The 2006 Rankings
Grading a health plan's successes and failures
Picking the right health plan is like looking at houses whose windows are blackened and whose doors lack knobs: You can't tell what they're like inside. Yet this is open season, the time of year when millions of Americans must choose their health coverage for the next 12 months-usually with little idea of the quality of the plan they select.
So U.S. News and the National Committee for Quality Assurance, the primary accrediting organization for managed-care plans, have teamed up for the second straight year to clean windows and install doorknobs. This year's rankings of commercial, Medicare, and Medicaid health maintenance organizations and point-of-service plans show useful, important information, such as how well a plan screens its members for colorectal cancer, about most of the nation's large plans and the majority of smaller ones. Available data are presented for plans that didn't provide enough information to NCQA to be rankable. And plans are named that did not submit data at all or that refused to make their information public (story, Page 78).
Yardsticks. NCQA examined 684 plans altogether, 54 more than last year. The top 50 commercial plans, top 25 Medicare plans, and top 25 Medicaid plans are ranked on the next two pages. The full set of rankings, plan-by-plan details, and the ability to compare plans are available at www.usnews.com/healthplans.
NCQA expanded the kinds of health-related information requested from plans this year. New Medicare yardsticks include the plan's rate of flu shots and glaucoma screenings. Continuation of beta blocker drugs after a heart attack, known to improve survival, was added to the evaluation of commercial and Medicare plans.
But service is also important. So another measure was added for all plans: the percentage of members who said their plan didn't put them on hold forever and otherwise gave good service. That kept their blood pressure low, too-a free health benefit.
This story appears in the November 6, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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