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Employee Noise About Health Plans
Employee Noise About Health Plans
By: Eric Bricker, MD
Forbes Magazine reported that 26% of Millennials would rather clean a toilet than learn about their health insurance. Forty-five percent would rather clean out their email.
If understanding health insurance is so dreaded among the largest demographic of American workers, then that process better be as intuitive as possible.
Which brings up an interesting point… is needing to have something ‘explained’ to you in-and-of-itself the problem?
Rather, we expect many things in our life to be intuitive—we should be able to figure them out on our own.
Who reads an iPhone manual? No one. It’s intuitive.
Who reads an instruction manual on how to use Instagram? No one. It’s intuitive.
By making health insurance so well designed that people can ‘figure it out’ on their own, it fits in line with their expectations for other areas of their life.
Problem: Today’s health insurance with Deductibles, Co-Insurance, Hidden Prices and Confusing Bills and EOBs is the exact OPPOSITE of intuitive.
Employers are paying $12,000+ per employee per year for a benefit that is perceived as low value by plan members in part because it requires so much education.
Maybe the issue is not the education, it’s that the product should not require education in the first place.
Using a gift card or credit card does not require education, why should a health insurance plan?
Employers will always hear noise about their employee health plan until they meet the expectations of their employees… expectations of intuitiveness.
Coupe’s $0 deductible, copay-only plans are just that: So simple a millennial could do it.
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