About 91% of Medicare Advantage plans participating in a 3-year federal demonstration project will get some quality bonus money in 2012, and participating plans with ratings of 4 stars or more on a 5-star scale will split about $1.1 billion in bonus money.
Gretchen Jacobson and other analysts have reported those figures in a review released by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Menlo Park, Calif. The analysts look at how the Medicare Advantage star rating and bonus payment program might work in the coming year.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) developed the star rating system in an effort to give Medicare beneficiaries some information about plan quality, and Congress included a provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA) that requires CMS to use quality information when allocating funding to Medicare Advantage plan providers starting in 2012.
CMS uses quality survey data and plan administrative data to assign star ratings.