Blog Post 2

My project is about visualizing the differences in health coverage for educators across Colorado, and my data so far has made certain trends clear. This information is important to me, as health costs have risen so sharply over the last decade and quality care falls further out of reach of many Americans. Educators themselves are at great risk, as they are notoriously underpaid, yet have to live near schools, regardless of the area's cost of living. With this in mind, it is important for educators to know how far coverage goes, as they may not afford treatment if they are forced to pay out of pocket. So far I have focused on the school districts in the Eastern plains of the state, as well as districts inside of the urban front range. While at first I encountered issues with finding the policies of each district as their websites were difficult to navigate, I have found a new method to locate data. By searching for the policies directly, I am usually sent straight to the homepage of the district, but if I instead go through other sources that appear after searching, like the google response, I can find links directly to pages that detail the district health policy. After being able to find the pages for each district I encountered a new problem: districts offering multiple plans. While some policies were straightforward, the largest one, that being the actual cost covered by the district, often varied between providers. What I decided to do was use the plan that would lead to the lowest cost for the educator, as a primary focus of my research is analyzing affordability.

Each district has their own page for health policy, often set up in the form of an info-graphic. While this makes them visually appealing, at times it makes it annoying to decipher what exactly the policy being shown actually entails. This is another reason for me to use the lower cost for the educator, as so many plans that provide so many different things would make it difficult to fairly compare districts. This is also why I have separately collected data for whether or not districts provide dental and vision care. What I have found so far is that districts consistently cover hearing and dental, often with little to no cost from the educator. This is likely due to its low cost relative to general insurance, allowing districts to fit it into their budgets. For general health coverage on the other hand, districts do not cover fully in most cases. I also have found that contrary to what I expected, the more people included within the health plan, that being family members, the higher the cost per person. This came as a surprise to me, as I would have expected better deals when more people are on the plan, as prices are higher and net the insurers more profit. Below I have provided an example of what one of these websites looks like, specifically the one from Burlington school district in Eastern Colorado.

The amount of different possible plans can be visualized here, as there are 4 levels in this district, each with different prices for how many people are being covered. For this example, I would use the Gold CDHP plan for data collection, as it costs the least out of the 4.

When I chose the districts that I will be collecting data for, I decided to use a random sample of 5 from 4 geographical regions across the state, those being the Eastern plains, front range, central mountains, and Western slope. I had to decide which region each district would be placed in since there was no difinative list of where each region covered. I made sure to make each region mostly equal in size, allowing for a more fair random sample to be taken. What I have found recently is that a handful of these districts do not clearly lay out their health coverage at all, making it incredibly difficult to record data for them. I have decided to replace these districts with new ones that do provide health information, though this is a limiation of my project that needs to be noted. Below is the list of districts in the state, which region they are sorted into, and which ones have been chosen for my project (highlighted in red). This shows how the regions are somewhat evenly divided, however the mountain regions have less districts as their districts seem to be much greater in size on average.

While parts of the research process have been mundane, overall it has been very interesting to see how high prices can really get for medical coverage, taking up portions of monthly earnings that seem too high. I have found that I enjoy simple data collection, as I can be certain that the data I am recording is accurate. I have also found it very annoying when information is provided in confusing and unclear ways, preferring when it is laid out in a table or list. Overall, I am excited to finish collecting data and start analyzing it, as it will allow me to better understand the trends that I have seen so far.