Understandable Insurance Builds Trust that Legal Jargon Never Will

Most people who buy insurance never read the policy, and the ones who do often still don’t understand it. This is a design problem the industry has lived with for decades.

Traditional policies are full of jargon, unnecessary inclusions nobody asked for, and exclusions that only surface after something’s already gone wrong. Understandable insurance, policies written in plain language instead of legal jargon, is how that gets fixed.

The comprehension problem is bigger than it looks

It would be easy to assume this is only a “no one reads the fine print” problem, but the research says otherwise. A 2026 study published in the Virginia Law Review surveyed roughly 2,500 US homeowners and tested how well they could judge what a standard homeowners policy actually covered. The survey found that giving homeowners the precise policy language didn’t reliably help them understand it. Across the seven coverage scenarios tested, people who read the actual policy wording were less accurate than people who weren’t shown it at all in three of them, with accuracy dropping by 18 to 33 percentage points. Even in scenarios where reading the policy helped, accuracy still topped out well below 100%.

The researchers’ explanation is telling. Insurance policies often grant broad coverage in one sentence and then quietly restrict it with exclusions in the next, and readers tend to stop processing carefully once they think they’ve found their answer. This is a clear document design problem, and it shows up regardless of how sophisticated or educated the reader is.

Regulators already know this

This isn’t a new concern for insurance regulators either. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners has run a dedicated Transparency and Readability of Consumer Information working group since 2010, built specifically to help insurers write clearer consumer-facing documents and give regulators better tools to compare policies across the industry.

Most US states already require a level of plain language in personal insurance policies. Insurers have wanted to simplify policies for years. The difference now is that the technology finally exists to actually pull it off at the speed and scale digital platforms need.

What understandable insurance actually looks like

Cover Genius builds every policy wording and fact sheet through the same principle, a customer should be able to understand what they’re covered for, and what they aren’t, without needing a law degree.

In practice, that means a few concrete things.  Policies are written in plain English instead of legal language. They’re delivered as accessible HTML documents rather than static PDFs, so customers can hover over unfamiliar terms for a quick definition, or jump between sections using sticky navigation instead of scrolling through pages of dense text.

Because the XCover API issues policies dynamically, the specific wording a customer sees is tailored in real time to what they actually bought, not a generic template that covers every possible scenario whether it applies to them or not. The same API also lets partners request policies in whatever language their customers use, so that plain-language treatment carries over regardless of country, instead of just handing them a translated version of English fine print.