Oliver Wyman has conducted what we believe to be the first major market survey of the consumers most likely to participate in this new insurance market. Part of the project consisted of detailed surveys of more than 700 currently uninsured individuals.
We asked about their health status, their income, and their attitudes toward the health system. To discover how they would make buying decisions we presented them with a series of discrete choice scenarios, featuring realistic descriptions of the sort of insurance products we expect to see in the under-65 (U65) healthcare exchanges when the exchanges open in 2014.
What we found was promising. Faced with the choice of buying insurance or paying a penalty, 76 percent of the uninsured in our sample found the products and related costs compelling enough to purchase coverage.
