If you’re looking for health insurance, you can now visit a newly updated government website and do your comparison shopping in one place – although it might take some work to navigate.
“It’s 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.
Since the federal government launched www.HealthCare.gov in July as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, more than 2.3 million people have visited it. 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.
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