Nothing exceeds like success: managed care comes to Medicaid in New York City.

Nearly every state is encouraging or requiring Medicaid beneficiaries to enroll in managed care delivery systems. In New York City, Medicaid officials began with an incremental, but not insignificant, managed care initiative. Buoyed by its success, New York policy makers tried, and failed, to accelerate the transition to managed care. The legacy of that failure still plagues them. A comparison of such initiatives in other states indicates that most state officials have remembered what New York's leaders temporarily forgot, namely, that Medicaid managed care is a complex exercise that demands consultation and consensus building.