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