Wednesday, July 11, 2007; D02

Healthy Confusion

Most workers want better health insurance coverage, but they don't understand their current plans.

One of the top insurance challenges for workers is figuring out how their policies work, cited by 43 percent of the 2,099 full-time workers surveyed for Watson Wyatt, a human resources consultancy. All the workers in the random online poll said they had health benefits.

Most employees could not tell a co-worker or friend what co-insurance means. (It's your share of the treatment cost, usually given as a percentage.)

And they are even less likely to know what a formulary is. (I had to look it up, too. It means a list of preferred drugs chosen on safety, cost and more.)

Despite such incomplete knowledge, barely half of workers said they read all the insurance materials their employer gave them during the open enrollment period.

The biggest concern, cited by two-thirds of workers, is higher cost, both deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses. Co-pays are rising, and so are stress levels for one-fourth of the workers in the survey.

-- Vickie Elmer