatic during various levels of exercise, heart disease and cancer can be mildly symptomatic and even hidden without sophisticated testing, and therefore can easily be ignored until acute symptoms appear. Other risk rating criteria which health insurance companies are prohibited by the ACA from applying include medical history generally, tobacco use, and occupation. The ACA therefore nearly eliminates the individual risk rating model in favor of a slightly modified community rating model. The only difference from a pure community model is that it still allows premiums to vary based on age, and in the individual and small group markets, taking tobacco use into account is allowed (Norris, 2023).
Overall, the ACA’s modified group rating approach levels premiums for geographic areas with some variation based on a limited number of factors, so the health insurer must spread costs among the insured by setting a generally applicable premium which has limited variability. This makes the HMO an agent for spreading the general health care risk expense among the members of geographically defined communities rather than such being determined individually as a traditional insurance company does.
The topic of this research paper is Health Maintenance Organizations and the particular focus of my study of HMO’s is the likelihood of them investing in or supporting the development of technology which will have a major, long term negative effect on their cash flow, forcing them to significantly downsize and restructure to stay in business. The ACA provided a major increase in business volume and revenue to HMOs and managed care organizations generally, and they would certainly like this amplified financial performance to continue. The HMO is a major stakeholder in the healthcare delivery infrastructure of the United States, and is therefore not likely to play nice when there is no referee on the field watching the details of every play. Which insiders can be counted on for support, including intelligence, and tactical, strategic, and in particular logistical support for research and development operations leading to deployment, is a question needing an answer. An HMO as an active investor, one involved in the technology design and healthcare process development required, would be a significant advantage to the technology company.
Symptom driven medical diagnosis and treatment economics is a root problem that can be solved if sufficient public attention were directed to the issues, upstream health dangers and the value to both economics and the quality of life of monitoring and addressing them. The current industry norm is highly supportive of cash flow into healthcare providing and insuring institutions, which due to their expertise and wealth are powerful in the policy formation process. Only a popular movement supported by ongoing public education using the mass media capabilities of the internet will provide the political capital needed for action to be worthwhile for politicians.
Digital technology integration increases reliability and quantity simultaneously in human value producing processes. Through competent mobilization of more reliable information and greater volumes of relevant information, it also increases the quality of decision making and the quality of procedure and process design. It can also be used to improve the competence of procedure and process review. It therefore needs to be an integral part of any ongoing quality improvement process such as Six Sigma, and ongoing customer value driven quality improvement is essential to the financial success of the healthcare industry. The Health Maintenance organization is in a unique position in the industry, integrating functions into a financial and management nexus, such that it is a prime target for implementation of Six Sigma principles and practices. If such were required by law, innovation would be the norm rather than the exception.
Conclusion
Due to the structuring of healthcare services that HMOs inherently impose on the market, consumer choice is limited. Due to the alignment of interests which merging of the provider and payer inherently produces in HMOs, the usual conflict of interest between the consumer / payer and the “provider” does not exist as a cost controlling factor. The HMO controls the actual healthcare provider through structuring access to services, seriously restricting the choices available to the consumer and therefore competition between providers. Barriers to entry into the provider field are created by the high levels of education required, requirements of government approved or accredited certification and licensure, and by legal requirements of approval of new products. There is therefore very limited access to the market by producers decreasing competition except with respect to meeting occupational standards and legal compliance. All of these factors contribute to production of a market which is a long way from meeting the definition of a free market as defined in classical economic theory. Can there be any doubt that this is the cause of both ever increasing costs and ever diminishing returns in the healthcare field in the United States? Fortunately, a healthcare economic venue in which the usual market dynamics preserve competition to the extent possible, one which would lower costs of healthcare generally and which is not subject to the structuring of services that HMOs impose exists in the form of wearable and implantable personal digital health monitoring technology. Its independence insures that the economic interests of existing healthcare organizations, including insurance organizations, will not be able to impede its growth, and hence its contribution to better, earlier detection and diagnosis, and the result will be much cheaper and effective healthcare options for the patient.
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