Section 26-A3511. READABILITY STANDARDS FOR INDIVIDUAL OR GROUP CONTRACTS AND EVIDENCE OF COVERAGE

 

3511.1Each individual or group contract, or evidence of coverage, shall include a table of contents.

 

3511.2Each section in the aforementioned documents shall be self-contained and independent, and any section may cross-reference another section or sections when necessary and appropriate. However, general provisions applicable to more than one section may be included in a common section.

 

3511.3The group or individual contracts and the evidence of coverage shall be printed in ten (10) point type or more.

 

3511.4The group or individual contract and evidence of coverage shall be printed in a legible type style with adequate contrast between ink and paper. Captions, headings, and spacing shall be used to increase overall legibility.

 

3511.5The group or individual contracts and evidence of coverage shall be written in everyday conversational language.

 

3511.6Technical terms and words with special meaning shall be avoided wherever possible. If a technical word is used, it should be clearly defined in the document.

 

3511.7The group or individual contract and evidence of coverage must earn at least a score of forty on the Flesch Reading Ease Test or an equivalent score on any other comparable test, or a lower score on either if the Commissioner finds the policy or document reasonably easy to read.

 

3511.8The Flesch Reading Ease Test will be scored by the following method:

 

(a)For a group or individual contract, or evidence of coverage, that contains ten thousand (10,000) words or less of text, the entire document will be analyzed. For a group or individual contract, or evidence of coverage, containing more than ten thousand (10,000) words, the readability of two one hundred (100) word samples per page may be analyzed instead. The samples must be separated by at least twenty (20) printed lines;

 

(b)The total number of words in the text or sample shall be divided by the total number of sentences. The figure so obtained shall then be multiplied by 1.015;

 

(c)The total number of syllables in the text or sample shall be divided by the total number of words. The figure so obtained shall then be multiplied by 84.6; and

 

(d)The sum of the figures computed under (b) and (c) shall then be subtracted from 206.835 to determine the Flesch Reading Ease Test score.

 

3511.9For purposes of subsection 3511.8, the following procedures shall be used:

 

(a)A contraction, hyphenated word, numbers, and letters, when separated by spaces, shall be counted as one word.

 

(b)A unit of text ending with a period, semi-colon, or colon shall be counted as a sentence.

 

(c)A syllable means a unit of spoken language consisting of one or more letters of a word as identified in a recognized dictionary.

 

source

Final Rulemaking published at 46 DCR 7291(September 17, 1999).