#Transparency: Government orders tests of Healthcare.gov be kept secret

Published October 8, 2014 4:32am ET



Healthcare.gov is rolling out another round of tests — but you won’t get to know how it fares.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is requiring all testers to keep their results confidential, according to a CMS email obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

They are forbidden to indulge any information “relating to the performance or functionality” of the website to anyone, journalists included.

This is a new arrangement for testers, who had no such requirement during initial testing of the website last year, before its disastrous debut.

The Wall Street Journal quotes the email at length:

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.

The testing is being performed in advance of the November 15 beginning of open enrollment for 2015.