Medicare: Many HMOs Experience High Rates of Beneficiary Disenrollment

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the feasibility of computing health maintenance organizations' (HMO) voluntary disenrollment rates from readily available data and analyzed the extent to which these rates varied among plans, focusing on: (1) disenrollment rates for all Medicare HMOs operating in 1996; (2) the disenrollment rates of plans operating in the same markets; (3) disenrollment rates of relatively new plans; and (4) the percentage of disenrollees who switched to fee-for-service.