Kaiser Health News tells us that CQ Health Beat reports,
“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.”
A lot can be done with aggregate enrollment data. If they put all that in a downloadable database then I will be very happy. If not, the data could still be used for research, but not before someone smarter than me wrote a program to mine the website for it and/or a team of graduate students (to which I do not have access) did so.
