Cooperatives: A Competitive Yardstick for Health Care

As the national debate over health care reform continues, consideration is increasingly being given to the use of consumer-focused health care cooperatives as a key strategy for providing access to affordable health care and insurance for the millions of consumers and small businesses not presently able to afford or obtain adequate health care. Historically in many other sectors, the cooperative form of business has been successfully adapted by farmers, consumers, businesses, and public bodies as an effective strategy for attaining scale, lowering costs, improving incomes, providing services, and creating a better functioning marketplace. Reasons for forming cooperatives and analysis of cooperative movements can typically be traced to presence of a market failure (Schrader). Thus, as this nation seeks to remedy the plight of millions of uninsured urban and rural residents, cooperative models are properly on the table,