Economy

Sarah Davis on trying to understand how health plans work

UW-Madison Center for Patient Partnerships Director Sarah Davis describes difficulties in understanding the complex structures of different types of health care coverage plans in the United States.

By Marisa Wojcik | Here & Now

July 24, 2025

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Sarah Davis on difficulties in understanding structures of health care coverage plans.


Sarah Davis:
What the Affordable Care Act tried to do was to incentivize everyone to buy into a system, to buy into insurance or a self-funded plan, because you don't know what expenses you're going to have. And for young people, it's called the invincibles, right? You can sort of hope, "Oh, I'll be fine! I won't need to use access care, until, unfortunately, there is a diagnosis or an accident." Understandably, for many consumers, we're not thinking about the deep complexities of how we're getting coverage and what's covered until we're in the middle of a health crisis, and then we're learning a whole bunch really, really, really fast! And we can help people sort of plan for the next — when they have open enrollment, it could potentially change. But it's human nature to not fully understand something until you really, really need to understand it. I have spent almost 20 years being a health advocate. I have a law degree and a policy degree, and this stuff is confusing — I am confused. I have to do a tremendous amount of research. It's designed for obfuscation. It's designed to — it's infuriating to me and I worry for people who don't have hours and hours and hours to read fine print, and make sure that they're going to get what they need if they get ill.

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