Healthcare.gov is now open for window shopping.
Customers looking to use the Obamacare exchange can now get an early preview of 2015 prices for the program’s health plans before the exchange opens officially Saturday. This feature is available for the 37 states using the federal exchange.
The preview feature is supposed to ease pressure on the system and hopefully avoid a repeat of last year’s technological failures, Bloomberg News reported. Last year, consumers who tried to use the site met with errors and delays that continued for months.
Officials also said that this feature was unveiled in the hopes of bringing people who previously enrolled back into the exchange.
“We have been working in a number of areas to raise the bar,” Andy Slavitt, the deputy director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told Bloomberg. “Our principal focus is to bring people back to the website so they can update their information and shop for the best values. That’s our principal focus, is to get people to come back.”
But they face a tough sell.
About 90 percent of uninsured people surveyed in October by the Kaiser Family Foundation said they didn’t know when they could sign up for coverage and more than half of the people who tried out federal and state enrollment systems last year said they wouldn’t return, according to a November Bankrate.com survey.
Legal challenges to the law are also making it difficult to convince people to purchase insurance through the exchange.
