PALTC, The Specialty That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Back in the early 1990s, not long after I hired on full-time with what was then Mission Park Medical Group in Oceanside, CA, I began doing utilization review for our group. We had a lot of Medicare Advantage patients — or “senior managed care lives” as the bean counters would refer to them — and we were trying to figure out ways to improve their care while also lowering costs. Our group was paid on a capitated basis, regardless of how extensive (or expensive) the services these patients received were.