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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.'"
I'm looking at a zip code and it tells me the price for all the plans, but it doesn't even tell me the deductible or out-of-pocket?
Lipstick on a pig is still a pig.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
This only shows why it's important that organisations, especially public ones publish open data - even if the software is broken, as long as the data is open and accessible and in a known format, someone else can pick up the slack and process it as necessary!
This proves the old adage that no more programmers should be involved on a project than you can fit into a VW Bug with pizza and beer.
This is a nicely done website, there is no doubt about that. And certainly the people who implemented healthcare.gov could learn a thing or too from it.
But I do have to ask, how would thehealthsherpa.com hold up when 100,000's of people try to use it at the same time? My guess is that the site is hosted on a single, relatively small server and wouldn't hold up very well. I could be wrong, but I think that scale is worth considering.
I recall when web pages began to become popular technology. Everyone would ask me how I could possible be paid so much money to develop software when anyone with GoLive could put up a website in an evening.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Until hospitals have a constitutional right to let you die if you show up at the emergency room with no insurance, you need to shut the fuck up.
IMO and I will probably get downgraded because of this comment... WOOOPEEE DOOOO! So you did a nice job, like you said. However, a UI is only a detail. The backend and getting that work is often much more difficult. I get really annoyed by some Silicon Valley types that think I can rewrite an entire enterprise system over a weekend. It involves a bit more than just fancy UI and greenfield database storage.
My guess what went wrong of the the original healthcare website is that it was designed with enterprise in mind and became bogged down in enterprise details. Would not be the first time, and will not be the last time something like this happens.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
The principle I see in action here is that if you break every task down into easy-to-implement components that do one simple thing well, then you can have three young coders build each component for you and each will probably work well. If you try to build a system which is more complex than that, the effort grows something like exponentially with the complexity, and the likelihood of early success shrinks correspondingly. If only we could get by with simple things and not bother with complex integrated online services.
Korma: Good
A search for insurance for a 65 year old single person with an annual income of $35,000 returned a "Market Young Adult Essentials" policy and a link to the insurance company's start page for finding available policies. This is not "A better portal to HealthCare.gov"
And then, there's the warning ... "The information provided here is for research purposes. Make sure to verify premiums and subsidies on your state exchange or healthcare.gov, or directly with the insurance company or an agent."
This is not good to go and less functional that even the real HealthCare.gov.
They left all the hard stuff out.
This. This sums up the big problem the ACA is trying to fix and why the individual mandate is important. The majority of the people in the US are just too fucking stupid or steeped in partisan politics to understand it.
Seems to me that the government ought to be in the API business, making all their tools open to developers that can then take the information and the forms, fill them out get details, etc. Make life easy for developers and then let the public create the interfaces.
I could see a lot of great things coming out of such a model.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Exactly.
"Our site doesn't connect to the IRS, DHS, and various state exchanges and authorities"
So they put a new front end on the part that works, and completely left out the part that didn't work.
Next they should take their little PHP widget and connect it to dozens of federal agencies, 33 state governments, 400 insurance companies, and 4000 insurance plans. All in real time. Then throw in congress, the white house, and 4,000 pages of functional requirements.
Seriously folks, the "glitch" isn't in the source code.
"life" means I (or the govt.) theoretically can't walk up to you and kill you for no reason
it does NOT mean that I have to sacrifice my resources (in the form of taxes) to keep you alive regardless of any poor choices you make or accidents that befall you
My coworker says the exact same thing about the ACA. She insists that the government should not get involved in her life and intrude on something as personal as health care. Of course she wants the government to intrude in someone else's personal life so that it can protect traditional marriage by telling two people who love each other to not get married because they are the same sex. She also insists that the government should dictate the reproductive rights of women too. Why is it okay for the government to intrude in someone else's personal lives but not our own?
Her mixed message makes me doubt the sincerity of her desire to uphold the constitution. She is not alone, I see thing from a lot of social conservatives.
