Assessment of medicare part d communications to beneficiaries

Older Americans receive healthcare benefits through the federal Medicare program. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services provides comprehensive information to Medicare beneficiaries regarding benefits, plan options, and enrollment policies primarily through the annual Medicare & You handbook and the Medicare website. Few studies have assessed the overall readability and, therefore, the usefulness of this handbook for adequately educating beneficiaries. Healthcare communications written at higher levels than the readers' comprehension levels cannot be well understood.

To measure the readability of the 2008 Medicare & You handbook provided to all Medicare beneficiaries.

For our analysis, the 2008 version of the Medicare & You handbook was downloaded from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services website. Passages of ≥250 words were saved individually in Windows Notepad as text files. Shorter passages (ie, <250 words) were combined with the next continuing passage. Each file was then uploaded into the Internet-based Lexile analyzer (the Lexile Framework for Reading). Figures, pictures, and tables were not included in the analysis.

Approximately 70% of analyzed passages were written at approximately the 5th- to 12th-grade levels (Lexile scores: 790L-1290L), whereas 30% of the passages were written at levels above grade 12 (Lexile scores: 1310L-1910L).

Medicare beneficiaries who have less than a high-school level education may find the passages analyzed in this study difficult to read and comprehend as discussed, indicating the need for simplified communication. Our study provides recommendations to improve the handbook for better comprehension by beneficiaries.