Shopping on the Public and Private Health Insurance Marketplaces: Consumer Decision Aids and Plan Presentation

Journal of General Internal Medicine
Charlene WongTom Baker

Abstract

The design of the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) health insurance marketplaces influences complex health plan choices. To compare the choice environments of the public health insurance exchanges in the fourth (OEP4) versus third (OEP3) open enrollment period and to examine online marketplace run by private companies, including a total cost estimate comparison. In November-December 2016, we examined the public and private online health insurance exchanges. We navigated each site for "real-shopping" (personal information required) and "window-shopping" (no required personal information). Public (n = 13; 12 state-based marketplaces and HealthCare.gov ) and private (n = 23) online health insurance exchanges. Features included consumer decision aids (e.g., total cost estimators, provider lookups) and plan display (e.g., order of plans). We examined private health insurance exchanges for notable features (i.e., those not found on public exchanges) and compared the total cost estimates on public versus private exchanges for a standardized consumer. Nearly all studied consumer decision aids saw increased deployment in the public marketplaces in OEP4 compared to OEP3. Over half of the public exchanges (n = 7 of 13) had total cost estimator...Continue Reading

References

Jan 4, 2001·Journal of Personality and Social Psychology·S S Iyengar, M R Lepper
Oct 29, 2013·Medical Care Research and Review : MCRR·Mary C PolitiTimothy McBride
Feb 19, 2015·The New England Journal of Medicine·Peter A UbelEric Johnson
Dec 17, 2015·JAMA : the Journal of the American Medical Association·Saurabh Bhargava, George Loewenstein
Mar 3, 2017·Pediatrics·Charlene A WongDaniel Polsky

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Citations

Aug 14, 2021·JMIR Formative Research·Coralys M Colón-MoralesMichelle Alvarado

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