Editorial standards
How We Research, Update, and Correct Insurance Information
Insurance decisions can affect access to care and household finances. This page explains how Insure With Mercy prepares educational content, identifies authors, handles updates and translations, and responds when something needs correction.
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We start with primary sources
For rules, dates, definitions, and program requirements, we prefer the government agency or official program responsible for the information. Plan-specific claims should come from current carrier documents, provider directories, formularies, or policy materials.
Examples of sources we use
A link is not a substitute for checking the current rule. Insurance rules, deadlines, plan availability, provider networks, formularies, and benefits can change.
Authorship and professional experience
An article may identify Mercy Makarevich or the Insure With Mercy team as its author. A named author describes who prepared the page; it does not mean every page on the site received a separate review by Mercy.
- Pages attributed to Mercy connect to her published professional profile.
- The licenses page publishes Mercy’s National Producer Number and the states in which she reports being licensed.
- Team-authored pages are attributed to the organization rather than assigning them to an individual.
- We do not add a reviewer, credential, or endorsement unless that review or relationship actually occurred.
How we handle updates
We revise a page when a material rule, deadline, source, tool method, or explanation changes. Articles can display publication and modification dates in page metadata. A recent date means the page was changed; it does not guarantee that every linked plan document or external page remains unchanged.
- Dated rules should identify the applicable plan year or time period.
- Material updates should change the modification date.
- Broken or superseded official sources should be replaced when identified.
- Evergreen explanations are reviewed when a related rule or product changes.
English and Spanish content
Spanish pages are written for Spanish-speaking visitors in the United States. A localized page should preserve the material meaning, cautions, and next steps of its English counterpart, but it does not need to be a word-for-word translation. Some Spanish resources address a distinct search question and may not have an English equivalent.
How to request a correction
If you find an inaccurate statement, outdated source, translation problem, broken link, or unclear disclosure, please contact us. Include the page URL, the passage in question, why it may be incorrect, and an authoritative source when available.
- 1We review the page and the cited or applicable primary source.
- 2If a material error is confirmed, we update or remove the statement and revise the modification date when appropriate.
- 3If the issue depends on a person’s eligibility, policy, or location, we may clarify the limitation instead of presenting one answer as universal.
- 4We do not promise a particular outcome or response time before reviewing the facts.
What this website cannot determine
The site provides general education and comparison support. It does not make eligibility decisions, issue policies, guarantee savings, confirm that a provider is in network, or replace the current contract and official determination.
- The Marketplace or government program makes applicable eligibility determinations.
- The issuing carrier controls policy terms, covered benefits, networks, formularies, underwriting, and claims.
- Provider participation should be confirmed for the exact plan and location before enrollment and again before receiving care.
- Calculators and worksheets use the information entered by the visitor and disclose their assumptions and limits.
- Content is not legal, tax, or medical advice.
Commercial and privacy disclosures
Insure With Mercy is an insurance brokerage, not a government agency or insurance carrier. The terms explain the brokerage relationship and compensation disclosure. The privacy policy explains how information submitted through the site may be collected and used.
Our standard
A page should help a visitor make a safer, clearer decision. We favor specific questions, official sources, practical comparison steps, and honest limits over unsupported claims or unnecessary volume.
Why an insurance site needs stated standards
Health insurance content is unusually easy to get wrong and unusually consequential when it is. Rules change by plan year, thresholds move, state policies diverge, and a page written three years ago can be confidently wrong today while still reading as authoritative.
Publishing the standards this site holds itself to is partly accountability and partly a practical tool for readers: knowing how a page was researched, when it was last checked, and what it is not able to tell you is what lets you judge how much weight to put on it.
Sourcing and what counts as authoritative
Factual claims about eligibility, enrollment windows, and program rules are sourced to primary government publications — HealthCare.gov, Medicare.gov, CMS, and the relevant state agency — rather than to secondary summaries. Where a page cites a specific dataset, such as county-level carrier counts, the publisher, document, and publication date are named so the figure can be checked at the source.
Carrier-specific claims are avoided unless they can be tied to a filed, published document. Plan networks, formularies, and pricing change between plan years and sometimes within them, which is why this site consistently directs readers to the plan's own documents rather than restating specifics that may have moved.
What this site does not do
It does not determine eligibility. The Marketplace, Medicare, and state agencies make eligibility determinations, and nothing published here substitutes for an official result.
It does not guarantee that a provider is in a network or that a drug is on a formulary. Those are carrier decisions that change, and the only reliable confirmation comes from the plan's directory and the provider or pharmacy directly.
It does not present the products of the carriers represented here as the entire market. A licensed broker represents specific carriers, and a comparison across those carriers is not the same as a comparison across every plan available in your county. The Marketplace preview tool shows the full on-exchange menu.
Corrections
Pages carry a last-reviewed date, and factual corrections are made to the page itself rather than appended as a note. If you find something on this site that is inaccurate or out of date, reporting it is genuinely useful — insurance rules move faster than most content review cycles, and reader corrections catch things internal review does not.
How to evaluate any insurance content, including this site
The volume of insurance content online is enormous and its quality varies wildly, largely because the subject rewards confident writing and punishes verification. A few habits separate content worth acting on from content worth ignoring.
Check whether the page tells you when it was written or last reviewed. Insurance rules are annual, and a page without a date is a page that cannot be assessed for currency. Check whether specific claims carry a source, and whether that source is a primary government publication or another article summarising one.
Be sceptical of pages that state dollar figures for premiums without naming a county, a plan year, and a household. Those three variables determine the number, and any figure quoted without them is decorative.
Watch for the difference between explaining a rule and making a determination. Legitimate content explains how eligibility works and points you to the body that decides it. Content that tells you that you qualify, or that a specific plan is the best one for you, without having your household details, is selling rather than informing.
Finally, notice whether a page ever says no. Content that recommends a product in every scenario, and never concludes that Medicaid is the better answer or that an employer plan wins, is not analysis.
How pages on this site are built and reviewed
Content begins from the primary source rather than from other published articles. For eligibility rules, enrollment windows, and program mechanics that means the relevant government publication; for state-level data such as county carrier counts it means the regulator's own filed table, cited with publisher, document, and publication date so the figure can be checked independently.
Claims are written to a standard of what can be verified rather than what sounds authoritative. Where a figure changes by plan year — subsidy percentage schedules, enrollment dates, federal poverty guidelines — the page explains the mechanism and points to the official source rather than printing a number that will silently expire.
Carrier-specific claims are avoided unless tied to a published document, because networks, formularies, and pricing change between plan years and sometimes within them. This is why pages here consistently tell you to check the plan's own directory and formulary rather than restating specifics.
Pages carry a last-reviewed date. Corrections are made to the page itself rather than appended as a footnote, and material errors are corrected as soon as they are identified rather than at the next scheduled review.