Choose the Health Plan That's Best for You. Choosing the right health plan can make a big difference for your health, for the convenience and pleasantness of the service you get, and for your health care costs.
The best plans sign up good doctors and hospitals. They help their doctors give good care through training and information programs, reminder systems for following up with patients, and other kinds of support. They continually measure how well the doctors and their patients are doing.
The worst plans put obstacles in the way of good care at every turn. They contract only with lower quality doctors and hospitals. They make it hard to get referrals to specialists. They delay or deny approvals for needed tests, treatments, and drugs. And they wear you down with arbitrary rules, bureaucratic hassles, unresponsive staff, and pointless paperwork.
Fortunately, there are many good plans, and many of these are among the more reasonable in cost. This book will steer you to them - with ratings of 385 plans throughout the U.S.
You will see that, in Consumers' Checkbook's survey of nearly 20,000 physicians who have participated in the plans, some plans were rated favorably for the quality of their patient care by more than 80 percent of the physicians who rated them; other plans got favorable ratings from fewer than 30 percent of their physicians.
You will see significant differences in how plans were rated by their patients, in a survey of more than 200,000 patients. And you will see that some plans do much better than others on direct measures of patient care, such as, giving the proper medications to patients after a heart attack.
What's more, you will learn how to choose a relatively low-cost plan. And you will learn how to get the best possible care through whatever plan you choose.
This book is the best available guide for individuals and families of all sizes and all ages, young and old, including Medicare beneficiaries.
