Development and Psychometric Evaluation of Beneficiary Knowledge Indices from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey.

摘要

The Balanced Budget Act (BBA) of 1997 significantly increased the number and range of health plan options potentially available to Medicare beneficiaries. To inform Medicare beneficiaries about these choices, the law provided for specific information dissemination activities that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) implemented with the National Medicare Education Program (NMEP). The NMEP is the largest and most comprehensive information program ever undertaken by the Medicare program. One important feature of the NMEP is the Medicare & You handbook which was first nationally distributed in 1999. A goal of RTI's project, Analysis of Medicare Beneficiary Knowledge Data Using the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS): Phase Three, is to evaluate the impact of the NMEP on beneficiaries' knowledge of the Medicare program. As a part of this project, RTI is comparing knowledge before and after the first national distribution of the Medicare & You handbook using data from the 1999 and 2000 administrations of the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS). To assess beneficiary knowledge, we developed three potential knowledge measures using data from the Beneficiary Knowledge (BK rounds 23 & 26) and Beneficiary Needs (BN rounds 24 & 27) supplemental rounds of the CY 1998 and 1999 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) Access to Care files. The first measure, the perceived knowledge index, includes five questions that ask beneficiaries to subjectively rate how much they know about a particular topic related to Medicare. The other two measures are a three-item and a seven-item quiz that require participants to respond to a series of true/false questions.