The results were based on survey responses gathered from November 2023 through October 2024.

To qualify as a top-ranked brand, a brand had to receive scores from at least 300 survey takers.

YouGov dubs the brand ranked as the top contender for supplying the survey taker's next health insurance policy as the beneficiary of "purchaser intent."

What it means: About 43% of the YouGov survey takers said they had employer-sponsored health coverage.

Many employers are offering workers a choice of coverage providers within plans, and some are starting to offer "cash for coverage" that workers can use to buy their own plans through health reimbursement arrangement programs.

Those trends mean that coverage provider brands may affect how enrollment in the employer plan market as well as in the ordinary individual major medical market, the Medicare Advantage plan market and the managed Medicaid plan market.

The Blues: The popularity of Blue Cross Blue Shield may reflect consumer confusion about how health insurance works as well as awareness of the Blue Cross Blue Shield.

In the United States, the Blue Cross Blue Shield brand applies to the 33 independent members of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. The member companies work together to provide some types of coverage, but they range from single-state nonprofit plans in states like Rhode Island up to Elevance Health, a publicly traded, for-profit giant that provides or administers major medical coverage for 48 million people.

Two separate Blue Cross and Blue Shield carriers, including Anthem and Blue Shield of California, also showed up in the SurveyGov rankings. Anthem, for example, was the sixth most likely coverage provider to show up on a SurveyGov survey taker's hypothetical health insurance shopping list: About 10.5% of the survey takers said Anthem would be one of the carriers they would look at when shopping.

It was not clear from the YouGov survey results how well consumers could distinguish one Blue Cross Blue Shield carrier from another one.

Another sign of possible consumer confusion: Many consumers said they would consider buying their next health insurance coverage from eHealth, and eHealth ranked 10th on the list of the coverage providers most likely to supply a survey taker's next new health insurance policy, even though eHealth is a web broker, not a health insurance provider.

The purchase intent rankings: Here's a look at the rankings for the question about which carrier would benefit from "purchase intent" and be the most likely source for a survey taker's next new health insurance policy:

1. Blue Cross Blue Shield: 10.2%
2. UnitedHealthcare: 5.4%
3. Humana: 5.1%
4. Aetna: 4.1%
5. Anthem Blue Cross: 3.3%
6. AARP Medicare Plans from UnitedHealthcare: 2.9%
7. Cigna: 2.8%
8. Kaiser Permanente: 1.5%
9. Blue Shield of California: 0.8%
10. EHealth: 0.1%