Unlikely Partnership Works To Help Consumers Make The Most Of Their Insurance Plans
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
AHIP and NCL launch education initiative to aid consumers in making sense of their health insurance.
Health insurance plans can often be confusing for consumers, leading to unnecessary healthcare costs, missed treatment and diagnosis opportunities, and poorer healthcare outcomes. To try to remedy this, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) and the National Consumers League (NCL) have teamed up in an unlikely partnership to launch MyHealthPlan.guide, a comprehensive online guide to inform, educate, and engage consumers to provide a better understanding of how health insurance works.
According to a recent state analysis, 42 percent of consumers who purchased their own health insurance reported a lack of clear understanding of the terms of their policies. AHIP officials say other research demonstrates consumers remain unaware of important factors that should be a part of selecting a health insurance plan, while many consumers remain unaware of critical benefits covered by their plans, including important free preventive services.
“Health insurance can be frustrating when you don’t have the right information to make the best decision for yourself or your family. That’s why we want to help inform, educate, and engage consumers to make sure they have the information and tools at their fingertips to make the best decisions about their healthcare,” said AHIP CEO Marilyn Tavenner.
As record numbers of Americans are now covered by health insurance (some 20 million total), this provides an excellent opportunity to engage in initiatives to improve overall healthcare outcomes, increase the rates of diagnosis and treatment, and help healthcare be more efficient.
The online, interactive resource provides three portals for consumers to help solve the challenges of education: Choosing a Health Plan, Living a Healthy Lifestyle, and Using My Health Plan. Each provides individualized, in-depth responses, information, and resources for user questions. Consumers can also use keywords to search the guide, access a curated list of additional recommended resources, or look up terms in the site’s glossary.
Politico called the new site, “A sort-of health insurance Wikipedia for consumers.” It provides basic explanations for consumers on the topics of buying healthcare coverage or using the benefits provided under a specific insurance plan.
“Consumers today are more engaged in healthcare decision-making than ever before — a trend that is predicted to grow for the foreseeable future. MyHealthPlan.guide aims to provide consumers with easy-to-access, straightforward information to determine the health insurance coverage that is right for them and how to best use it to meet their personal health needs,” said NCL Executive Director Sally Greenberg.
Tavenner told Politico the partnership was a great way to strengthen AHIP by directly connecting to more consumers to demonstrate the value of healthcare coverage, stating “We felt like if we were going to go down this path we needed to have someone who would balance us.”
And for NCL’s Greenburg, “It’s a real win-win for us,” she told Politico. “There are a lot of preventive services that consumers don’t know exist that are either free or very low-cost.”