Springer Series on Industry and Health Care – serie

The purpose of the Springer Series on Industry and Health Care is to explore in depth the current and potential future role of industry­ both management and labor in all private sector enterprises-as a financer of health care benefits, as a provider of health care services, and as an extremely influential "consumer" of health care.

The Springer Series on Industry and Health Care is intended to character­ ize present and future ways in which industry can influence the nation's health care system in the direction of greater efficiency and effectiveness.

Close followers of the evolution of the Series on Industry and Health Care will recognize in this fourth volume some continuity and some change. The essential concept behind the series remains: here, as before, we are looking to private industry as a potential agent of change in the American health care delivery system.

This fifth issue in the Industry and Health Care series takes a quick turn through unpredictable and only partially charted waters.

The springboard for this sixth volume in the Industry and Health Care series was a conference sponsored by the Center for Industry and Health Care of Boston University on June 9 and 10, 1978. That conference had a gradual genesis. Over a year ago we spent some time with Kevin Stokeld of Deere and Company and heard his views on self-insurance and self-administration as one device for a corporation to achieve better management control of its health benefit. More recent discussions with representatives of American Telephone and Telegraph Company and other corporations made it increasingly clear to us that management's need for data to monitor the use of employee health benefits was emerging as a critical policy issue. Subsequent meetings with executives at John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company in Boston and Mobil Oil Corporation in New York, among others, convinced us that simple answers would be elusive or inadequate and that there was a need for an objective and careful look at the evolving relationships between employee health benefits, claims administration, health services utilization, and corpo­ rate health care cost containment programs. Since self-funding and particularly self-administration represent a fun­ damental change in the traditional insurance relationship, the conference was convened to explore the advantages and disadvantages of self-insurance for employee health benefits, with some attention to claims production but with special emphasis on the originating question of data for effective management of an employee health benefit.

It is a pleasure to introduce this special volume of the Industry and Health Care Series. Using the Washing­ ton Business Group on Health 1978 Annual Meeting as its starting point, this volume captures the feelings, concerns, and experience of many who are leading industry's increasingly significant presence in health policy and economics.

It may prove helpful, however, as we work together formulating our thoughts about the nation's health system, the role of industry, and where the mental health issue fits into the picture.