Nov. 14, 2018
You may unwittingly be confusing your patients. There are at least several commonly used terms in healthcare that many Americans don’t truly understand, according to reporting by Dan Gingiss in Forbes.
Policy Genius surveyed 2,000 Americans, and asked them a seemingly simple question: Can you define four basic health insurance terms? The four terms were: deductible, co-insurance, co-pay and out-of-pocket maximum.
Eighty-three percent of respondents were confident that they “definitely understand” what a co-pay is. This compared to 74 percent who were confident that they “definitely understand” what a deductible is; 67 percent who said they knew what out-of-pocket maximum means; and just 47 percent who claimed to understand co-insurance.
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However, the percentage of people who could actually recite the correct definition was just 52 percent for co-pay, 50 percent for deductible, 42 percent for out-of-pocket maximum and 22 percent for co-insurance. What’s more, only 4 percent of Americans could correctly define all four terms.
So, some patient education may be called for. You may have more explaining to your patients to do than you thought.
