Managed care in Latin America: the new common sense in health policy reform

This article presents the results of the comparative research project, "Man aged Care in Lain America: Its Role in Health System Reform." Conducted by teams in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, and the United States, the stud y focused on the exportation of managed care, especially from the United St ates, and its adoption in Latin American countries. Our research methods in cluded qualitative and quantitative techniques. The adoption of managed car e reflects the process of transnationalization in the health sector. Our fi ndings demonstrate the entrance of the main multinational corporations of f inance capital into the private sector of insurance and health services, an d these corporations' intention to assume administrative responsibilities f or state institutions and to Secure access to medical social security funds . International Lending agencies, especially the World Bank, support the co rporatization and privatization of health care services, as a condition of further loans to Latin American countries. We conclude that this process of change, which involves the gradual adoption of managed care as an official ly favored policy, reflects ideologically based discourses that accept the inexorable nature of managed care reforms. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. A ll rights reserved.