Dive Brief:
- The websites of the federal and state health exchanges have improved their efforts to help consumers make informed choices about health insurance plans, say researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
- The researchers based their recommendations on reviews of HealthCare.gov and 12 state exchanges during the first and second open enrollment periods.
- They concluded that decision support tools became more common by the second enrollment period, but were still not "universally available." But they recommended that the sites take additional measures.
Dive Insight:
The study highlights the impact of site design on consumer behavior.
"Performance of the health insurance marketplaces will significantly depend on such features as the order in which plans are displayed, the plan features listed, and the availability of decision-support tools created for consumers," wrote lead author Charlene A. Wong, MD, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar and fellow at Penn's Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.
She adds that additional measures "can and should be added in the future to further improve the selection process for consumers."
Among the findings:
- Just three states included cost estimators that combined users' premium and expected costs based on their predicted use.
- The majority of sites used the premium amount to order plans, which may influence users to focus on that over deductibles and other out-of-pocket expenses.
- Just six websites had a tool to allow the search of plans based on the provider network.
- Only nine sites featured pop-up definitions for terms such as "deductible" and "coinsurance" even though they are easy to implement.
- Just four of the websites included quality rankings of health plans.