It'll be a
whole new Healthcare.gov that rolls out for new enrollees starting November 15. Well, mostly new. In a very smart move, the administration began testing the new website this summer with people eligible to enroll outside of the open enrollment period—people who had moved states, lost their job, lost coverage through a spouse, etc. About 20,000 applications have been completed through the new site since July. That's part of the stress-testing the administration has done to make sure that the kinds of problems that made last year's rollout a disaster won't be repeated. But beyond that, they've made the process much simpler.
[T]he biggest change is the length and simplicity of the application. The form that, last year, took applicants through 76 different screens of questions and answer boxes has been pared back to 16 pages.
"In the old application, someone would submit an answer, it would get sent to the data services hub and then it might hourglass or [users would] have to wait between questions," says Andy Slavitt, principal deputy administrator at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Now, the questions are submitted on a few forms—and sent to the data hub in one big batch. That is, as Slavitt put it, "how a modern website should work."
That's not to say that there won't be some hiccups when the millions of people expected to sign on to shop for health insurance for the first time. A chunk of people will also have more complicated life and financial situations that will require they go through more than just the 16 pages. The site will also have to accommodate millions who want to renew their existing plans, or shop for new one, something the administration wants to encourage: "'We want to leverage the fact we've got new competitors,' says Healthcare.gov chief executive Kevin Counihan. 'We believe there's a lot to be gained by leveraging competition and choice to get people a better deal.'" It's also important for renewers to
shop around to make sure that they are still getting the best premium price for their needs, and that they don't fall into the potential trap of having their subsidy amount reduced because of marketplace competition.
End-to-end testing of the whole Healthcare.gov system—including this new renewal system—began on Monday, giving the administration five weeks to test the system. In comparison, they had 10 days of end-to-end testing last year. So the Healthcare.gov team is somewhat justified in the confidence they have that this time it will run a lot more smoothly.
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