HHS seeking to publish new health insurance data

CQ Health Beat: "The Department of Health and Human Services is working on regulations that would allow it to publish additional in-depth health insurance data, including the number of people enrolled in each insurance plan." An official at HHS said "transparency is what's needed to best help consumers understand their choices among insurance plans as the health care law is implemented." That will entail adding new data on insurance companies to www.healthcare.gov, a Web portal that already allows consumers to "compare plan premiums, benefits, and more" under the new health care law. HHS is planning to increase the number of plans included on the site to 8,000, and may include the enrollment numbers of each plan at some point in the future—currently, plans are ranked by enrollment but do not reveal the number of participants in a plan" (Norman, 11/12).

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This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.