Resolving Technical Difficulties with State Health Insurance Marketplaces
Posted on September 17, 2015
Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, marketplace websites were supposed to let people seamlessly enroll in private health insurance plans and apply for premium subsidies. But these state-based websites and their underlying and related systems were far from seamless when they went live in October 2013. Many websites froze, crashed, or had other technical problems as people were in the middle of filling out applications. These problems delayed enrollment for thousands and received widespread media attention.
So just what went wrong? Our recent report on state marketplaces, the subject of today’s WatchBlog, has the answers and some recommended improvements. You can also listen to Valerie Melvin, a director in our Information Technology team, discuss the report.
State-based marketplaces vs. HealthCare.gov First, the setup. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act allowed states to set up their own health insurance marketplaces or to use a marketplace established by the federal government. Depending on what individual states decided, residents could apply for coverage through a state-created web portal, the federal HealthCare.gov site, or some combination of the two.
(Excerpted from GAO-15-527)
- Questions on the content of this post? Contact Valerie Melvin at melvinv@gao.gov.
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