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HealthCare.gov Can't Handle Appeals of Errors
PapayaSF writes "The Washington Post reports that roughly 22,000 people have claimed they were charged too much, steered into the wrong insurance program, or denied coverage, but the HealthCare.gov website cannot handle appeals. They've filled out seven-page forms and mailed them to a federal contractor's office in Kentucky, where they were scanned and entered, but workers at CMS cannot read them because that part of the system has not been built. Other missing aspects are said to have higher priorities: completing the electronic payment system for insurers, the connections with state Medicaid programs, and the ability to adjust coverage to accommodate major changes such as new babies. People with complaints about mistakes have been told to 'return to the Web site and start over.'"
Maybe they should have hired actual coders to do the job.
Yeah, $634 million and counting (as of... way back in 2013-10) ceartainly isn't enough to develop a website. What price would you have us pay, ridiculous, partisan one?
sig: sauer
... I personally know several people, in several states that have not established their own exchanges, who have signed up for "Obamacare" using the federal site and are now taking advantage of much better coverage, at a much lower price, than they could have received before the ACA went into effect. The problems are real and clearly need to be fixed, but beware of confirmation bias--every single problem is going to get lots of press, while successes go unnoticed because they don't fit the "if it bleeds, it leads" paradigm.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
When I worked for a Fortune 50 company, we once had corporate IT charge us $1.7 million to tell us that it would cost $4.5 million to make a simple e-commerce web site for a division that had a catalog of 2000 products and did about 250 orders per day. Everyone on that team was praised and the local GM that refused to go forward with the project was eventually pushed out. The project eventually happened.
They now have a maintenance team of five people dedicated full time to that web site.
Different AC who has also used the site to get coverage after being laid off. It worked as well as any modern moderately intimate "create an account" web experience. More used friendly (and less intrusive) than the average online job application.
I happen to live in one of the Red states that had been trying torpedo "ObamaCare", fwiw.
I hope you don't are never forced to resort to healthcare.gov, and I am sure there are plenty if people who have problems with it (like any other online or off line process), but it isn't the absolute failure that it is made out to be.
I'd like to see any private project do better when 50% of both management and customers are hoping for failure.