Easy-to-read consumer communications: A missing link in Medicaid managed care

Effective consumer communication is key to successfully moving Medicaid rec ipients into managed care systems and realizing the promised cost savings f rom the upheaval. Yet, little attention has been paid to educating these co nsumers with easy-to-read materials. The Maine Area Health Education Center (AHEC) Health Literacy Center,(1) with the support of the Center for Healt h Care Strategies, Inc., addressed the problem by offering three national s kills training workshops called Writing for the Medicaid Market. The traini ng was marketed to public and private organizations providing Medicaid mana ged care services, including state Medicaid officials, health benefit couns elor staff (enrollment brokers), managed care plan (HMO) staff, and consume r advocates. The training addressed the core issue in health literacy: the mismatch between the low literacy skills of the target population and the h igh reading level of most health and managed care materials. Posttraining s urvey data revealed that training was successful in skill building, but als o that it addressed only the tip of the iceberg. Faulty and/or nonexistent communication planning limits the success not only of Medicaid, but of othe r large health and social programs as well. The authors outline the broad s cope of the national health literacy problem, share their posttraining surv ey data, discuss lessons extrapolated from both their data and their experi ence, and propose a national agenda to address a vast and generally ignored public problem.