If only the constitution specified some procedure that must be followed to verify that a law is in fact constitutional like have the highest court in the nation review and approve the controversial law. Wait it does, and yes they did.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
No, that quote is saying that their website was easier to implement and has less issues because it does only a small fraction of what HealthCare.gov does. They don't have to query all those sources, they don't have to handle magnitudes higher load volume, etc. So of course something that is far more simplistic than HealthCare.gov is likely to have far less issues, but that isn't really saying much.
You will. :-)
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Actually, the current Constitution says there are no slaves in the United States. The amendments matter.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Is that related to the spherical cow?
No, but it is to the pork barrel.
Article I, Section 8:
The Congress shall have Power To ... provide for the ... general Welfare of the United States;...
Or in other words, the government is allowed by the Constitution to make America better, as Congress sees fit. By passing the ACA, Congress has invoked this power. The Supreme Court has determined that it is fairly applied and within the mandate of the Constitution, so yes, health care is actually an area the government has Constitutional authority over.
Before spouting off about the Constitution, you might want to actually read it.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
You utterly misunderstand what this website does. You punch in your zip code and age, it spits back plans and rack-rate premiums. That's it. That's the part of healthcare.gov that actually works, and has since they rolled out the feature a few days after launch.
The part of the government website that is having all the problems is the part where you actually sign up for the plans. That's what is requiring a large amount of integration, and has been doing horribly. Because of how the law was written (specifically the parts on subsidy eligibility) it's a little more complicated than processing a shopping cart on Amazon. (Business rules validation/integration is the most difficult part of most business applications.)
Translation: "In a few weeks we created a pretty front end to the part of the website that is really easy to write."
I'm not saying the healthcare.gov rollout was done well, or that the main contractor didn't botch the job. I'm just saying that this website doesn't provide any evidence of it.
What I wonder is why healthcare.gov is connecting to DHS...
Translation: "I can't read"!
"We accomplished something in a few weeks that the wastes of flesh in charge of this boondoggle couldn't do in two years" - nope, that's not what he's saying. He's saying "We did something different in two weeks, something much simpler but considerably less functional."
"and with vastly better access to internal information" - misleading. He's saying that they was able to build upon the work that the original Healthcare.gov developers had done making the internal information available.
There's no question Heathcare.gov is a fiasco. But this project doesn't prove much, if anything at all. Take some work that's already been done, and build a functional shell that doesn't meet the full requirements? I can do that too. I can do it in two weeks. Given that scope, I'll rewrite Delta's reservation system in one day - sure, you won't be able to book any flights with it, or see what discounts you have available, but, uh, it'll work, save for that reservation thing.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Of course not. That "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" phrase comes from the Declaration of Independence, which doesn't actually require anything.
Rather, it's the Constitution that requires you to give your resources to help others, according to what Congress considers to promote the "general welfare":
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Even with the Sherpa team's disclaimers, they've provided a really valuable service. How many people are going to go to the Sherpa site, quickly get information about what's available to them on the exchange, and decide that the exchange is not their best option? It has to be some double-digit percentage of people who would have wasted a lot of time being frustrated on healthcare.gov.
Basically, the Sherpa team has given us a great heuristic optimization, in which part of the load problem is handed off to where it can be handled easier, more effectively, and more cheaply. Nicely done!
But we have CEOs to feed. In your socialist country, you'd hand them a broom and tell them to clean the sidewalks.
Its a different sort of welfare system.
Have gnu, will travel.
The only reason this is an issue is that the government is involved in marriage the first place. If there was no government sanction of marriage, then gay marriage would be a non-issue.
Abortion is a balance of rights between the mother and the unborn child. Obviously, her opinion rests on the unborn child having full rights as a human being, so she is basically supporting murder being illegal. Do you support murder being illegal?
There is no inconsistency in her positions as far as you have stated them.
Interesting. Punched in my stats and selected Gold, which is what I have now. My current provider doesn't appear. That said, there are seven plans less expensive than what I have now. I guess the real question is: what are the requirements to get one of these? Do they require a physical and if so, do those results factor into the rates?
Even though this site takes only the easiest task of healthcare.gov, which completely works from healthcare.gov BTW...the "how much are these plans" thing is not what's broken, but the results are wrong. From health sherpa, the cost of a humana bronze plan is 194.72, but from healthcare.gov it is 166.99.
Since the price is relatively close, I guess this site does *something*, but it looks like it is not accurate, in which case it's kinda useless.
Can an editor change the title to "How 3 Young Coders Built a Broken healthcare.gov Portal"?
My Blue Cross is being cancelled. Thanks, assholes. Go ahead, mod me down, hiding the issue, just like all people in power try to hide the dissenters who are in trouble.
In a free country, "for my own good" is my decision, not yours.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"general welfare of the united states" is, and has, meant a lot of different things to different people.
For some, it's healthcare for all.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
She opposes the existence of gay marriage. I doubt she cares about someone's tax status or estate rights. Marriage in of itself is a social contract to define what constitutes a household. I see nothing wrong with the government determining the tax structure of a household or protecting the ownership rights of an estate if someone in the household dies.
It's not just abortion, but I love how you zinged right to that part. It's also about access to birth control.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
The Declaration of Independence says "all men are created equal." Not the Constitution.
No, it does not. I'm sick and tired of seeing that lie perpetuated over and over by people looking to pass unconstitutional law. The general welfare clause is entirely dependent on the other enumerated powers in the Constitution, none of which gives Congress the power over health care. Madison himself wrote extensively on exactly how that phrase was suppose to be interpreted, and he should know best, given that he wrote the fucking Constitution of the United States. Please educate yourself on the issue.
Remember, you can't look dignified when your having fun! Don't take life too seriously, you'll never get out of it alive
And you can thank Blue Cross for that. The ACA didn't cancel your plan, your carrier cancelled your plan because it was no longer profitable under the ACA's rules. Your insurer had the option of improving their efficiency and lowering their costs so that they could meet the 85% rule the ACA requires, but they decided that that was too hard. The ACA's wrong move there was assuming that for-profit insurance companies 1) should continue to exist and 2) would exchange the mountains of new business they're getting for not acting like complete money-grubbing parasitic sociopathic asshats.
tl;dr: Your plan got cancelled because your insurer made a marketing decision.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
I've got to agree with the New York one. First the site wouldn't recognize me as a "valid person." When I called support, they had me sign up on the DMV website which got me a login I could use on the New York Health Care site. Then, as I put that I had a wife and two kids, it began to ask for all of their social security numbers. Why? I'm a victim of identity theft so I get very leery about this sort of thing. (I was feeling sick about putting my own SSN into the sign up form but did it figuring they needed to verify that I was a NY resident somehow.) I stopped immediately and likely won't sign up via the health care exchange. (Thankfully, my company provides somewhat decent health care.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Why should I need insurance to pay for a $100 bottle of anti-venom?
When I was growing up, my parents didn't have insurance. They didn't need it. They paid out of pocket. Why the fuck do you think everyone needs insurance now, asshole? Until you've been charged $83K for a bug bite, you to shut the fuck up. Obamacare didn't do a damn thing about hospitals constitutional right to commit fraud against people who will die without their $100 bottle of medicine.
Excellent. Let's apply 200-year-old interpretations to modern life!
Or, we could follow the modern interpretations of the Supreme Court, since that's actually their job:
Shortly after Butler, in Helvering v. Davis, the Supreme Court interpreted the clause even more expansively, disavowing almost entirely any role for judicial review of Congressional spending policies, thereby conferring upon Congress a plenary power to impose taxes and to spend money for the general welfare subject almost entirely to Congress's own discretion. Even more recently, in South Dakota v. Dole the Court held Congress possessed power to indirectly influence the states into adopting national standards by withholding, to a limited extent, federal funds. To date, the Hamiltonian view of the General Welfare Clause predominates in case law.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
But it doesn't send data to 57 agencies does it? I read somewhere that they have 57 different agencies that are sharing in all the data and information that people put in and search on the website and also the goverment has to follow the 503 rule (I think it's called that the one that calls for disability features and such) also all the diffrent languages is these guys website in? only english? what about Spanish? and so on that the goverment one has to have. I know the article says "bare bones" I'm sure the Healthcare.gov site worked when it was bare bones to. I'm not defending how the site is right now but I'm guessing when it was first frameworked without all the added layers of what the goverment has to have in it could be causing some of the issues. I'm not part of the site just my thoughts on it.
