No Association Between Medicare Advantage Providers' Network Restrictiveness and Star Rating Between 2013 and 2017:...

Medicare beneficiaries are increasingly enrolling in Medicare Advantage (MA), which employs a wide range of practices around restriction of the networks of providers that beneficiaries visit. Though Medicare beneficiaries highly value provider choice, it is unknown whether the MA contract quality metrics which beneficiaries use to inform their contract selection capture the restrictiveness of contracts' provider networks.

We evaluated whether there are meaningful associations between provider network restrictiveness (across primary care, psychiatry, and endocrinology providers) and contracts' overall star quality rating, as well as between network restrictiveness and contracts' performance on access to care measures from the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) survey.

Medicare Advantage contracts with health maintenance organization (HMO), local preferred provider organization (PPO), and point of service (POS) plans with available data.

A cross-sectional analysis using multivariable linear regressions to assess the relationship between provider network restrictiveness and contract quality scores in 2013 through 2017.

Statistical significance in the relationship between network restrictiveness and contract performance on quality measures.

Across all study years, we included 562 unique contracts and 2801 contract-years. We find no evidence of consistent relationships between MA physician network restrictiveness and contract star rating. For primary care, psychiatry, and endocrinology, respectively, a 10 percentage point increase in restrictiveness was associated with a 0.02 (95% confidence interval [CI] -0.01 to 0.04), 0.0008 (95% CI, -0.01 to 0.02), and -0.01 (95% CI, -0.01 to 0.001) difference in star rating (p-value > 0.05 for all). Similarly, we find no evidence of consistent relationships between network restrictiveness and access to care measures.

Our findings suggest that existing MA contract quality measures are not useful for indicating differences in network restrictiveness. Given the importance of provider choice to beneficiaries, more specific metrics may be needed to facilitate informed decisions about MA coverage.