The myth must be destroyed. Although health insurance companies, government agencies, and employer groups have already spent millions of dollars to develop report cards, the report cards published to date have been few and crude. But no matter how sophisticated and numerous insurance report cards become, they will always be useless. The term often connotes anti-competitive behavior. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court held in 1961 that a cable TV company violated antitrust law when it bundled the installation of cable TV with a contract to maintain the cable connection.
Health insurance is the ultimate bundled product.
Thus, the purchaser of a typical health insurance policy is buying, in one bundle, access to thousands of services. Before I illustrate how useless such a report card will be, indulge me while I make four heroic assumptions. Let us assume that statisticians can figure out how to adjust the quality of care delivered by each health care provider so that insurance companies which insure sicker people are compared accurately with insurers which insure healthier people. Let us assume secondly that the insurance industry can afford to finance the production of voluminous report cards on each of the nation's 600 HMOs and hundreds of other insurance companies. Let us assume thirdly that Americans have time to read dictionary-sized report cards on each of the health insurance companies operating in their area.