Oh and when I went though both sites the goverment one gave me diffrent cheapter plans than this one did. So the question is how up to date are the databases are or is it just the search Algorithms or maybe even the time of day since I did my Obama search last night and this one right now?
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
You as an individual may not have the same idea. However the social conservatives have documented their political platform and fully subscribed to it. You can find it on the tea party patriots site,Heritage Foundation site, and the actual republican party site.
if you don't subscribe to their philosophy then good for you. You are not the target of my "brush"
You did immediately lose your moral high ground with:
You assumed that since I didn't agree with your beliefs in this particular instance that I'm not only liberal but I'm a moron too.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
She considers emergency contraception taken within 24 hours of unprotected sex as being equivalent to abortion despite the actual mechanism being used by the drug.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
For some, it's healthcare for all.
In fairness, for others it's saving money, even if it hurts others.
That's why Congress is given the power. Ideally, Congress changes its opinions about what's good every few generations, as the impulsive and optimistic youth mature into politicians who can balance their morality with the realities of managing a large country.
I said "ideally".
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Well, as an adult male in his thirties, I don't need to pay for dialysis, cancer care, endocrine problems, prescriptions, birth control, asthma treatments, vision care, women's wellness visits, or any other thing that's not catastrophic care. But, if you only paid for what you use, then why would you cover insurance at all? Just to get the 50% "I have insurance" negotiated rate?
I think you're missing the point of insurance -- that is, an individual's problem is everyone's problem. Stop treating insurance like it was capitalism. That's what got us into this mess in the first place.
This. This sums up the big problem the ACA is trying to fix and why the individual mandate is important. The majority of the people in the US are just too fucking stupid or steeped in partisan politics to understand it.
Hospitals already can't deny services in an emergency. The ACA and individual mandate only serve to try and limit the hospital's financial loss; it has absolutely nothing to do with the patient.
It is an entirely political question related to the boundary of Government. Do you want to force young, healthy people to have coverage to pay the lion's share for everyone else, or do you allow individuals to take responsibility for the choices they make and the risks they take by not having insurance?
False dichotomy. Try this. Do you want people with pre-existing conditions to be excluded from any type of insurance, or do you force health insurance to give them coverage (passing the amortized cost to the rest of the people w/o pre-existing conditions.) In other words, do we do something about that, or do we live by a "I got mine, fuck you very much" philosophy?
It is interesting (and sad) how people paint every narrative in terms of absolute personal choices. Where are the personal choices in having a pre-existing condition? Over 50% of bankruptcies in the states are related to medical bills. How do we impute "personal choice" when people fall through the economic ranks due to factors predominantly out of their control (globalization comes to mind) and have to make do with zero health insurance (or with crappy money pits like Vista health care plans)?
This is no different from the leftie loonie toons who paint everything in terms of the big, fat, lazy rich man exploiting the hapless but hard working and ethical little man. The same ideological bullshit that just happens to sit on the other side of the political spectrum.
Reality sits somewhere in the middle and solutions requires compromise from everybody involved. Painting everything in terms of either class struggle or personal choices is just a way to pampering their ideological pets over actually giving a shit about their compatriots and their nation.
Is the government in the business of prop-ing businesses up? Funny for most how that answer changes when the subject is large banking institutions.
Yes. The economy is a national strategic asset (oh yes, even in a capitalist economy, this is a truth.) Also, you are asking the wrong question. A more appropriate question to ask is "do the current actions (or in-actions) taken by the government with respect to X or Y line of business provide a positive (or negative) net effect on the economy?"
No his plan got cancelled because it didn't meet new federal requirements, idiot. Just like mine did.
And why wouldn't they? I do not understand why this is confusing. If you take away competition, you no longer have to compete. Why wouldn't an insurance company want to hedge their losses on the unhealthy by forcing healthy single males to buy maternity insurance?
If everyone was suddenly forced to have tornado insurance, you bet that insurance companies would cancel plans that didn't cover tornado insurance. It's an easy hedge.
