What do physicians dislike about managed care? Evidence from a choice experiment.

Managed care (MC) imposes restrictions on physician behavior, but also holds promises, especially in terms of cost savings and improvements in treatment quality. This contribution reports on private-practice physicians' willingness to accept (WTA, compensation asked, respectively) for several MC features. In 2011, 1,088 Swiss ambulatory care physicians participated in a discrete choice experiment, which permits putting WTA values on MC attributes. With the exception of shared decision making and up to six quality circle meetings per year, all attributes are associated with non-zero WTA values. Thus, health insurers must be able to achieve substantial savings in order to create sufficient incentives for Swiss physicians to participate voluntarily in MC plans.