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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?
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.
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"
"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...
Hush my mouth, I tooled around their site a little, and they do estimate your subsidy, based on income and number of people in your household. So right now, this is much more useful that HealthCare.gov - at least for information purposes.
Dark Reflection
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.
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?"