Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS)
The Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) is in process. Trained interviewers are setting up appointments with and interviewing beneficiaries across the country.
Please be advised, some Medicare beneficiaries will receive direct contact to conduct either a phone or in-home, in-person interview. To informed beneficiaries, this may sound like fraud. In fact, recently the CMS Regional Offices received
a few inquiries from SHIPs and SMPs on behalf of beneficiaries contacted to participate in the survey. Please share this email about the survey within your teams and beneficiaries.
The Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey is run out of the CMS Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics (OEDA). CMS partners with the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC). The MCBS has been in the field for 25
years collecting information on Medicare and the health and well-being of the beneficiaries. This is not a
marketing nor a quality assessment survey of providers. The survey collects information on beneficiary out-of-pocket expenses and utilization and overall Medicare experience. Over 1 million interviews have been collected. It was
one of the ways CMS determined that Part D was needed as a benefit.
The MCBS is continually in the field and is an in-person survey – i.e. they interview the beneficiary in their home. Every Fall they contact new beneficiaries to participate in the survey. Participants are in the survey for a total of
12 interviews over 4 years (3 interviews per year).
The survey team follows all of the OMB and CMS guidelines regarding contacting beneficiaries for the survey. Initial outreach is by mail. If they have a telephone number, they also call. And, they (interviewers) also show up at the door
to introduce the survey to the beneficiary and make appointments to interview them.
The MCBS is listed in “Mail you may receive from Medicare” regarding eligibility selection into the survey, and the team works with 1-800-MEDICARE to help alleviate the fraud questions beneficiaries may have about the survey.
If at any time a MCBS survey participant questions the survey, they can be referred to 1-800-MEDICARE as all of the selected beneficiaries are in the 1-800 system so that they know they were specially selected. Additionally, the MCBS letter
is also on the “mail you may receive from Medicare” website.
The MCBS respondent page is located here:
The survey page is located here:
https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Research/MCBS/index.html?redirect=/mcbs
And the “mail you get from Medicare page” is here: