Abstract
This study aims to identify sentiments that consumers have about health insurance by analyzing what they discuss on Twitter. The objective was to use sentiment analysis to identify attitudes consumers express towards health insurance and health care providers. We used an Application Programming Interface to gather tweets from Twitter with the words “health insurance” or “health plan” during health insurance enrollment season in the United States in 2016‒2017. Word association was used to find words associated with “premium,” “access,” “network,” and “switch.” Sentiment analysis established which specific emotions were associated with insurance and medical providers, using the NRC Emotion Lexicon, identifying emotions. We identified that provider networks, prescription drug benefits, political preferences, and norms of other consumers matter. Consumers trust medical providers but they fear unexpected health events. The results suggest that there is a need for different algorithms to help consumers find the plans they want and need. Consumers buying health insurance in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces in the United States choose lower-cost plans with limited benefits, but at the same time express fear about unexpected health events and unanticipated costs. If we better understand the origin of the sentiments that drive consumers, we may be able to help them better navigate insurance plan options and insurers can better respond to their needs.
Highlights
In the Affordable Care Act health insurance marketplaces in the United States (USA), consumers are mandated to choose a health insurance plan
The aim of this study is to identify sentiments that consumers express on Twitter when they discuss health insurance
Since we were interested in attitudes to plan attributes, we tested three attributes of health insurance plans: “premium,” “access,” and “network.” We looked for all the words that were associated with the word “switch” at least 5% of the time
Summary
In the Affordable Care Act health insurance marketplaces in the United States (USA), consumers are mandated to choose a health insurance plan. The health insurance choice literature has found that financial considerations, such as premiums, deductibles, and maximum out-of-pocket spending caps, are important to consumers [1,2,3,4,5]. These considerations are just part of the cost-benefit trade-off consumers make. Surveys and discrete choice experiments suggest that other plan attributes, such as choice of personal doctors [6,7], continuity of care [8,9,10,11], or how “tightly managed” the plan is [4], have an effect on consumers’
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