WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is redesigning HealthCare.gov and says that 70 percent of consumers will be able to use a shorter, simpler online application form to buy health insurance when the second annual open enrollment period begins in mid-November.
Federal health officials said Monday that the shorter application had fewer pages and questions, fewer screens to navigate, and would allow people to sign up with fewer clicks of a computer mouse.
The new application is intended for people with uncomplicated household situations It can be used only by first-time applicants, not by people who have previously obtained coverage through the federal insurance marketplace.
“The streamlined application will allow people to get through the process a lot faster,” said Andrew M. Slavitt, the No. 2 official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs the federal marketplace.
If it works as intended, the new application procedure will spare consumers from the frustration that many experienced last fall when they tried to buy insurance through HealthCare.gov.
“Instead of being user-friendly, the original website was user-hostile,” said Luke Chung, the president of FMS, a software development company in Vienna, Va.
The revamped website will have “a new look and feel” and will provide “a shorter, smoother, simpler user experience,” according to an internal memorandum prepared by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Consumers will be asked a series of questions to determine whether they should use the old or new application.
In these screening questions, the government asks: Does everyone applying for coverage have the same permanent home address? Is anyone an American Indian or a naturalized citizen? Are you and your spouse responsible for a child who lives with you but is not on your federal tax return? Do any of your dependents live with a parent who is not on your tax return?
Changes in the online application are being “randomly released to an increasing subset of HealthCare.gov users,” the administration said, and will be fully rolled out in time for the open enrollment season, which begins on Nov. 15. In theory, health officials said, this gradual approach will ensure that everything in the new application is working properly before they make it available to more users.
In a summary of the new procedure, health officials said: “We expect about 70 percent of applicants to use the shorter, updated application. The remaining 30 percent, who have more complicated household scenarios, will use the traditional marketplace application.”
Consumers can see the available health plans without identifying themselves, but will need to create accounts to buy insurance through HealthCare.gov.
“In the improved online application, account creation is completed on one, long screen, instead of using a separate screen for each section,” the administration said. “This requires fewer clicks and makes the account creation process simpler and faster.”
The new application has a feature known as backward navigation, which allows consumers to change information entered on previous screens. The old application did not have this capability, so consumers often had to start over if they wanted to correct an error.
Jessica F. Waltman, a senior vice president of the National Association of Health Underwriters, which represents agents and brokers, welcomed the new application. “This is something we’ve been seeking for quite a while — a procedure that allows people to jump the queue and get through the system faster if their case is neat and simple,” she said.
Consumer advocates, mindful of the problems that stymied users last fall, were cautiously optimistic.
At a news conference in April 2013, President Obama boasted that the administration had listened to criticism from consumer groups and shortened the individual application to three pages, from 21. “Especially in this age of the Internet,” he said, “people aren’t going to have the patience to sit there for hours on end.”
But that is exactly what many people did, as they struggled to create accounts and sign up for insurance in October and November.
The Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress,raised questions on Monday about financial management of the federal insurance exchange and related activities. The auditors said in a report that they could not verify the amounts spent on staff salaries, advertising, travel, public relations, polling, focus groups and conferences.
The new secretary of health and human services, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, a former White House budget director, has described improved management as one of her top priorities. But the department disagreed with recommendations from the G.A.O. about steps she should take to track spending and report more accurate data.
The auditors tried to determine how many federal employees had been shifted from Medicare, Medicaid and other programs to work on the insurance exchanges. Information provided by the administration “was not complete and was based on personal recollection unsupported by documentary evidence,” the report said.
Date: September 22, 2014