This really wasn't unexpected either. It's how this system works. If the healthy didn't have to buy insurance they didn't need then it would cause premiums to skyrocket. Now this isn't me dissing or supporting this plan, but just telling it like it is. The plan all along was that the healthy had to buy insurance they didn't need to support the unhealthy who wouldn't have been insured otherwise. Whether that is a good thing or not simply depends on your opinion.
There is a law called EMTALA that requires hospitals to stabilize your health when you show up at a hospital. The bill signed under the Reagan administration created an unfunded universal healthcare system.
Why is it no longer affordable? Because the ACA forces the contract that I and my insurer had agreed upon to change to such a degree via required coverage that it no longer is economically viable? The root problem is that the ACA essentially forces me to pay for coverage I don't want, and provide services/coverage that my insurance company must charge more for.
As the GP said: "In a free country, "for my own good" is my decision, not yours." The ACA just tramples all over that concept.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
As we have seen recently, the Constitution and the Law is merely a suggestion.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
No his plan got cancelled because it didn't meet new federal requirements, idiot. Just like mine did.
And my last mod point just expired...
Blue Cross had a plan that they liked. Blue Cross had a plan the customer liked. Both were happy. Obama said "If you like your plan you can keep it"... Knowing that the law would require the plan to be changed to meet the requirement. He tried to spin this as "removing the under-insured" but no... People had plans they liked.
Blue Cross now has to offer "Government Approved" plans, and I'm sure all the canceled policy holders got a note of what new "Government Approved" plans they can switch to (With the hike in premiums).
Ever now and then we need a reminder that: There is no such thing as a free lunch.
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
This is a misunderstanding on your part, thinking that our healthcare "insurance" is about paying for only the things you need. In fact, it is, and has always been, about paying for things that you don't need in order to fund things that you do need.
It's just that when you unfuck a system for a bunch of people, some other set of people are going to lose something. Like if you abolish slavery, slave owners are going to lose their "property". If you pay the slave owners for the loss, then that money will come from the people who never owned slaves. It's not a zero-sum game, but it's not completely elastic either.
The system got a lot less fucked for a lot of people, so you, as a previously lucky-SOB, have to pay a little extra.
If you're going to live by the concepts of a 200 year old document, then how about using interpretations that were contemporaneous to the concept? Better yet, how is ignoring the very clarifying words of the author a better approach?
And of course the SC has consistently allowed expansion of the Federal Government. As an arm of the Federal Government, the SC is yet another case of the fox guarding the hen house, albeit in fancily dressed black robes...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
article 1 section 2 states non free people count as 3/5 a person and indians don't count for its purpose of assigning representatives and taxes. It was put in place to stop the over representation of people not allowed to vote
It was put in place to prevent southern states from counting slaves and thus increasing their census count and thus their representation in congress based on that census count. It had nothing to do with whether they could vote or not. Women and children couldn't vote but you'll note that they were still counted.
Outside of indians not being taxed, it had nothing to do with race as whites were also slaves at the time too.
Really? You're seriously going to go with that? Virtually all slaves were black at the time the Constitution was written and you are seriously going to argue it had nothing to do with race? Wow... Just wow.
No, it really is thanks to Healthcare.gov. The open access to their data is what made it feasible to build HealthSherpa - getting that data otherwise would have been an absolute nightmare. You're right that there are a few pre-existing sites to help people buy insurance, but even those mostly aren't offering ACA plans - and it's a lot harder to estimate premiums on non-ACA stuff.
Source: I'm a member of the team.
This is WAY off topic but what the heck...
Abortion is a balance of rights between the mother and the unborn child. Obviously, her opinion rests on the unborn child having full rights as a human being, so she is basically supporting murder being illegal. Do you support murder being illegal?
So you think a fetus is a person. Ok let's roll with that and say that a fetus is a person from the moment of conception. Following your logic answer the following:
1) Do you then think that if a mother smokes or drinks and the child becomes handicapped as a result that the mother should be put in jail for child abuse? Do you support child abuse being legal? (see how I framed that issue the same way you did?)
2) How about if the fetus develops in such a way that it is a life threatening danger to the mother. Is the mother committing murder if she aborts the fetus to save her own life? Or should the mother commit suicide to save the life of the fetus so that she does not commit "murder"?
