Jackson Hole Group hopes to spark a reform revival

The influential group that promoted managed competition a decade ago will begin meeting again this fall to set a new health care system reform agenda.

By Amy Snow Landa, AMNews staff. June 10, 2002.

Washington -- Paul Ellwood, MD -- an HMO pioneer and founder of the Jackson Hole Group -- is not someone to let adversity stand in his way.

Tossed from his horse a few years ago, the fall crushed a vertebra in Dr. Ellwood's neck and nearly left him paralyzed. But after his recovery, he got right back in the saddle.

"I ride a lot these days," said Dr. Ellwood, 75, speaking from his home in Wyoming.

Now the veteran health policy leader is planning to revive another of his longtime passions -- the gatherings he hosted for nearly 25 years in Jackson Hole, Wyo. The meetings, held at least twice and sometimes as many as five times a year, brought together a shifting assortment of physicians, academics and health industry executives to discuss market-based ideas for reforming the health care system.

Known as the Jackson Hole Group, their gatherings led to the idea of "health maintenance organizations" in the 1970s and the concept of "managed competition" in the 1990s, which became the centerpiece of the national health reform debate.

During the early 1990s, the AMA took an interest in the group's activities, and former Executive Vice President James Todd, MD, attended some of the meetings.

The group's influence and visibility reached its zenith in 1992, when then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton embraced its idea of using managed competition among private health plans to control spiraling health care costs.

But within two years of Clinton's inauguration, his administration's effort to pass reform plans in Congress had collapsed, and so had the Jackson Hole Group's momentum. [...]