Reproductive Health Services and Managed Care Plans: improving the fit.

Managed care is revolutionizing health care delivery in the United States. Its recent exponential growth stems largely from the fact that, increasingly, the nation's major purchasers of insurance coverage -- employers in the private sector and governments in the public sector -- are determined to hold down health care costs and are seeking to do so without sacrificing quality. This is the fundamental promise of managed care.

Already, traditional indemnity insurance covers fewer than six in 10 privately insured Americans; the rest -- as well as one in four Medicaid enrollees -- are covered by an array of highly diverse managed care plans, including four different ...