HEALTH PLAN REPORT CARDS AND INSURANCE CHOICE

This paper examines the relationship between consumers' health plan ch oices and health plan performance ratings. We make rn,se of an initiat ive at a large firm to collect aggregate, and disseminate to employees plan performance ratings. We estimate several statistical models, inc luding share equations-which allow for the presence of important unobs erved plan attributes-and logit models. Although report card ratings a ppear to be related to enrollment choices, the relationship is not uni form. For some dimensions of performance, the results are consistent w ith the hypothesis that employees respond to the performance ratings. For other dimensions, the ratings seem less influential than other pla n attributes that employees likely observed without the data release.