Public Reporting in Health Care: How Do Consumers Use Quality-of-Care Information? (original) (raw)
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The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) initiated the National Medicare Education Program (NMEP) in 1998, aiming to collect information of quality from contracted managed care plans and disseminate it to Medicare beneficiaries. Before evaluating these CMS efforts, it is necessary to understand what quality information was publicly available before the NMEP, how such information affected Medicare enrollment during pre-NMEP periods, and how such information correlated with the information collected by CMS. This paper answers these questions by examining the publicly available information from the National Committee of Quality Assurance (NCQA). Specifically, we find that (1) CMS efforts provide extra information on managed care quality but do not replace the public-accessible NCQA information; (2) although NCQA information already had a strong correlation with Medicare enrollment during pre-NMEP periods, it was not utilized to the full extent. In particular, publicly released NCQA data on plan performance contributed to the enrollment shift from fee-for-service to managed care, but did not draw clear distinction among competing managed care plans. These findings suggest that NMEP may have great potential in separating good managed care plans from bad ones, but will have a limited ability in generating further switches from fee-for-service to managed care.
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