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How 3 Young Coders Built a Better Portal To HealthCare.gov
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Doug Gross writes at CNN that spurred by the problems that have surrounded the rollout of the official HeathCare.gov website, three 20-year-old programmers in San Francisco have created an alternative website to help people get health insurance under the Affordable Care Act quickly and cheaply. The result is a bare-bones site called Health Sherpa, which lets users enter their zip code, plus details about their family and income, to find suggested plans in their area. 'We were surprised to see that it was actually fairly difficult to use HealthCare.gov to find and understand our options,' says George Kalogeropoulos, who created the site along with Ning Liang and Michael Wasser. 'Given that the data was publicly available, we thought that it made a lot of sense to take the data that was on there and just make it easy to search through and view available plans.' Of course, it's not fair to compare the creation of Health Sherpa to the rollout of the more complicated government ACA site, which even President Obama has acknowledged as a horribly botched affair. 'It isn't a fair apples-to-apples comparison,' says Kalogeropoulos. 'Unlike Healthcare.gov, our site doesn't connect to the IRS, DHS, and various state exchanges and authorities. Furthermore, we're using the government's data, so our site is only possible because of the hard work that the Healthcare.gov team has done.' But it does cast light on the difference between what can be done by a small group of experts, steeped in Silicon Valley's anything-is-possible mentality, and a massive government project in which politics and bureaucracy seem to have helped create an unwieldy mess. The three programmers have continued fine-tuning the site as its popularity has grown. In less than a week, the site has had almost 200,000 unique visitors and over half a million page views. '"The Health Sherpa makes it ridiculously easy for anyone to compare health care plans covered under Obamacare in 34 states," writes Connor Simpson at Atlantic Wire. "The result is a simple, beautiful, remarkably responsive website that anyone could use.'"
Look here. I'm sick and tired of liberal morons painting everyone with the same brush. We're not all the same. I oppose the ACA, not only because it gets the government, the IRS, and the DHS involved in my personal healthcare decisions (which are all bad enough), but because also it takes away my freedom to make my own decisions regarding how I live my own life, puts even more tax on the already-burdened middle class, and limits the charity care that the lower middle class/poor are already receiving. You think people are dying in the streets now, wait until this shit takes effect.
That being said, I also think the government should stay out of people's bedrooms, marriage chapels, and wombs. Again, it's one more place the government doesn't belong. But, you see, it's not that the leftists want government out of all of those places (like I do in addition to my doctor's office), it's that they want the government IN all those places, on THEIR side.
Therein lies the problem, people wouldn't be happy with only being left alone by the government, oh no. They want their own lifestyles mandated onto everyone else. These are decisions that should be made at the local level. If there is enough demand for same-sex marriage in a given area, then of course that local community should be free to allow it. Additionally, if there is enough demand for abortion at a local level, then a doctor should be free to provide those services. The opposite applies, as well. If a given community has no need for an abortion doctor or same-sex marriages, why should they be federally mandated to provide those services? Because it hurts liberals feelings otherwise, and that's the only reason.
Again, I could care less about abortion, same-sex marriage, or any of these wedge issues because they are distractions designed to polarize left vs. right and keep people divided. But the ACA affects everyone, and that's why it is so dangerous. It brings a whole new level of intrusion into people's lives who don't want it there. If states and municipalities decide that this healthcare system is something that is needed in their area, then they should be free to provide it, and people should be free to opt-into it or ignore it, whichever option fits them better. That's freedom.