Editorial policy
How this is sourced, dated and corrected. And the things we will not publish.
This page describes how the content on HealthPlanIndex is produced, sourced and corrected. It is a description of what we actually do, not a statement of aspiration.
Sourcing
Two categories of fact appear on this site and they are handled differently.
County and state data
Taken without alteration from CMS Marketplace Open Enrollment Public Use Files and US Census Small Area Health Insurance Estimates. We do not adjust, smooth or model these figures. Where a county is missing any field we require, we publish no page for it rather than filling the gap — 35 counties are excluded on that basis.
Derived figures — enrollment per thousand residents, the new-versus-renewing split, the change in insurer count — are arithmetic on those published numbers, computed once in one place so no two pages can disagree.
Rules, thresholds and dates
Taken from the issuing document, not from secondary coverage of it. The 2027 applicable percentage table comes from IRS Revenue Procedure 2026-26. The poverty guidelines come from the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. Enrollment dates come from the marketplace that administers them.
Dating
Every page carries the date it was last reviewed. Every dated figure lives in one place in the build, so an annual update is a single edit rather than a search across hundreds of files — which is how sites end up with 2024 numbers under a 2027 headline.
Where a fact is genuinely unsettled, we say so on the page. The 2027 Open Enrollment dates are currently subject to a pending appeal, and the enrollment page states that rather than presenting the dates as final.
What we do not publish
- Reviews, ratings or rankings of insurers. Not ours, not solicited, not incentivized. The FTC's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials (16 CFR Part 465) is unambiguous, and beyond the rule we have no honest basis for an opinion about an insurer's service.
- Content written to place a link. We do not accept paid guest posts, and we do not exchange links.
- Carrier logos or seals. Using an insurer's marks on a page with a call button implies an affiliation we do not have.
- Figures we cannot source. If we cannot point at where a number came from, it does not go on the page.
How AI is used here
Drafting and data processing on this site are assisted by software. Every factual claim is checked against the primary source named beside it, and the automated build refuses to publish pages that fail its checks — including a similarity test that blocks near-duplicate pages from being generated at scale. Nothing is published because a model produced it; it is published because the source says so.
Independence from the phone number
HealthPlanIndex is compensated when a reader calls Clearline Health Insurance. That arrangement pays for the site and it is disclosed on every page. It does not influence what the data says, and there is nothing for it to influence: we publish federal figures and we do not recommend insurers.
Full detail on how we make money.
Corrections
We correct errors and we log them publicly rather than editing quietly. See corrections.