I often hear health plans talk about “meeting members where they are.” It’s become one of those phrases that shows up in slide decks, mission statements, and conference panels. But if you look at how most consumers actually experience their health plan, especially those living on the edge of coverage loss, the reality is vastly different. With the looming arrival of HR1, the new 80 hours per month work eligibility requirement for Medicaid members, the gap between intention and execution is now way more than a customer-experience problem, it is a structural risk to keeping underserved families insured.
The truth is that many plans still design processes around old operational models and not around how real people behave and live. Real people don’t wake up thinking about portals, document uploads, or multi-step verification flows. They think about work schedules, childcare, transportation, and the dozens of small frictions that make something as simple as “send us this form” feel absolutely impossible.
If you want a good example of what it looks like to design around human behavior, look at entertainment companies. They don’t ask guests to adapt to their systems. Instead, they build systems around how guests naturally move, decide, and communicate. The secret sauce is that it is not just the show but rather the entire journey that makes the experience magical.
Healthcare, by contrast, often expects consumers to contort themselves around processes that were never built with them in mind. And that’s where the trust issue begins.
The trust problem health plans don’t want to admit
Trust erodes when the only way to stay covered is through a portal login someone created three phones ago. Trust erodes when a family receives a notice in a language they don’t speak. Trust erodes when a plan says, “we’re here to help,” but then the help is an AI bot that does not solve the problem, or the help requires a printer, a scanner, or a desktop computer that many households simply don’t have.
Under HR1, those frictions are major. They are the difference between continuous coverage and falling through the cracks.
Designing for real life, not idealized consumers
If we’re serious about keeping underserved communities insured, we have to stop designing for the idealized consumer and start designing for the real one. The one who is busy, confused, overwhelmed, skeptical, and often navigating systems that weren’t built for them.
That means not expecting consumers to come to you at your website but rather meeting people in the channels they actually use. PHI secure texting and chat isn’t a “nice to have” anymore; it is the default language of modern communication. People read texts. They respond to texts. They trust texts more than emails from unknown senders. And for many families, their cell phone is the only reliable digital channel they have.
It also means communicating in the language someone actually speaks. Not “English plus Spanish,” but the full spectrum of linguistic diversity that shows up in Medicaid populations. Many languages, not two. When someone receives a message in their own language, the power dynamic shifts. The plan stops feeling like a distant institution and starts feeling like a partner.
It means eliminating the need for apps. Apps sound great in theory, but they’re a barrier in practice. Data limits, outdated phones, forgotten passwords – all of this adds friction. If a member can complete a task without downloading anything, they’re far more likely to do it.
It means letting someone snap a photo of a document instead of hunting for a scanner. It means letting them e-sign a form in seconds instead of mailing it back. These aren’t “digital transformation features.” They’re trust-building tools. They signal respect for a person’s time, their circumstances, and their reality.
And finally, it means keeping the human in healthcare – people need to trust other people with something as important as health. Health plans need to maximize their good people but then digitally enable them to reach more members and be there for the hard questions.
Why HR1 makes this urgent
Maybe most importantly, it means acknowledging that consumer experience isn’t a side project. It is the core strategy for maintaining coverage under HR1. Plans cannot afford to lose members because a form was too hard to return or a notice was too hard to understand. Every barrier is a potential coverage loss. Every friction point is a risk that cuts their bottom line.
The plans that will succeed in this new environment are the ones willing to rethink the fundamentals, not just the messaging, but the mechanics. They’ll borrow from industries that have mastered the art of designing around human behavior. They’ll treat trust as something that’s earned through simplicity, clarity, and consistency. And they’ll recognize that “meeting people where they are” is not a slogan. It should be a discipline.
If we want to keep the most vulnerable insured, we have to deploy platforms that work for the way people actually live. Not the way we wish they lived. Not the way our internal workflows prefer they lived. But the way they really do.
That’s the work ahead that we need to do together. And it’s more urgent than ever.
Photo: zhaojiankang, Getty Images
Kendall Lockhart is the former worldwide product head of interactive media for The Walt Disney Company and the Founder of Me+U Care, a HITRUST r2 certified company built on the mission that families deserve healthcare experiences designed around their real lives. He has spent the past decade shaping tools and communication models that remove barriers, support caregivers, and help health plans build trust with the communities they serve. Today, Me+U Care supports more than 30 million members nationwide through app-free, mobile, HIPAA secure, multilingual, bidirectional communication that meets people where they are.
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