By Susan Jaffe | June 23, 2011 | Kaiser Health News in partnership with 
BUFFALO, N.Y. – At an office tucked next to Macy’s at the Boulevard Mall, Susan Kleimann pushes two sets of papers across a table to a woman in her 40s wearing a gray sweatshirt. “We aren’t testing you,” assures Kleimann, who runs a market research firm in Bethesda, Md. “We are testing health plan information.”
Kleimann explains that they will be comparing the two documents describing two hypothetical insurance plans. “What you tell us today will help us improve the information and be sure that consumers can easily understand what they read about different health plans,” she says. 
While a video camera captures every moment, the woman accepts the task with gusto. She says getting rid of some columns will make the form clearer and changing the blue ink to black will be easier on the eyes. But the last page is trouble. “This is really wordy,” she says. “I would have to put it down and go get a bowl of ice cream and go back to it later.”
Starting next March, all insurers and employers will have to make it easier for consumers faced with the ordeal of picking a health plan. Under the 2010 health law, they’ll have to provide health policy information that the average enrollee can understand and use to compare with other plans. The forms were developed by a group assembled by the National Assn. of Insurance Commissioners, and policymakers are getting feedback the same way advertisers learn the best way to sell orange juice: consumer-focus-group testing.
The woman in the gray sweatshirt is among eight people who received a $75 stipend to sit in a windowless room and spend 90 minutes reviewing the forms and answering questions. The one-on-one sessions, spread over two days last month along with an identical round in St. Louis, are sponsored by Consumers Union. Two representatives from the group, a Kaiser Health News reporter and other observers silently watch from a darkened hideaway room behind a one-way mirror; sound from the session is piped in through an audio system. [FULL story from Kaiser Health News] [ABRIDGED from Los Angeles Times]