NEW YORK – A less confident physician might have been humbled by the letters Dr. Mike Kelly received last year from two insurers.

Regence BlueShield and UnitedHealthcare informed Kelly that he failed to qualify for their respective designations as a high quality doctor. Health insurers are increasingly rating doctors and often charge patients a lower co-payment to see those they deem exceptional providers.

“I did doubt myself initially when I got the letters,” said Kelly, a family physician in practice outside Tacoma, Wash., who is now suing Regence over its program. “But eventually I realized I didn’t do anything wrong and I felt, ‘How dare they do this?’ I think it is all about money. They just want networks of doctors that don’t spend a lot of money.”

That’s false, insist insurers such as UnitedHealth Group Inc., Cigna Corp., Aetna Inc. and WellPoint Inc. which all either started or expanded their physician quality ranking programs this year. They said the programs are an attempt to help employers struggling with ever-rising health care costs to ensure that their money is well spent.

“We believe consumers should have information and access to all their doctors but we want to [give them incentives] to go to high quality providers,” said Dr. Jeffrey Kang, senior vice president and chief medical officer at Cigna. Such products can lower health care costs by 3 to 5 percent, he said.

Cigna expanded its program, which charges lower co-payments, to 42 new markets this year, for a total of 58. Aetna rates 12 different specialties in 27 different markets, up from six specialties in three markets three years ago; some employers do offer lower co-payments based on quality. Meanwhile, this marks the first year Wellpoint is offering employers a rating system.

Employers have expressed interest in such plans but are hesitant because of the lack of universally accepted quality measures, said Blaine Bos, a partner at Mercer Health & Benefits LLC. Last year, only 9 percent of employers with 500 or more employees had programs that tiered doctors by quality, according to a study by Mercer.

Many physicians suspect insurers’ motivation and some are fighting the programs. The American Medical Association along with several doctors sued Regence BlueShield last year, claiming libel and deceptive business practices. The program has since been discarded, but the suit is continuing. Meanwhile, late last year Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas agreed to postpone listing doctors’ rankings on its Web site after physicians cried foul.

“We’re concerned that as insurers try to maximize profits they are saying that the doctor that charges the least amount of money is the highest quality,” said Dr. Jim Rohack, a cardiologist who is an AMA board member.

Insurers deny such accusations, noting they use a combination of cost and quality measures developed from information from medical societies and the federal government.