Within the Nineteen Sixties, whereas nonetheless working for the American Rehabilitation Basis, Dr. Ellwood fashioned a well being coverage analysis group known as Interstudy, which explored methods to use enterprise administration methods to enhance well being care and minimize prices. It arrange an H.M.O. that years later grew to become United Well being Group, now one of many nation’s largest well being firms.
Within the early Nineteen Seventies, Dr. Ellwood, having given up his medical profession, moved to Wyoming, acquired into actual property and based the Jackson Gap Group — a cohort of docs, economists, teachers and policymakers who met at his dwelling periodically for many years to speak about new well being care methods.
The group produced many stories, however its most notable was utilized by Invoice Clinton in his 1992 presidential marketing campaign, when he pledged to reform a well being care system of runaway prices and uninsured tens of millions. After Mr. Clinton’s election, Dr. Ellwood, the economist Alain C. Enthoven and others devised the blueprint for the administration’s “managed competition” well being reform proposal.
It might have banded companies and people into cooperatives to purchase insurance coverage from partnerships of docs, hospitals and insurers competing for the enterprise, and it could have lined nearly all uninsured People. The plan, shepherded by Hillary Clinton, failed in 1994, however by then Dr. Ellwood and his colleagues had distanced themselves from the plan over conflicts concerning the ranges of regulation it could have imposed.
Dr. Ellwood, who lived in Bellingham, north of Seattle, retired as president of the Jackson Gap Group in 2002. He and his first spouse, Elizabeth Ann (Schwenk) Ellwood, had three youngsters, Deborah, Cynthia and David. They divorced in 1990 and Elizabeth Ann later died. In 2000, he married Barbara Winch. Along with his spouse, Dr. Ellwood is survived by his three youngsters and 5 grandchildren.
In later years he championed what he known as “outcomes management” — a nationwide database to indicate how the remedy of sufferers truly works out. With out such measures, he argued, well being care suppliers and policymakers had no manner of figuring out whether or not care was being compromised to chop prices, and no method to consider proposals for reforms.
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