“We should have results about that in the spring.” “We’ve developed some strategies already that we are testing in the second part of the study,” she says. The team is hoping to develop better ways of communicating about health insurance so that consumers will understand their options, she says. She found that these patients also had struggled with questions of “how to decide on health insurance options, which really impacted their care.” That lack of knowledge, in turn, made her wonder how savvy patients would be in understanding choices they must make in the insurance exchange. Her previous research has focused on decisions that patients and doctors make about care. Politi says limited health literacy and limited math skills mean some individuals need help “given the complex written and numerical information required to understand” and compare different insurance plans. The first phase of the study will soon be published in Medical Care Research and Review, a bi-monthly journal. Some preliminary results of research were publicized in the spring at the Society for Behavioral Medicine. Even so, participants couldn’t make distinctions between some terms, such as deductible and co-payment. More terms were understood by consumers who were able to draw on their familiarity with auto insurance, the researchers found consumers who previously had health insurance were more familiar with the terms than others in the study. Those with no experience in buying insurance had the most difficulty understanding a range of terms, including co-payment, deductible and formulary, according to the research. The initial part of the study involved 51 uninsured consumers from rural, urban and suburban parts of Missouri. The study examines how well consumers, with limited to no experience with buying insurance, are able to understand terms associated with coverage. Other team members are Kimberly Kaphingst, Matthew Kreuter and Timothy McBride, all affiliated with Washington University, and Enbal Shacham from Saint Louis University. Louis, is collaborating with four other scholars on ways to help consumers to make good choices when buying insurance on the federal exchange. Politi, an assistant professor at Washington University in St. They need to use visuals, personal narratives and other techniques to help consumers through what she says can be a confusing process. Her research suggests that those navigators need to do more than simplify the jargon. Mary Politi has thought a lot about this issue. If you already have health insurance and are perplexed by this jargon, imagine how much more confusing the terminology is for people signing up for health insurance for the first time - even with the assistance of navigators trained to answer questions and help people sign up. Pay close attention to words like PPO, POS, deductible, co-payment, drug formulary and many more. While you wait for programmers to fix the glitch-ridden sign-up system, grab a crib sheet and learn the terms that can help you make good decisions about coverage. 21, 2013: Thinking of buying insurance through the exchange?
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