On October 1993, Health Care Reform ventured to create a new capitation based patient care system, directed toward primary care management for non-insured medically indigent population in the island. The Health Reform in the San Juan metropolitan area was started on July 1, 2000. Currently, 1.9 million island-wide population of Medicare-type individuals are covered by the new health care reform. Patient care under the health reform was designed to function as a team, in which primary physicians, nurses, health educators, dieticians, and psychologists, and other health allied services complement patient medical care. No precise accountable statistics about the benefit of the new health program, compared with previous one, are available. The Puerto Rico Cancer Registry has unreliable data given sporadic health department publishing of this information. The Puerto Rico Cancer Registry has unreliable data given sporadic health department publishing of this information. The accurate collection of cancer patient information from HMO-Capitation system by specific evaluation of prevention, screening, treatment planning, and measuring outcomes of the treatment can provide better accountability of the possibility of improving the medical care system for cancer patients. Under the health care reform, private insurance companies, such as Humana, Blue Cross/Blue Shield and others are responsible for the implementation of the health reform. They receive an annual capitation of $45 to $87 per life. Prior to the health care reform, the state and city government were the sole providers of medical care to this population. Under this new health reform, the government comes out of the health care delivery system. Cancer care under this new health care reform will be compared with the old medical care system.
| Rivera-Peña, Bianca; Ruíz-Fullana, Francisco J; Vélez-Reyes, Germán L et al. (2016) HPV-16 infection modifies overall survival of Puerto Rican HNSCC patients. Infect Agent Cancer 11:47 |
| Baez, Adriana; Cantor, Alan; Fonseca, Sharon et al. (2005) Differences in Smad4 expression in human papillomavirus type 16-positive and human papillomavirus type 16-negative head and neck squamous cell carcinoma. Clin Cancer Res 11:3191-7 |
