If you’re looking for health insurance, this government website allows you to do your comparison shopping in one place – although it might take some work to navigate.

“It was the first website that’s compiled an inventory of both public health coverage programs and private health insurance programs in a single data base,” explains Todd Park, the chief technology officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS.

The federal government launched www.HealthCare.gov as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The site allows them to review individual and family plans and more than 4,400 policies through 225 plus insurance companies. It includes information about insurance plans for people with pre-existing conditions and public programs like Medicaid.

Consumers can search and compare details on monthly premiums, annual deductibles and types of services covered. They also can see how many people were denied coverage by individual insurance companies and how many people were charged more for pre-existing conditions or other health problems.

“It is important for the marketplace to become more transparent and for insurers to know that consumers can look at [plans] side-by-side, so they have to compete,” Park says.

The site asks visitors for personal information, including age, gender, family size, home state, whether they have a disability or medical condition, if they smoke and if they have had trouble affording insurance. Based on answers to those types of questions, it produces a list of insurance possibilities that the user can further sort. Insurance company executives had to attest to the accuracy of the information appearing on the site, says Park, but he stresses that the prices are only estimates.

“It’s not guaranteed to be your final price until 2014, when the Affordable Care Act is implemented,” he says. “Until then, insurers can still reject you based on your health status and charge you more if you have a chronic condition.”

The insurance marketplace can be difficult for people with chronic and serious medical conditions, and this site will show what options are available to them now, Park says. “It’s going to give you the pre-existing conditions insurance plan. It’s going to show you Medicaid as an option and it will show you private health insurance, because there are instances you could get coverage. But it warns you it’s not guaranteed because you could get rejected and you could be charged more.”

Dennis Scanlon, PhD, a professor of health policy and administration at The Pennsylvania State University in University Park is a health economist who specializes in the business, economic and decision-making aspects of health care. Although the government says this new information is readily accessible and easy to navigate on www.HealthCare.gov, Scanlon says it took a little time to find it on his first visit to the site.

“On the plus side, once I could find my way through this website – which I think is complicated – it produced 61 insurance plans. If I click on these, I can find out monthly premiums, co-pays, deductibles,” he says.

“If the information is accurate, having it all in one place would be useful. But it still doesn’t make the decision easy,” he says. “You have 61 policies. You have to sort through them. You can be turned down. You can be surcharged. I think there’s still going to be some work involved for our consumer to get to the point where they ultimately have insurance.”

Scanlon also wonders what consumers are supposed to do with information like how many people have been denied coverage. “If it says that 15 percent of people were turned down, that doesn’t necessarily mean I shouldn’t apply,” he says.

“We hope the message people get is they do have a chance of getting rejected and getting charged more. We want people to be in the marketplace with their eyes wide open and really knowing what’s going on,” Park responds. “These numbers are another way to let people know this marketplace has sharp edges and you should have your eyes wide open when you are shopping in it.”

Park says information on more private insurance plans is coming, and the inventory and the site itself will continue to be updated and improved.   

“One of the best comments we got when we launched the site – and we know it was meant as a compliment – was ‘This looks nothing like any other government site we’ve seen.’ They liked how consumer-friendly and consumer-oriented the site was,” Park says. “But we absolutely believe we can make it more friendly and more intuitive, and we will continue to work to do that. What you see now is just the beginning.”