3) Is the fetus guilty of murder/manslaughter if it kills the mother? (Remember the fetus is a person under your logic so a person just killed a person)
4) How about if the mother is raped and the implanted fetus eventually kills the mother. Is the rapist then guilty of murder too?
5) If a mother takes birth control pills and thus prevents the zygote from forming when it would have otherwise. Is the mother guilty of murder?
6) If a child is born prematurely because of some action of the mother and dies during the birth is the mother guilty of murder?
These questions are of course absurd just like yours is. The real question is when does a fetus attain legal standing as a person? I would argue that if the fetus is not viable outside of the mother then all legal rights should be retained by the mother up to and including abortion of the fetus. Until such time as a fetus can reasonably be expected to survive independently, any discussion of its rights as an individual is absurd because it is not an individual. It is effectively a parasite. If the mother wishes to go through with the pregnancy then that should be her right. If she doesn't then that should be her right as well.
Blue Cross had a plan that they liked. Blue Cross had a plan the customer liked. Both were happy.
Indeed -- and this idyllic utopia was going to be maintained until the customer needed some significant coverage. I am sure the plan was great until you had to use it to actually cover stuff.
People are notoriously bad at reading fine print (or their contracts in general, in fact). I think no matter what else ACA did, instituting a minimal requirement of what counts as "health insurance" is definitely a good thing.
He tried to spin this as "removing the under-insured" but no... People had plans they liked.
These two statements are not in contradiction. I just read an article about one of those "plans" that people liked which had a payout cap of $50 for any medical expense, no matter what how high it was. The plan was really cheap, so of course people liked it, but it was also useless (which people would only truly learn after they had to use it)
No. Blue Cross could have kept the plan, but they had to keep it exactly. Including not raising premiums. Blue Cross wanted to raise premiums, so they chose to cancel the plan.
What would you have the government do otherwise? Force Blue Cross to keep offering a product against their will?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Oh Americans- I really don't know if there is anyone better a spewing nonsense and strawmen in the face of mountains of contradictory evidence. It's nice you can go off on diatribes about obese alcoholic drug addicts but those really aren't much of an issue. Even healthy people can get sick (and often do).
I assume since you assert that no one else is your responsibility you also don't think you are theirs. I hope you have never had insurance of any kind and if you were forced to then you better have never made a claim. Insurance means having other people help with the costs when you need it while helping them with theirs while you do not. How else do you think a few dollars a month can pay for medical bills costing hundreds of thousands?
It's nice you live in a little fantasy world but here in reality if people really need something they will take it with force. Most civilised nations have discovered it is best to try and provide what people need rather than to assume they'll just roll over and die. That's where an individual's problem becomes everyone's. You can either pay a few dollars to help the problem or deal with high crime rates.
I guess it's a good thing those exemptions don't actually exist, then.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
It's cool that me explaining how insurance works means that you can jump to conclusions about "People like you" and my political views (which were not mentioned AT ALL).
Whether you want to call bullshit or not, you're incorrect. When is the last time car insurance made you pay for the damages in your own auto accident? It didn't. When is the last time someone had to pay replacement value put of pocket on their home because of a fire? They don't. When is the last time you paid the entire hospital bill yourself because you had a baby? You didn't. So whether you like to admit it or not, you belong to a pool of insured people who all collectively pay for 'things that happen'. That means, by definition, that an individual's problem is everyone's problem. If you can't see that, you should talk to an actuary.
So, here's an idea: let's start a health plan where we kick out the fatties, the smokers, the reckless people, and people who engage in sex without birth control, and anyone who has a mental health issue? Medically, all of that stuff means higher costs for our insurance members. But that's the heart of the issue -- now it's illegal to not offer coverage for that stuff, so that type of plan would be NOT CALLED HEALTH INSURANCE. Which is why the plans are getting cancelled. Whether you personally like it or not (and I don't) all of that stuff is EVERYONE's problem now.
Bullshit, bullshit, BULLSHIT! Your problem is your problem, not mine
Here you have it folks: The modern Republican Party in a nutshell. Enjoy!
We're also not as young as all the articles say :). The articles saying we're all 20-year-olds is a misquote of the original CBS piece that called us "twenty-somethings". We're all in our mid-to-late twenties, and we've all previously worked for at least one big company you've heard of.
