Rigging the Survey

I noticed that, once again, Consumer Reports gave the highest possible rating to Kaiser of Northern California for medical care. The last time they did this, I actually thought seriously about making the move from my current provider. I was given a contact, left voice mail, and never heard anything after that.

I was reminded of that incident while filling out a customer satisfaction form with regard to my annual physical from the current provider that I ended up not leaving. I realized that the level of questioning was extremely narrow and provided almost no opportunity to include any major issues of discontent. In other words the survey was basically rigged to stick to those topics for which the best answers could be expected. This led me to question whether or not Consumer Reports had evaluated Kaiser through a similar procedure, a question which, I am sure, will never be satisfactorily answered, not, at least, as long as we treat health care as an industry and treat health maintenance as a matter of efficiency, rather than patient well-being.