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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?
To test it, they want you to put in all kinds of personal information. No thanks.
I'm unemployed and without insurance. If I go to the dentist's office to get a small no-anesthesia filling, as I did last week, they will accept $116 from an insurance company but will charge me $167 for exactly the same procedure because I'm a cash payer. When an insurance company pays them, they deduct the difference between $167 and $116 as a "loss" to reduce their taxes. Obviously, they've got quite an incentive to do that.
It's not just dentist's offices. Those are the shenanigans going on with tens of thousands of health care providers across the US, it's to the tune of tens of billions of dollars of "losses" pulled out of thin air, and it has to fixed before any of this is going to improve. Subsidizing private insurance companies with taxpayer money and mandating that people sign up with them while allowing insurance companies to keep skimming profits out of the system and penalizing cash-payers is the wrong thing to do.
BOSS: Our mandate is to make this site work for the vast majority of users in two weeks. Otherwise we don't get a bonus. And by "we" I mean "I". ... well, I just thought you could hire a few competent engineers for a change. That might get the job done.
ENGINEER ERNIE: But there are millions of users! Right now the site can only handle 200 simultaneous users, and we just don't have the hardware for more. If we work our asses off and spend a bunch of money on servers, we might be able to get it up to ten thousand. That's nowhere near the vast majority.
BOSS: Damn it, I promised my son I'd buy him a Cessna for his birthday. I need that bonus! You guys had better think of something quickly.
ENGINEER DAVE: I think I have an idea...
BOSS: Spit it out, man!
ENGINEER DAVE:
BOSS: Look, I tried that. It was nixed by the big shots -- they don't want to develop a reputation for competence, okay? You've gotta figure something out that works with our current human capital.
ENGINEER ERNIE: Uh, I have an idea. Say again what the mandate was?
BOSS: We have to make the site work for the vast majority of users in two weeks.
ENGINEER ERNIE: That's what I thought. So if we just drive away all the users right now, then we will have no users in two weeks, right?
BOSS: Yeah... how does that help?
ENGINEER ERNIE: Well, what's the vast majority of zero?
[Silence]
ENGINEER DAVE: But... but...
BOSS: Shut up and start sabotaging the code, or you're fired.
ENGINEERS: Yes, sir!
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.
Canada has more health care than Americans do, and they're not slaves.
Are you completely sure that health care is slavery?
there's no such thing as something cheaper than mandatory insurance
anyone who doesn't get insurance is someone who thinks they don't need insurance. while those who get insurance really need it. so costs are spread amongst fewer people and they go up, if you respect the "freedom" of some freeloaders to be stupid and irresponsible
then those assholes without insurance break their arm and get sick anyway, and then they avoid the bill because they can't afford it, and the taxpayer has to bail out the hospital
so you pay for it anyway, in the most wasteful, stupid way possible, and you pay for irresponsible freeloaders
that's why healthcare is such a joke in the usa and is so incredibly expensive
now forcing 50 year old to buy childbirth insurance does sound crazy so you fix that specific problem, you don't jettison the entire superior idea
any questions?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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
And those younger women are paying for old people's heart attacks. The old people are paying to prevent flu epidemics from getting younger males sick. And men tend to have a part in making babies and it is much cheaper to pay for IUDs and pills than kids. Especially unplanned ones.
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!
I think much of the opposition to health insurance reform is because the costs to treat the uninsured are hidden. People who receive health care and do not have money or insurance cost hospitals (and patients and shareholders) a lot of money. When they pass these costs on, I think the hospitals should be required to break out these costs as separate line items on the bills they send to their patients and the insurance companies. I feel people would be much less opposed to health insurance reform when they see exactly how much they are paying to treat the uninsured. I do not think a civilized person can think "let them die in the streets" to be an option.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
Which of these other countries do you speak of that I would have gotten better treatment or a better outcome?
In any modern developed country other than the US, you would have gotten similar treatment and since we know you responded well to treatment, you'd have the same outcome. Obviously you can't get a better outcome than successful treatment.
For people without insurance, of course, the outcomes are often vastly different because in the US that means they'll likely have to delay treatment.
