A Short Medicare Proficiency Questionnaire (MPQ): Reliability and Validity

This cross-sectional study explores the reliability and validity of a newly developed 15-item Medicare proficiency questionnaire (MPQ) across a mixed group of participants enrolled and unenrolled in Medicare. The MPQ was designed to assess beneficiary knowledge across a variety of Medicare topics and was developed by combining questions selected from the 2003 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey and updating it with researcher-generated Medicare Part D questions. During the month of February in 2024, participants enrolled and unenrolled in Medicare, which were recruited on Prolific, completed online surveys which included the MPQ and demographic questions. We found that the MPQ has adequate internal consistency reliability with Cronbach's alpha = .73 across participants enrolled and unenrolled in Medicare as well as adequate validity, as demonstrated by positive relationships of MPQ scores to education level and to enrollment status (enrollees scoring higher).