WHY NEXT STEP?

Consumers are potential or actual purchasers. In order to obtain medical services and medical products, we must purchase them. In short, in order to obtain medical services, we all must be medical consumers, though there are different types, that change from time to time: patients, caregivers (non-professional givers of care) and simply purchasers. Understanding and utilizing the consumer approach is one of the most important ways of maintaining and improving your health and well-being.

AMC exists in order to make life more realistic for medical consumers in a changing world; likewise for doctors and other participants in our health care delivery system.

The American health care delivery system is undergoing revolutionary changes. Many people talk as if the revolution resulted from the intentions and plans of managed care organizations. The real revolution has been initiated by the medical consumer.

Managed Care, as such, is not the issue. The issue is “contract medicine,” making health care decisions through contract language rather than on the basis of medical necessity determined by your doctor.

Plain and simply, AMC believes that the medical consumers’ medically necessary needs are more important than contract language. “Doctor, can you help to the fullest extent of your knowledge and abilities?” These words are both an assertion and a call for assistance: a request for the doctor to do what he or she does best. They contrast with a deceptively similar question: “Doc, what does my health plan pay for?” The tragedy – and the basis for medical consumerism – is that often the doctor doesn’t appreciate the difference between these two questions.

Problems in the healthcare delivery system represent an opportunity to serve the medical consumer and to improve the system. AMC provides the skills and tools for both tasks.

WHEN A DECISION HAS TO BE MADE, YOU MUST CONSIDER WHETHER THE BENEFITS DECISION MEASURES UP TO THE MEDICAL DECISION