OBAMAmess: The Feds Database for Rating Doctors is USELESS

Consumers searching this fall for the best doctor covered by their new public or private insurance plan won't get very far on a federal database designed to rate physician quality.

The Affordable Care Act requires the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to provide physician quality data, but that database offers only the most basic information. It's so limited, health care experts say, as to be useless to many consumers.

This comes as people shopping for insurance on the state or federal exchanges will find increasingly narrow networks of doctors and may be forced to find a new one. Many with employer-provided plans will face the same predicament.

A report out last week by the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute said insurers were limiting the choices of doctors and hospitals for those buying insurance on health insurance exchanges to keep premiums low.

The CMS data include only 66 group practices and 141 accountable care organizations (ACOs). There are about 600,000 doctors in the USA, tens of thousands of group practices and more than 600 ACOs, which are partnerships between doctors and hospitals to treat a group of patients efficiently.

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