Inaccurate directories frustrate coverage assessment

Concurring with a number of other articles this year published elsewhere, Kaiser Health News published an article about inaccuracies in insurance companies' provider directories. This article focused on whether doctors are accepting new patients who have particular insurance plans, reporting that one patient called over 300 physicians when shopping for health insurance. Inaccuracies in terms of whether a doctor is accepting new patients with a particular insurance plan make it difficult to assess whether a plan is better or worse than another plan. While a plan can claim to have a broad network of providers to choose from, such supposed breadth is not meaningful if patients cannot actually visit the providers. Accuracy is especially important when the government assesses whether or not a plan has adequate network coverage.

Keeping these directories up-to-date is certainly tedious. However, rather than have millions of individual consumers call around and check (with doctors' offices fielding multiple such calls from different consumers), it makes sense to centralize the costs at either the insurance company level or potentially, with some government agency. Unfortunately, the article indicates that federal regulation in this area has not been enforced.