Putting Prices on Obama's Health Plan Site
BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, September 7 2010
Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson. I just tracked down HHS's Chief Technology Officer Todd Park after his talk here at Gov 2.0 to press him for details on adding pricing data to the Obama administration's HealthCare.gov
Park demurred a bit on the details, other than to say that the process is moving along, and the agency is in the midst of parsing the data sent in by health insurers. Hard numbers on how much health care plans cost is supposed to be added to the site by October 1st, less than a month away. The red flag for cynical sorts, though, is that there's little stick goading American health insurers into handing their internal pricing data over to Uncle Sam. They're free to make the judgment that it's not worth it.
The carrot? "It's really the fact that they're going to have their data on this highly-regarded site," said Park.
In order to have that be much of an incentive, it seems, you probably need to have some pretty wide-spread adoption of the site by Americans looking for trusted health information (or, maybe, some investigative reporters taking Aetna or what have you to task for not playing along with the site.) On that point, I asked Park about traffic. HealthCare.gov, he said, "just recently broke a million hits since it launched," which happened in July.
There have been improvements to the site since that launch, pointed out Park, including the addition of a Dialysis Facility Compare tool and help bubbles that pop up over words that might be unfamiliar to users. Congress mandated the creation of the site with the passage of the health reform legislative package.