Their Diagnosis: It Stinks

If the managed-care industry wants consumers to make peace with the current healthcare setup, it may need to win over an influential constituency of its own. Physicians are even more hostile to managed care than their patients are. The chart below, summarizing data from a Kaiser Family Foundation survey of doctors, indicates the breadth of negative sentiment. And while polling tends to find consumers relatively content with their own health plans, even as they deplore the general setup, doctors’ antipathy toward the current system is based very much on their own bad experience with it.