Health Insurers Aren’t Allowed to Talk About Testing Obamacare’s Website

Last
year, in the weeks before Obamacare’s exchanges opened for business
in October, there were rumors and rumblings from the insurance
industry hinting that the website wasn’t quite ready for prime
time.

It wasn’t entirely clear how bad the problems were: One Wall
Street Journal
report, for example, warned that the system’s pricing
mechanisms weren’t always accurate, but there was little sense of
how widespread that glitch was, or if there were other serious
problems.

But combined with multiple previous warnings, including a summer
report from the Government Accountability Office concluding that it
was possible that the exchange system wouldn’t be ready on
deadline, it seemed clear that the system would be at least
somewhat flawed when it opened. 

As it turned out, of course, it was a lot worse than that,
though the extent of the failure didn’t become clear until after it
went live. 

This year, we’re likely to have even less indication of how the
system is performing prior to launch. Insurers participating in the
testing phase are required to keep the process
confidential, The Wall Street Journal
reports: 

On Monday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
emailed insurers that it would require “all testers to acknowledge
the confidentiality of this process to access the testing
environment,” according to a copy reviewed by The Wall Street
Journal.

…The email alert spells out exactly what is expected of
participants: Insurance-industry officials “will not use, disclose,
describe, post to a public form, or in any way share Test Data with
any person or entity, including but not limited to the media,”
unless the recipient also has agreed to the confidentiality
provisions.

The new confidentiality agreement won’t just cover the industry
data that will be included in the marketplace’s testing
environment. It also includes “results of this testing exercise and
any information describing or otherwise relating to the performance
or functionality” of HealthCare.gov.

As I’ve said before, given the tolerable performance of the
exchange’s front end during the final months of last year’s open
enrollment period, I don’t expect the catastrophic failures we saw
last year to be repeated. But if new problems arise this time, we
may not know about them before launch.