Medicine 4 LessAffordable, Quality Products and Services

By Reed Abelson, Originally published: April 1, 2008

Doctors and health insurers called a tentative truce Tuesday in their long-standing dispute over how health plans rank physicians’ efforts in taking care of patients. The parties said on Tuesday that they would develop a national set of standards to measure physician performance.

While insurers increasingly have been measuring doctors’ performance through public report cards or designating tiers of physicians that try to steer people to certain doctors, so far such rating efforts have been controversial. Doctors complain that the health plans have focused too much on cost, without regard to the quality of care physicians actually provide, and that rankings are often inaccurate.

Last year, the New York attorney general started an investigation into some of the plan’s rankings, eventually reaching an agreement with several major insurers on how they would proceed in rating physicians. Officials in other states are also looking closely at the issue.

“There has been a hodgepodge of measures that patients don’t know if they can rely on and doctors certainly don’t trust,” said Peter V. Lee, the executive director for health policy of the Pacific Business Group on Health, a San Francisco-based association of employers that offer health coverage, which helped push for the agreement.

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