The root problem is that the ACA essentially forces me to pay for coverage I don't want
You're omitting the other part of the root problem: that hospitals are forced to provide emergency care to uninsured/underinsured persons that don't pay for coverage that they don't want.
Of course you don't like the idea of paying for coverage that you don't want. It stops you from being able to get "free healthcare", paid for by everyone else.
Here's a tiny violin.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
What about this problem that I had before the ACA:
I'm healthy. My BMI at the high end of Normal, but still not enough to be classed Overweight. I am working on this at my own cost to get back more to the middle of the normal road. I do not smoke, anything. I do not take illicit drugs, and even over the counter stuff requires absolute need before I pop a pill. My cholesterol is good. My Blood pressure is normal. I don't drink but maybe once every few months. My only vice would be caffeine, and that's only a cup of coffee and a Mountain Dew a day. I have not called into work because of illness except for once during an excruciating migraine in the last 3 years.
Before the provisions of the ACA, starting in 2009 I was classified non-insurable due to a preexisting condition that wasn't discovered until a Workman's Compensation claim. I was probably born with it. I have no physical disability from it. I have no mental disability from it. It's not likely to kill me before anything else would. If the condition was a bit worse, I could get surgery to correct it, but at the moment it's too small to touch without neurological damage. Basically it could go away on its own, it could enlarge to a point where it's fixable, or it could always be the size it is now and show no adverse effects, but because it's on my record, I couldn't get insurance.
No. My Pineal Cyst is not your problem. It's not my problem either; not directly my problem, anyway. I'm not going into any other details but there are procedures that I needed that were denied me since I didn't have insurance to afford them. I finally got insurance this year through my employer under the new initiative for compliance with the ACA that they started in July. When my coverage kicked in, I started to get things fixed that have been getting put off for affordability. Things that would have been covered by Insurance to begin with. Things that would not have been as bad as they were had I been able to get to a Doctor sooner. Nothing serious. Nothing life threatening. But they did make day to day living interestingly painful at times.
And one final note. You apparently have no idea how insurance works. By its very definition, in purchasing a policy, you are putting money into a giant pot to cover the costs of catastrophic events for anyone with a stake in that pot. Through this method, the healthy are going to carry the burden of the unhealthy. What makes it worthwhile to put money into this pot is no one knows when anything would happen to shift a person from healthy to unhealthy. Step off the curb at the wrong moment...and live? You are now unhealthy and drawing from the pot. Run over someone who legally stepped into the way of your vehicle at just the wrong moment...and lived? He is now drawing from your share of the pot. Perfectly healthy person finds out the hard way he has a genetic heart condition that won't immediately kill him... he draws from the pot until something does. The big thing with why Insurance Companies are restructuring their plans to fit with ACA guidelines and forcing Policy holders into more expensive plans is so they can grow the pot to cover the influx of potential unhealthies while they minimize the dip in their profit pool.
Of course, I can see why you'd be upset about being forced into participating in the pot. If you've got a good bit of health, you probably don't want to support anyone who's not as lucky or as disciplined as you. But, if you turn out to be not as lucky as you thought you were and wind up having to pay $50,000 - $500,000 for a single stay in a hospital for surgery, or a broken leg, or losing traction in a snow storm and slamming broadside into a tree, breaking a leg as it gets smashed in the door, or any other event... I don't want to hear one iota about how far in debt you are. It can be something very trivial, fleeting, and unexpected that could leave any one of us in the hole for millions and destitute in a wheelchair...or worse, regardles
For my zip code and household--Shrepa worked like a champ. Confirmed what I already knew in less than a minute. i.e. the information is accurate and came quick. Took the better part of three weeks to get the "official" word.
I'm guessing this has given you a better informed perspective on the problems that Healthcare.gov has to solve. So what's your opinion on the struggles, do you feel like Healthcare.gov really screwed up a doable task or was the problem a lot more technically challenging than most people realize?
And do you think HealthSherpa or other 3rd party sites have the potential to eventually offer signups and fill the role of the Federal Exchange?
I stole this Sig