This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

John E. Ware, Jr, PhD; Martha S. Bayliss, MSc; William H. Rogers, PhD; Mark Kosinski, MA; Alvin R. Tarlov, MD
New England Medical Center Boston, Mass

JAMA. 1996;276(24):1953.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In Reply.

—We agree with the need for better understanding quasi-experimental (observational) methods for monitoring health care. Methods like those used in the MOS¹ will provide most of the information about changes in the utilization of health care services and health outcomes following health care reform.

We disagree with Drs Barrett and Juhn that MOS conclusions were based on "inconsistent results" and "novel" contrasts. Contrasts were planned in advance,¹ and results were consistent.² As documented in Tables 4 and 5 of our article² for analyses of both average changes and categories of change, we could reject the hypothesis that the differences between FFS and HMO systems in physical health were the same across elderly and nonelderly and across poor and nonpoor subgroups. The change score cut points were based on other studies^3,4 and were not subject to gaming. Including elderly patients who died in the worse category . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?