HealthCare.gov: It almost worked

He writes:<p>&quot;I create things all the time on the web. Its my chosen profession, so I know how hard it can be to make a good website when you need to integrate with a lot of different 3rd parties.&quot;<p>But I have read in several places that the Kentucky site works great. And I suspect that Kentucky&#x27;s site works well because Kentucky had a limited budget and therefore kept things simple.<p>The New York Times quoted one official as saying that &quot;changing requirements&quot; caused the Federal site to be in flux up until the last moment. In my experience, I am most likely to run into &quot;changing requirements&quot; when my client has too much money to burn. Lack of money often leads to a reasonable restraint regarding feature requests.<p>In my opinion, the correct question here is why the Federal site can not be as good as the Kentucky site.

I had to use ehealthinsurance to get a plan to cover a gap period this August. It&#x27;s not beautiful, but it worked perfectly fine. I think it&#x27;s proof positive that a central marketplace for healthcare could work.<p>The problems with Healthcare.gov are that it&#x27;s a badly designed morass of barely functional independent systems that need to get data from other government departments (which probably don&#x27;t even have real APIs) and requirements full of &#x27;bureaucrat enhanced&#x27; logic.<p>I&#x27;m fairly confident that at some point it will be at least as dead annoying as Treasury Direct, though at least be functional.<p>Ultimately I don&#x27;t view the idea as wrong, so much as I view major reforms of how the government uses and builds software as necessary.

A few things:<p>The author could have simply contacted any insurance company directly and under the new laws, applications are very short and easy to do (no preconditions allowed, so they don&#x27;t ask). A rep told me that it takes 5 to 10 days to get coverage this way.<p>So, take advantage of the new laws, but don&#x27;t necessarily use healthcare.gov site.<p>A bit anecdotal: I did use healthcare.gov a couple of months ago, and things worked for me, eventually.<p>Give the new system a year, and people will wonder how we ever did without healthcare.gov and the new laws.

The california version is covered california (<a href="https://www.coveredca.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.coveredca.com&#x2F;</a>). After investing a total of 8 hours over the course of 3 days on this site I still don&#x27;t have health coverage. Timeouts abound, and even when things say they have successfully gone through they haven&#x27;t. I have money to pay, I know what plan I want, I just want to sign up. As far as I can tell it&#x27;s impossible.

I applied, took a few days. They sent me a letter about &#x27;bulk payment&#x27; I received. (They must have accessed my tax records of 2 years ago). True.<p>What I got out of the article was a comment to use <a href="http://lucyphone.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lucyphone.com</a> , and I will.

Ah, thanks for posting this! I have been one of the unfortunate ones who could never even log into the site (tried numerous times over several months), but I tried today and FINALLY was able to login and view health insurance plans.

Curious: author makes it sound as though he&#x27;s leaving a company where he had health insurance. Why not apply for Cobra? Off-topic, perhaps, but worth pointing out for others in a similar position.

And there is more. UX is woefully absent. Getting married sometime this year? How do you add your spouse to your policy? Having a baby? Same.