Recent findings unveiled by the J.D. Power 2024 U.S. Commercial Member Health Plan Study indicate a growing disparity in customer satisfaction between the highest and lowest-ranked commercial health plans in the United States. This comprehensive survey, capturing member satisfaction across 147 health plans within 22 regions, underscores significant variance in how effectively these plans meet consumer expectations.
Measured on a 1,000-point scale, overall satisfaction has modestly increased to 565 points, marking a 3-point rise from 2023. However, a substantial 79-point differential persists between top-performing and bottom-ranked plans. Specifically, satisfaction scores escalated by 20 points for leading plans but dipped by 8 points for those at the lower end of the scale.
The most pronounced gaps were found in the areas of saving time and money (87 points), obtaining services (84 points), and trust (84 points). Furthermore, digital channels are a notable challenge for commercial health plans, achieving an average satisfaction score of 565 points—significantly trailing behind other industries like mortgage origination (730 points) and direct banking (718 points).
Christopher Lis, managing director of global healthcare intelligence at J.D. Power, highlighted the sluggish digital transformation within the health plan sector. According to Lis, “Most of the commercial health plan industry is still grappling with making digital tools easy to find, easy to use, and valuable, unlike the banking/financial services sector, for example, which figured out how to make these tools very valuable to most consumers many years ago.”
Additionally, the study highlights increased wait times for consumers tied to lower-ranked plans, with averages of 25 days to see a specialist and 18 days for an annual physical, compared to 22 and 15 days for higher-ranked plans respectively. Lis further stressed the critical impact of these findings, noting that employer-sponsored health insurance is often consumers’ primary interaction with the healthcare system, thus amplifying the importance of performing well across cost, service accessibility, and digital engagement.