Within the Sixties, whereas nonetheless working for the American Rehabilitation Basis, Dr. Ellwood shaped a well being coverage analysis group known as Interstudy, which explored methods to use enterprise administration strategies 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 corporations.
Within the early Nineteen Seventies, Dr. Ellwood, having given up his medical profession, moved to Wyoming, bought into actual property and based the Jackson Gap Group — a cohort of docs, economists, teachers and policymakers who met at his residence periodically for many years to speak about new well being care methods.
The group produced many experiences, 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 thousands and thousands. After Mr. Clinton’s election, Dr. Ellwood, the economist Alain C. Enthoven and others devised the blueprint for the administration’s “managed competitors” 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 coated 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 in regards to 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 administration” — a nationwide database to point out how the therapy of sufferers really works out. With out such measures, he argued, well being care suppliers and policymakers had no means of realizing whether or not care was being compromised to chop prices, and no technique to consider proposals for reforms.
