Interview a good actuary or professor of insurance. It’s helpful to know the nuts and bolts of insurance to understand the questions shoppers will ask. And there will be many. Background interviews are a good idea.
Visit places of enrollment. Here you can observe over several days, if you can, how navigators and assisters actually counsel shoppers. It’s the old journalistic skill of observation we’re talking about here. I suspect there will be wide variation in the quality of the counseling, but to separate the sheep from goats, you have to know what’s good advice and what’s not. A few years ago, I received a note from a Medicare counselor in Ohio urging me to tell reporters to visit their local insurance counseling offices, which help Medicare beneficiaries through the thicket of choices they must face every year. Listen to what seniors must sort through to make a choice, she said. Reporters will get an earful. It will be a similar situation for the new buyers coming into the exchanges, and the counselor’s advice is more relevant than ever.
Put yourself in the shoes of a shopper. Steve Koff, Washington bureau chief for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, sniffed out the insurance spin from the Ohio insurance director by doing just that. “I’ve covered enough of this stuff to know if you’re looking at a policy with a really, really low premium, you have to question what it is.” In other words, you get what you pay for. And that, dear colleagues, is a good place to start your reporting on the state insurance exchanges.
Follow @USProjectCJR for more posts from Trudy Lieberman and the rest of the United States Project team, including our work on healthcare issues and public health at The Second Opinion. And for Trudy’s resource guide to covering the ins and outs of buying insurance on the state exchanges, see Open Wide, from CJR’s new July/August issue.
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Trudy, I'm not sure I agree with your position on this. If you're a local reporter or editor in one of the many areas of the country with lots and lots of uninsured people (like Yakima, Wa. where I lived until a few weeks ago), and these people are hurting because they have no health coverage, then I think it's a public service for a news organization to provide detailed information for their readers and their public on how to sign up for coverage. That's a whole lot more valuable public service than covering the latest bake sale to raise money to pay for some uninsured person's medical care, which is what a lot of these local newspapers like the Yakima Herald-Republic are doing now. Journalistic neutrality can be overrated. Are we neutral about women's rights or civil rights? Why is universal health care any different. Come on, get off your high horse on this one.
#1 Posted by Harris Meyer, CJR on Wed 10 Jul 2013 at 02:22 PM
Harris, if you're a local reporter in a high-crime area of the country, would you take it as your role to help citizens get concealed-carry permits?
#2 Posted by Tom T., CJR on Wed 10 Jul 2013 at 09:29 PM
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