More than 70 million privately insured Americans saw the quality of their health care improve in 2005, and there are still significant gaps in the quality of health care overall.

In its annual State of Health Care report, the National Committee for Quality Assurance reports significant improvements in childhood and adolescent immunization rates, smoking cessation programs for Medicare recipients and improved diabetes care. The information is gleaned from data voluntarily reported by hospitals and health care providers to the NCQA, so the trends in the report can’t be extrapolated onto the entire U.S. population. Eighty commercial preferred provider organizations, in which the vast majority of privately insured health care consumers are enrolled, reported their data to NCQA.

“Working families deserve accurate and relevant information about the quality of their health plans, doctors and hospitals,” says Ann Kempski, Service Employees International Union director of health systems policy. “Quality improvement will accelerate if workers use tools such as those developed by NCQA to choose an affordable, high-quality plan that meets their families’ needs.”

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