How these pathways are written and kept accurate

Sources

Health coverage is a subject where mistakes can cost readers money or care, so the pathways use official government sources only: HealthCare.gov, Medicaid.gov, InsureKidsNow.gov, Medicare.gov, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the US Department of Labor. Insurers, brokers, blogs, news articles and commercial comparison sites are not used as the basis for any statement.

Each pathway lists the documents it relies on and shows the date it was last reviewed against them. Where the official sources are silent, or where the answer depends on the state or the plan, the pathway says so and points to whoever decides.

Figures and dates

Many numbers in health coverage change every year: Open Enrollment dates, premiums, deductibles, income limits, poverty guidelines and penalty amounts. The pathways leave these out on purpose and point to the official site that publishes the current figure. Figures that are fixed in law and stated in the cited documents, such as the age of 26, the seven-month Medicare Initial Enrollment Period, the usual 60-day Special Enrollment Period or COBRA's usual 18 months after a job ends, are included and attributed.

General information, not advice

The pathways explain how rules and programs generally work. They do not tell anyone which plan or program to choose, whether to keep or drop coverage, or whether they qualify for anything. Those decisions depend on facts only the reader and the official sources have. The notice at the foot of every page says this, and names the official free help: HealthCare.gov or a state Marketplace and its Navigators, state Medicaid agencies, and Medicare.gov and State Health Insurance Assistance Programs.

Writing

• Plain language, with terms explained the first time they appear in a pathway.
• Source material is paraphrased, not copied.
• Worked examples are invented to illustrate a rule. They describe no real person or family, are labelled as examples, and do not suggest which choice is right.
• Each pathway starts from a situation and stays on it. Definitions appear where a pathway needs them, rather than in a separate glossary.

Links

In this first edition, official documents are named but not linked, so that every page can be reviewed before any outbound link is added. Any links added later will go only to pages that help the reader, mainly the official sources. Paid or sponsored links, if there ever are any, will be labelled as such on the page and marked with the appropriate link attributes.

Reviews and corrections

Each pathway shows the date it was last reviewed against its sources. Pathways will be re-checked when the official rules or documents change, and at least before each Open Enrollment period. A correction that changes the meaning of a pathway will be noted at the end of that pathway with the date. There is no contact route yet, so corrections currently come from that re-checking rather than from reader reports.

Use of AI

The pathways were drafted with an AI system from the cited documents. A line-by-line check against those documents and an independent human editorial review have not been done yet. The about page describes how the site was made.