The Health and Human Services Department has launched an Web site to offer consumers a one-stop-shop of insurance coverage options and, when they are created, to state health insurance exchange portals.
The HealthCare.gov site, called for in the health reform law, takes "some of the mystery out of shopping for health insurance" and will offer consumers public and private health coverage choices, said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in an announcement July 1.
The site is the first central database of health coverage options, Sebelius said, combining information about public programs, including Medicare, Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program, as well as plans from private insurance carriers for small employers and individuals.
With some basic information entered by the consumer, the site's "insurance finder" will automatically sort through a catalog of insurance options to come up plans to fit specific needs and market. The online tool will also be able to connect consumers to quality rankings for local health care providers.
Plans also call for the site to provide insurance plan performance information, such as the percentage of premiums spent on healthcare.
"This is a consumer and transparency tool to do comparison shopping," Sebelius said at a briefing with reporters. "You can get more information about a car you want to buy than you can about health insurance to take care of yourself and your family."
Consumers provided input in the development of the site, which is "remarkably easy to navigate, despite the sheer volume of content it offers," said Todd Park, HHS's chief technology officer. To help HHS track of the value of the site to users, it let's people rate whether pages were helpful to them or not.
The Web site contains "billions of health care choices" via the finder and more than 500 pages of new content, "all of which is designed to grow with ongoing consumer feedback and as our health care system improves," Park said.
In related efforts, an HHS advisory group has begun to build an inventory of standards for exchanging eligibility and enrollment data electronically among federal and state health and human services programs, including future state health insurance exchanges.
At a June 30 meeting of the Health IT Standards Committee, Aneesh Chopra, the Obama administration's chief technology officer, said the standards, "will include data elements for name, address and income; messaging functions to match consumers across systems, retrieve and send packets of verification information, and communicate enrollment status."
The panel will also consider mechanisms to store and reuse eligibility data, he added. The enrollment work group will identify the standards by Sept. 30 to meet requirements of the health reform law, Chopra said.
