Marketing prevention to elderly Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in an HMO. The San Diego Medicare Preventive Health Project.

A comprehensive marketing effort--using direct mail, telemarketing, and orientation seminars--to enroll elderly participants in a Medicare preventive health services demonstration project was undertaken in 1989. Out of the more than 11,000 eligible members in a large Medicare HMO plan in San Diego County, 1,800 (16.2%) agreed to participate. The authors describe the recruiting effort in detail and postulates reasons why the elderly resisted enrolling in the study. These results have important policy implications for the nation's Medicare program and are relevant to promoting other useful health care services in this population.