Title : Choosing a Health Insurance Plan Is Not Shopping
link : Choosing a Health Insurance Plan Is Not Shopping
Choosing a Health Insurance Plan Is Not Shopping
Photo A couple considering their insurance options under the Affordable Care Act. Credit Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Itâs time to select a health insurance plan for 2018! Whether we get covered through an employer or the Affordable Care Act exchanges, weâll be told to carefully review our options to find a plan that will give us the best coverage for the least amount of money.
We will be told we need to shop.
âI encourage you to shop around,â Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, told her Facebook followers who are choosing plans from the A.C.A. marketplaces. The human resources giant Mercer wrote last year, âThis open enrollment, think of employees as shoppers.â The American Diabetes Association, the American Institute of Architects, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Aetna all use the terms in their literature or on their websites.
Make it stop!
This is not shopping. Shopping is a fun activity, like choosing a pie from the bakery or picking out cereal at the supermarket. The farthest thing from âshoppingâ is the arduous annual ritual of reviewing the complex and all but impossible to decipher health insurance options.
Thatâs partly because insurers do their best to make the experience as miserable as possible. Many of them offer up less-than-accurate lists of providers and participating institutions. They reserve the right to deny you coverage of a service, and you wonât know if they have until the day you need it â" and maybe after the fact. Prospectuses are complex, and few of us fully understand them. Only 9 percent of Americans can properly define all four of these rather vital phrases: health plan premium, health plan deductible, out-of-pocket maximum and coinsurance, according a survey recently released by United Healthcare.
No surprise, reviewing our health insurance options doesnât score high on the fun-o-meter. A 2016 Harris Poll discovered almost half of the employees they questioned always found choosing an insurance plan stressful. A similar number told Aflac they would rather talk to an ex or walk across hot coals than enroll in a health insurance plan. And yet another United Healthcare survey found more than a quarter of respondents would rather lose their credit card, smartphone or luggage, not to mention suffer a flat tire, than review their health insurance options during open-enrollment periods.
Plus, we have choices when we do the real kind of shopping. If we donât like the luggage in one store, we can always head to another. But if we donât like the health insurance options our employer selects, or the options on the local exchange â" well, short of changing jobs or moving, weâre stuck. Thatâs hardly the definition of consumer empowerment.
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