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Most large health plans fall short on quality
New rankings make choosing health insurance easier
By Steven Findlay
Consumer Reports Health.org, October 4, 2011
When it comes to health insurance, a familiar name and lots of members don’t guarantee quality or customer satisfaction, according to new rankings of health-insurance plans from the National Committee for Quality Assurance that we published today.
Our analysis of the NCQA rankings found that the five largest national insurers—Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Kaiser Permanente, and United Healthcare, plus the mostly state-based Blue Cross Blue Shield plans—account for about 75 percent of the 390 ranked private plans, but only 36 percent of the top 50.
Biggest isn’t best. United is the nation’s largest health-insurance company, but none of its private plans rank among the top 100, and most occupy the bottom half.
NCQA Health Plan Report Card
http://reportcard.ncqa.org/plan/external/plansearch.aspx
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
The big health insurers that are dominating most of the markets fall short on NCQA quality standards, except for Kaiser Permanente. No surprise. What is surprising is that we continue to tolerate this mediocrity merely because an improved Medicare for all is not politically feasible. How about changing the politics?