Jason Abaluck – 9/02/2020 Yale Insights

Mortality among health plans in the same county can vary by a factor of 4 to 1!

With the wealth of choices on the Medicare Advantage market comes a large variation in mortality rates, the researchers discovered. Within the same county, even controlling for basic demographic factors, plans’ mortality rates were “super different,” Abaluck says. “There are some plans where 2% of people die in a year, and some plans where 8% of people die. Of course, that raises the question: is that because those plans enroll healthier people, or because those plans are actually making people healthier?”

So why aren’t consumers all opting for the most life-prolonging plans? While mortality rates aren’t publicly available, there is other information to guide consumers in their choices—most notably, star ratings from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a measure of quality you might expect would correlate with mortality.

But it turns out that CMS star ratings, which are calculated based on factors including customer satisfaction, have no relationship to mortality rates. “Whether a plan has five stars or two stars tells you nothing about whether that plan is likely to make you live longer,” Abaluck says. In other words, one of the few pieces of information consumers have when making their choice doesn’t help them select plans with low mortality rates.

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