The rocket science

No worries if you’re not into rocket science. We’ll break down the results with easy-to-understand charts down further. Otherwise, in the context of this study, popularity refers to the internet dominance of a provider with data from Google Trends. This is calculated as a percentage of the total searches of all covered providers using the formula below.

P = 100(I)/(T)

Where:

P = popularity

I = search instances of the specified health insurance company

T = total search instances for all health insurance companies

Because all the providers were analyzed as “Topics” instead of “Querries”, even vague queries for the providers were included in the analysis (e.g. UHG Esso was included by Trends even if there is no UnitedHealth Group mentioned in the query). Also note that ratings do not correspond and are not meant to reflect the performance of the number of covered individuals, care or service provided, financial assets of the companies, or any other data. These ratings only correspond to how much internet attention the companies are getting and may involve positive and negative events that caused spikes in their popularity.

Let’s get started.