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Health Care Reform: The Website

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, June 22 2010

HealthCare.gov, the online clearinghouse of health insurance plan information mandated by the health reform package signed by the President in March, is set to go live next Thursday, reports Sarah Kiff of Politico. Kiff details the mad scramble inside the Department of Health and Human Services to pull it off, led by HHS's Chief Technology Officer Todd Park:

Since it will be the most tangible link to the health reform law for many Americans, health policy experts and administration officials say it’s crucial that the site is well-designed, easy to navigate and free of the jargon that makes the field of health insurance so unintelligible to the public.

With the launch date about a week away, Park and a team of more than 20 HHS staffers are pulling extra shifts to open a resource-heavy, data-intensive site that will pull together information from dozens of private insurance companies, integrated with resources on public insurance programs. “It’s not like I’ve asked people to work weekends,” said Park. “People are doing incredibly heroic work because they believe in this thing. But we’re all slightly sleep-deprived.”

(One thing they don't seem to have gotten to yet: a placeholder site of any kind.)

The first iteration of HealthCare.gov, reports Kiff, won't include any pricing information on what the various plans offered by insurers might run a person. A second version, on the calender for release October 1st, is meant to. There are a number of intriguing web portals and site overhauls called for by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, like improvements to Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Nursing Home Compare tool , but many of those requirements don't come due for some time.

(Related, if I might be so bold, is an old piece of mine in Seed magazine that argues that online interface design is an opportunity for the Obama administration to make its mark.)

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