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Officials Say HealthCare.gov Site Now Performing Well
The much-discussed health care finance sign-up website HealthCare.gov has benefited from the flurry of improvements that have been thrown at it in the last several weeks. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid spokesman Aaron Albright told Fox News Saturday that "[w]ith the scheduled upgrades last night and tonight, we're on track to meet our stated goal for the site to work for the vast majority of users." CMM spokeswoman Julie Bataille. "said the installation of new servers Friday night helped improved the response times and error rates, even with heavier-than-usual weekend traffic." If you've used the site this weekend, what has your experience been like?
Zippy and responsive. Each page was uncluttered, and what little info I had to give to "see plans in my area" was reasonable. I got back a dozen quotes in under a minute just clicking through things.
Now, the actual registration process is probably more complex, but if the rest of the website responds as beautifully as it did for me during those dozen screens I saw, then they really did a good job fixing it.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
To test it, they want you to put in all kinds of personal information. No thanks.
In the first release, a significant percentage of people who put in their info, checked out some plans, and then cancelled out of it all were accidentally signed up for Medicaid. Hope that bug got fixed.
But even the government doesn't claim the site is secure yet. Glad I'm not legally required to use it before they get around to they security audit they skipped (also legally required, but laws are for peons).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Basically all accounts created in the first week ten days must be abandoned and fresh account created. If you try to continue with the old account, it would retrieve an old incomplete corrupt data file and you are screwed. But start a new account, new email id, and it would be a breeze for most people. If you want to check your subsidy etc I heard there were trouble. Also heard that most troubled were older people unfamiliar with internet and web pages and were intimidated by all the new fangled terms and legalese.
Two days back got an email saying, "why don't you try again?". I logged in opened a chat window and asked "williams" to cancel that account. He said dont bother it will time out and die by itself.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So I'm in the process of trying to sign up for healthcare.gov. I'm already having problems, because it won't accept my e-mail address as my username, even though it would appear to fit the criteria.
"The username is case sensitive. Choose a username that is 6-74 characters long and must contain a lowercase or capital letter, a number, or one of these symbols _.@/-"
If they are having problems explaining the most basic things, I'm not hopeful.
The site is also less secure for me because none of my standard, extremely secure, never before had a problem with them passwords will work for it. That will force me to write it down, making the site inherently less secure.
5 Minutes later...
LOL. What an absolute piece of garbage of a web site. I tried to change my username to just the username of my email address and the site says it's invalid. It should be valid based on the instructions, but no joy. If they actually want the username to contain a number, then that's a joke; it's something I've never seen before on ANY website EVER.
WHO LAID OUT THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THIS SITE? JOE BIDEN? HAVE THEY NEVER EVEN USED THE INTERNET?
When sites come up with new, unusual standards for usernames and passwords (e.g. must contain a %, *, or ^), then they are making the site less secure because they are increasing the odds that people will have to write down their usernames and passwords.
Because previously, those "cheap" plans covered almost nothing and were pure profit for insurance companies:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/Decoder-Wire/2013/1029/Millions-losing-health-plans-under-Obamacare.-Did-president-mislead-video
People are now paying for coverage they should have been previously receiving.
Not only does every first world country other than the US have some sort of universal healthcare/single payer system, the US spends more than every other country for healthcare for a lower level of care/poor outcomes.
USA! USA!
WTF?
Optimizely is a complicated scheme for serving slightly different versions of a site to different people and seeing what that does to usage patterns. This allows testing different advertising approaches, or field-testing new versions of a site to a fraction of the user base. It's not inherently evil.
DoubleClick code is being loaded because HealthCare.gov uses the Google Tag Manager. ("Tag" in this context means "web bug", not "hashtag".) Google Tag Manager is a system for managing sites that have so much web tracking that they need a management system to keep it all straight. The Tag Manager itself doesn't track anything; it just loads other code that does, based on an configuration stored on Google servers. Each tracking code source has its very own privacy policy and intrusiveness. HealthCare.gov is trying (at least for me) to load CrazyEgg, Google Analytics, Doubleclick, and ChartBeat. Which trackers are loaded is controlled by Google's config. Google generates a page of Javascript for each site and injects all the tracking code. This replaces the old approach of putting tracking code directly into web pages. Here's what it injects into Healthcare.gov. (Minified Javascript, not easy to read.)
Google here has the power, should they decide to use it, to extract any data they want from any page or form in Healthcare.gov by downloading a suitable tracker. Whether you think this is evil depends on how much you trust Google.
In fact, this happened to my wife before we got married. She had "student insurance" at her college, but when she actually needed to use it for surgery, she found out she'd be on the hook for half the bill -about $10k almost 20 years ago. Fortunately she found out before actually scheduling the surgery. Since she's from Germany she was able to head home and get it done under the German "socialist" program. Bottom line under the old market was that you'd pay $800/month (at least in FL) for full/platinum-style insurance that actually provides the same level of coverage as a good employer plan. In most cases, if you were under private insurance, only a major medical/catastrophic policy makes sense -- true insurance rather than health-care funding.
We are the 198 proof..
To test it, they want you to put in all kinds of personal information. No thanks.
You joke, but it is true. At the last minute, the government added a http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/obamacare-healthcaregov-registration-98671.html">requirement to force people to register before they could see prices.
Foruntately, these guys came along and partially liberated that information. It still isn't detailed - when I looked up what was available to me, there were about 20 different plans all priced within $10 of each other, but no further details.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I'm neither defending nor criticizing the president, but that statement was clearly a bit of hyperbole, and you'd have to be an idiot to take it at face value. Why do I say that?
1) The statement was made about plans that existed prior to the ACA going into effect
2) One of the major problems that the ACA was created to address was the fact that insurance companies could (and routinely did) cancel people's policies for any reason at all.
3) Laws cannot be made to retroactively force people/companies to do something.
So I think the point was, there was nothing in the law that could cause you to lose the coverage you had. However, there was no way to prevent insurance companies from cancelling policies on their own whim before the ACA went into effect.