ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are pleased to acknowledge the contributions of the many people with whom we have
interacted during our work thus far on the evaluation of the Medicare-DoD subvention
demonstration. We thank the Senior Prime participants at the six demonstration sites whom
we interviewed during our initial round of site visits for their careful planning for our visits and
their candid discussions of activities during the program’s start-up period. We are especially
grateful to our points of contact in the Lead Agents’ Offices, whose responsiveness and
organizational skills helped make our visits so productive. As a result, we gained a richer
understanding of Senior Prime as well as many valuable insights into issues involved in its
planning and implementation. Numerous other individuals in the HCFA central and regional
offices, and in the TRICARE Management Activity also shared valuable time with us to offer
their perspectives on the history of the subvention demonstration and their experiences as
Senior Prime was being implemented. This diversity in both information and viewpoints
yielded valuable information for the process evaluation.
Thanks also go to the many individuals who reviewed the draft of this Interim Report, whose
comments helped to strengthen and clarify its presentation. We thank our RAND colleague,
Susan Hosek, for her very thoughtful consideration of the policy issues in the context of her
familiarity with the Military Health System. We also appreciate the helpful comments on
policy, technical, and presentation aspects of the draft report provided by the members of our
Technical Advisory Panel: John Moxley, Joseph Newhouse, and Richard Southby.
We appreciate the on-going support and guidance of HCFA Project Officer William Sobaski
and DoD Assistant Project Officer LTC Thomas Williams. In particular, we thank them for
their assistance in scheduling interviews at HCFA and TMA, providing the many documents
needed for our evaluation, and coordinating comments on the draft report.
The administrative and organizational support provided to this project by Diane Schoeff has
been essential to our ability to schedule and perform the evaluation site visits, obtain data
required for the evaluation, produce report documents, and numerous other tasks. We also
would like to thank David Adamson for drafting the Executive Summary for this report and
Deborah Rivera for preparing the final manuscript.
xv