The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has unveiled a new series of tools to help Americans find affordable coverage options through HealthCare.gov, a web portal first unveiled on July 1st. Starting today, applicants will be able to compare plan benefits, prices, and application denial rates. Currently the site includes information for 4,400 family and individual policies, a list that will grow more insurers submit plans in the coming months.

Here are some of the new features:

- Provides price estimates.

- Expands benefit detail for private insurance plans.

- Offers metrics on the percent of applications denied and percentage of applicants that were charged more than the advertised rate.

- More information about Medicaid and CHIP programs.

Watch Todd Park, Chief Technology Officer at HHS, demonstrate the new features:

Responding to a question from Politico’s Sarah Kliff about insurer criticism of the accuracy of the denial rate — which the industry warns may be inflated — Karen Pollitz, Deputy Director of the Office of Consumer Support, said that the data came directly from the industry. “We asked insurers to report to us on actual denials. So an application is submitted and the insurer does not issue the coverage or refuses to issue the coverage,” Pollitz said, explaining that insurers deny coverage for a number of reasons ranging from an applicant’s pre-existing condition to an illegitimate application from another state. Issuers also informally deny coverage by simply sizing up the applicant without embarking on a formal application process. “I think what we have is a pretty good measure, it’s not perfect, but it gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect in the marketplace today.”

“And in 2014, we’ll be able to take that down from the website because insurers won’t be able to do that anymore,” she concluded.

In 2011, the website will include pricing and comparison information for small businesses. It will also hopefully serve as a guide to states that are looking establish their own exchanges and develop similar web portals.

Health care and tech savvy bloggers breathed a collective sigh of relief last Thursday, when the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) unveiled a very user friendly and easy to navigate health care portal at healthcare.gov. I captured Todd Park’s very energetic presentation of the site here, and wondered how the national portal would interact with the state-based exchanges in 2014.

Will states build off the main site and sell policies from some kind of exchange section? Or, will they have to create their own websites and sell coverage that way? Will customers be able to view exchanges options from the main site or will that information only be available within each exchange? I sent these questions to a contact at HHS and received the following reply:

Under Section 1311(b)(5), the portal continues to operate. States have the option of using the portal directly or using a template the Secretary provides to set up their own portal but the portal continues to function robustly concurrently with any portal a state may set up. It is important to note that the portal is currently organized and displays information by state. In 2014, it will reflect the plan offerings in the Exchanges as well as public programs. The portal will also show plans sold outside the exchange.

During today’s Twitter chat, Park confirmed this arrangement, tweeting that “State-level portals can be a great complement to HealthCare.gov. We’ll continue to enhance HealthCare.gov as well.” All this should be seen as a good thing, since the existing site goes a long way towards accomplishing the main goal of exchanges — helping customers choose a compatible insurance plan.

In other words, in 2014, a purchaser a customer will be able to generate rate comparisons by inputting his or her date of birth, household size, and ZIP code. Many more details need to be worked out, but if states don’t have to create their own portals and can rely on the national model, it will be possible for consumers to compare products in a standardized way. That could only help increase the number of insured Americans.

The Department of Heath and Human Services unveiled its long awaited web portal this morning, healthcare.gov. The snazzy website allows consumers to comparison shop between different coverage options, including private insurance plans, high risk pools, CHIP and Medicaid. “For the first time ever in the history of this country, American consumers can see all their health care options in one place,” Kathleen Sebelius said a press conference this afternoon. The site has information on over 1,000 private insurance carriers from the private market place and supports over 3 billion potential personal scenarios.

And as Chief Technology Officer Todd Park demonstrates, it’s also very friendly:

By October 2010 the site will offer price estimates of different plans, medical-loss ratio information (percentage of your premium spent on administrative costs) and new details about prevention and care quality. “It’s a site we hope to co-author with the American people,” Todd Park said, stressing that the site “didn’t fee like a government website.” And while it certainly doesn’t look like a government site, the fact that it is, I think, is significant. Given the common perception of government inefficiency and waste, it’s telling that HHS was able to design such a user friendly and aesthetically pleasing website — in just 90 days. It speaks well of the department’s implementation strategy and sets up a fairly high bar and sound precedent for moving forward with reform.

What’s unclear is how the site will interact with the new exchanges once they become operational in 2014. Asked if by New York Times’ Robert Pear if individuals will be able to submit applications for insurance directly though the website, Sebelius stressed that the site would remain purely informational. “No, I don’t think we ever anticipate or want to be the insurance broker for the country,” she said. “This is really a consumer tool and a transparency tool to help people do some comparative shopping and information.” “What we want to do is give a non marketing tool to let people access the market a little more easily.”

State and regional exchanges will presumably have to establish their own websites, whether or not they’ll use healthcare.gov as a model and how the site will present the exchange options, is unknown.

In the latest issue of Health Affairs, Jon Kingsdale — who until recently ran the successful Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority in Massachusetts — suggests that the new state-based health exchanges should function as shops for insurance and help customers choose a compatible insurance plan. A purchaser of insurance should be able to “generate rate comparisons for any level of benefits simply by providing his or her date of birth, household size, and ZIP code. These rating rules make it possible to automate insurance pricing and facilitate comparison shopping in an exchange,” Kingsdale writes.

In July, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is preparing to unveil a new website that will allow individuals and small businesses to comparison shop between different coverage options, “including private insurance plans, high risk pools, CHIP and Medicaid.” Here is how Karen Pollitz — head of the new Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight — explained the new web portal during yesterday’s ‘web-chat’:

POLLITZ: The first thing we’re going to do is open a new website. That’s going to be a great big website. I don’t have the name of it yet, but that is a big project that’s in the works and that will show, on July 1st, all of the big health insurance policies that are for sale, for individuals and small businesses throughout the country. So you can go on the website, look up your state and see what’s available for you. A little bit later this year, we’ll put out information about pricing, sort of what, at least the sticker price is for those policies. And then, a few months down the road after that, we’ll start loading up some really important performance information. So how do these place really work for people. What kind of enforcement actions and complaints and what are the things they do well, so that folks can have a really better understand of what their options are.

Watch it:

The federal government hopes that states will adopt the new portal as a model for providing consumers with information in the exchanges and all the different stakeholders are advising the agency for how best to design the new site. As Politico’s Pulse notes, “Reform proponents like Families USA want HHS’s new consumer insurance portal to include an ‘in-depth compendium of plan information‘ in multiple languages. Others, such as Aetna, say that HHS’s sky-high demands for information go beyond Congressional intent and that the portal should ‘not be a mandatory, comprehensive and continuous reporting obligation for insurers on all open and closed insurance products.’”

Kingsdale notes that the exchanges will have to determine how to present information to consumers in the most useful and usable manner. “How many choices to offer, and of what kind, are matters of judgment and consumer preference,” Kingsdale suggests. “Too much choice may confuse consumers and lead to adverse selection. On the other hand, too little choice may conflict with consumers’ preferences and stifle innovation in the design of insurance policies and benefits.” Kingsdale writes that exchanges have to create administrative efficiencies and add transparency to the health care system. “Today, in the absence of exchanges, the non group and small-group markets offer a bewildering array of benefit choices and crate hurdles to purchasing coverage.” “Many of the functions associated with sales, enrollment, premium billing, and collections could be streamlined through a combination of manual rating and economies of scale,” he predicts.