NCQA Report on Health Insurance Plans

The National Committee for Quality Assurance, a private non profit organization, the most recognized agency that monitors health care in the US just released its State of Health Care Quality report on October 13, 2010.  This is the annual report on the quality of health care in America. The interesting finding is that "health plans that spend the most on care don’t always deliver the best quality." 

The analysis used the interphase between relative resource use (RRU), an indicator of health services utilization (e.g. doctor visits and hospitalizations) with the outcomes for five common costly chronic diseases  and comparison between different health insurance plans within the same region and within similar members. It found that the outcome was not necessarily better with health insurance plans that utilized more services and spent more.


A relevant follow-up might be to study the factors that produce better outcomes in these chronic diseases given that more dollars spent does not insure better results.  I would wager that lifestyle changes and individual responsibility for ones health will prove to be significant factors.