The New York state attorney general's office has sent a letter to United Healthcare asking that the health insurer abandon its September plans to introduce a method for ranking physicians by care quality and cost, the New York Times reports. The letter warned legal action if the insurer does not comply.
The letter noted a similar program introduced in Missouri in 2005, where physician groups such as the American Medical Association said the cost rankings mainly reflected the costs charged to the insurer, not the patient. The program was ended and now is being redesigned.
Linda Lacewell, senior lawyer in the office of Attorney General Andrew Cuomo (D) and the letter's author, said that patients might opt for doctors based on faulty information and United Healthcare's financial interests. "Consumers may be encouraged to choose doctors because they are cheap rather than because they are good," she wrote.
United Healthcare disagreed. "The assertion in the letter that sometimes higher cost equals higher quality is actually not what experts nationwide find," Tyler Mason, a United Healthcare spokesperson, said, adding, "Sometimes lower cost means higher quality."
Stephen Slocum, an ophthalmologist and president of the St. Louis Metropolitan Medical Society, described the Missouri program as "dishonest" and said that the program was "telling people that it was a quality metrics program when [it was] really just measuring cost" (Ramirez, New York Times, 7/14).