Most Americans believe that solving a Rubik's Cube is easier than picking a health care plan. That's according to a new survey from ConnectedHealth, an online platform for finding health insurance.
Even if the survey respondents are underestimating the difficulty of the Rubik's Cube, their response is nevertheless a valuable display of the stress and confusion that health care shopping can cause.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was supposed to make it easier to shop for insurance through the state exchanges. In some cases, it has succeeded. But the survey shows that many Americans are not in a good position to buy their own health insurance.
For instance: 39 percent of Americans cannot correctly define the term "deductible." Among millennials, 49 percent couldn't.
Furthermore, the survey showed that many can barely afford the plans they're buying. More than a third of respondents said they couldn't afford their current plan if the premium was hiked 10 percent, while a third were not confident that they could pay their deductible in the case of an emergency.
Many of the low-cost plans on the PPACA exchanges have extremely high deductibles, a concept that many hope will guide consumers to take ownership of their health care decisions.