At least not in my case. I was paying $165 for a better than platinum level plan.
Were you paying the entire bill for that plan? Did you have a large deductible? Most people that get health insurance have a major portion of the tab picked up by their employer. They think they pay $165 or whatever their price is because they never see the actual full cost of the plan. I've spent a LOT of time looking at health insurance plans in recent years. I have NEVER seen anyone get a plan with that much in the way of features for that kind of price unless they were paying a huge deductible. I had a catastrophic coverage plan a few years ago that had a $5000 deductible but had pretty good coverage after that and the price was around $150/month. But that first $5000 was entirely on me.
I run a manufacturing company. We provide health insurance for our employees and have picked up 50% of the cost. Our group rate for a pretty good 80/20 HMO with a zero deductible (roughly equivalent to a gold plan) cost about $525 per employee per month. Net cost to our employees is around $260/month since the company pays half. The plans we've found under the new regulations for the Affordable Care Act will give similar coverage for about $200-300/month (varies with age but always a lot less than current cost) or almost a 40% reduction in total premium over what we pay now. Furthermore a lot of our employees will qualify for subsidies so the coverage will cost even less.
While this whole roll out has been a fiasco, at the end of the day the people who work for me are mostly going to end up with similar or better coverage for less money. Furthermore their coverage will not be tied to their employment with us which is LONG overdue. No one should EVER lose health coverage just because they lost a job.
that's one smart bloodworm.
Citing a Salon article that exposes Fox News? Pot, meet kettle...
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.
Slavery. Good one.
If you don't want to participate in this society, don't. Sure, none of the civilized countries in Europe will take you, but maybe you can get into Rwanda. Then you can see firsthand what actual slavery looks like.
I do not think a civilized person can think "let them die in the streets" to be an option.
CNN's 2012 GOP Presidential Debate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yva0VSN1_T4&t=41s
Wolf Blitzer: Congressman [Ron Paul], are you saying that society should just let him die? ::laughter::
Audience: Yeah!
Ron Paul: No.
Audience: YEAH!
Audience:
Ron Paul: I practiced medicine, ummm, before we had medicaid in the early 1960s, when I got out of medical school.
I practiced in Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio and the churches took care of them.
The audience members didn't have to dissemble like Ron Paul did.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Damn straight you should count yourself lucky.
There are seriously terrible things out there. Cancer. Parkinson's. MS. But do go on. Complain about paying more than your share, you always-healthy person, with your great genes, with your great personal character and intelligence that have kept you away from drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, with your even temperament that has shielded you from depression. Complain, with your good job, where you aren't exposed to toxins, which pays for your good house in your nice neighborhood, where gang violence is the farthest thing from your mind, where you have a great grocery store that enables your fully organic diet, where you have a great gym just up the road that you work out at five days a week.
The whole point of insurance is that we all get screwed a little, so that when someone gets really fucking boned, they don't get screwed sideways on top of it. Even a perfect person like you can fall off a bike or get hit by a car.
Of course, you're also right. We're all getting screwed way more than we should because we didn't have balls to say to hell with wall street and insist on a single-payer system.
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.
They're called appropriations bills and they're freely available online.
>That's called something else that was tried numerous times in the 20th century and proven a failure.
the american system is a failure. we pay ridiculous multiples as compared to other countries with universal healthcare/ mandatory insurance, and we have lower quality of care than them
what you call a failure has been proven to be a success in all of our social and economic peers
this is where you trot out out horror stories from countries with socialized medicine. as if the american model has no horror stories, including avoiding the doctor until it is too late because you can't afford him
socialized medicine is not perfect. it's just a hell of a lot better than the american joke of a system
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
what about police services?
do we have to do a financial means test before cops answer 911?
what about fire services?
do we have to a financial means test before the firemen turn on the hose?
healthcare is same necessary fundamental service, where no questions are asked and response is automatic
therefore it must be paid for in the same way as police and fire, and understood in the same way: a fundamental necessary government service, the way it is all of our economic and social peers (who pay fractions of our healthcare rates, because their policy matches the reality of what healthcare is)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it