Common wisdom holds that your patients agree with you about hating managed care, but a recent survey yielded some surprising results about feelings toward Medicare HMOs.

Caredata.com, an Atlanta-based research organization, found that 68.5% of respondents to their survey were highly satisfied in 1999, as opposed to 66.9% in 1998. More than 80% of respondents said that they were likely to re-enroll, compared with 78.6% the previous year. Harvard Pilgrim Health Care in Boston, Mass., and Kaiser Permanente in California had the highest overall satisfaction ratings.