HealthCare.gov Provides Tools for Understanding Health Care Options

By Rachel Walden — July 7, 2010

Last month, Christine posted some resources for shopping for health insurance in light of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which institutes a number of changes in health insurance availability and coverage.

This month, one of the provisions of that Act was enacted to further aid in insurance shopping. The government is now offering a website where residents of any state can identify affordable health insurance coverage options in their state.

The website, HealthCare.gov, provides an online tool individuals and families can use to search for insurance and healthcare options. Under the “Find Insurance Options” section, you can put in information about your state, status (healthy individual, senior, young adult, etc.), age, and other non-personal details to find information about available plans in your area for individuals and families, including those considered “high risk” because they have a pre-existing health condition.

You can also find out if there are health care facilities near you that provide free or low-cost care.

The “Understand the New Law” section provides information on the Act and a timeline of when the various provisions will be implemented, and the “Information for You” section provides details specifically for families with children, individuals, people with disabilities, seniors, young adults, and employers.

The site also links to other federal sources of information, like Hospital Compare for healthcare quality data by hospital/location, and healthfinder for disease prevention information.

4 responses to “HealthCare.gov Provides Tools for Understanding Health Care Options”

  1. most americans [even poor ones] don’t want this adm. piece of shit health care deal. the sooner the adm. gets it through the thick egotistical arrogant heads the better off we will all be—thank you

  2. Rachel,

    (and “charles”)

    Though its true that the new health care reform bill still leaves too many people uninsured and leaves the insurance companies too many reasons to treat customers unfairly, the new legislation is a definite and dramatic improvement, There are still many falsehoods that were propagated by the press and many misinformed consumers (like “charles above there”) who need to get the facts.

    The sources you list are helpful, thorough and necessary especially because the lobbyists were saturating the airwaves for months on end trying any means necessary to block reasonable reform that protects and empowers the consumers.

    thanks for pointing to these resources Rachel, I’ll make sure to share them along whenever people need a reality check and some common sense facts.

  3. I have twenty two years experience in IT field. I agree that there is always room for improvement, especially the medical field where the government is trying to set or push the standards across the country.

    However, there is a risk and physician don’t have the time to provide the data input or adding more staff to input their data. This is a huge impact on every physician clinic to demand for more data and forcing them to compliance with the EMR or EHR. How we are really going to improve by centralizing the patient data? We will still have the data integrity issues such as data is old, data is not correct, data hasn’t been uploaded by one clinic out of the three patient visited for particular treatment, patient prescription has changed two days ago but showing two month old. Physicians will still have to jump around to many different systems to gather all the patient information before they provide the care patient needs. We must still consider the impact that the demands for increased data have on physician’s practices. Physicians, clinics, and hospitals will increase their fee for the services and medical cost will be unaffordable by the American public.

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