Market-level health maintenance organization activity and physician autonomy and satisfaction

Managed care is widely expected to affect physicians throughout the healthcare system. In this study, we examined the relationship between health maintenance organization (HMO) activity and the level of competition, autonomy, and satisfaction perceived by physicians who do not work for HMOs. We obtained data on physicians from the 1991 Survey of Young Physicians, which contains a nationally representative sample of physicians younger than age 45 who had 2 to 9 years of practice experience in 1991. We examined the relationships between HMO market share and perceived competition, autonomy, and satisfaction using multivariate logistic regression. The main outcome measures were perceived level of competition; several measures of physicians' freedom to undertake common tasks that might be threatened by managed care (e.g., hospitalizing patients, ordering tests and procedures); satisfaction with current practice situation; perceived ability to practice quality medicine; whether the physician would attend medical school again; and satisfaction with medicine as a career. We found that an increase of 10 percentage points in HMO market share was associated with a 28% increase in the probability that physicians will regard their practice situation as very competitive as opposed to somewhat or not competitive (P < 0.01). Examinations of the relationship between HMO market share and autonomy and satisfaction revealed few significant results. We found no evidence that increases in HMO activity adversely affect physician autonomy. Only a limited amount of evidence indicates that increases in HMO activity reduce the satisfaction of specialist physicians, and no evidence associates HMO activity with the satisfaction of generalists. Although physicians perceive HMOs as competitors, HMO activity has not had a strong negative effect on the autonomy and satisfaction of physicians.