Third Try with ACA

~ Laura

I logged onto healthcare.gov this morning just to see how the system is working. This is my third time that I’ve played with the website in the past month. I don’t need health insurance right now, but I’m curious what options are like and how the system is working.

I got further into the website then I did in the past. I was able to log in (the first time I couldn’t do that). I didn’t get caught up in some programming errors in the the third screen (that happened the second time). So, progress.

But I had to plug in the same information multiple times. I had to plug in all sorts of personal information and got bored and logged off. I just wanted to browse. I should be able to plug in my income and ages of the family members to get a ballpark figure without first giving the name of my neice, social security number, and phone number.

It asked for information that a lot of people might not have, like an e-mail account. Then I had to go to my e-mail account and verify and return to the website. Not a big deal for me, but that might have tripped up my dad.

So, not enough progress.

Published by Laura

10 thoughts on “Third Try with ACA”

  1. The impression of incompetence which the web site has created is a big problem, but I think “if you like your plan, you can keep it” is worse. The reason Obama and all the rest of the backers had to say that was to hide the subsidies which will be flowing from relatively healthy and younger people to older and sicker ones. And this pretense was required to enable the claim that taxes would not rise more than moderately. Somehow there was a number above which they did not dare score for the tax cost for this. I don’t actually know where they got this number, but trying to meet it has hurt them desperately. “… I just wanted to browse. I should be able to plug in my income and ages of the family members to get a ballpark figure….” and that was what they couldn’t let the young-and-healthies know, or at least thought they couldn’t, so that was why they designed the website to frustrate browsing.

    We have a reasonably progressive income tax base: the Soroses and Kochs and Pelosis of this country pay a huge fraction of the taxes. That was where to go to get this paid for. But that would have scored the thing for higher tax cost than they thought people would stand for. Thus, “If you like your plan, you can keep it”. I think the McMegan surmises about how they thought this would play out – becoming more popular, being able over time to bully and cajole the Reeps to cooperate in fixing it – are likely dead on, and that it didn’t go that way is why they are in the soup now.

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    1. The reason Obama and all the rest of the backers had to say that was to hide the subsidies which will be flowing from relatively healthy and younger people to older and sicker ones.

      I really don’t follow this reasoning. Why would Obama have to hide a small subsidy to a sixty-year-old when it is trivial compared to the subsidy provided to a 65-year old? The Republicans just finished running a presidential campaign in which they paid millions to put “Obama will cut Medicare” on my TV every ten minutes for two months. The people making this argument belong to a political party that certainly does act like it believes subsidizing the elderly is a political problem.

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  4. Yes, I used that calculator before. Just wanted to get that info directly from the gov.

    ACA would have cut our health care costs in half last year when we were on COBRA, btw.

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  5. “The reason Obama and all the rest of the backers had to say that was to hide the subsidies which will be flowing from relatively healthy and younger people to older and sicker ones.” Maybe I’m too Canadian but isn’t that close to the definition of a group plan?

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    1. A group plan here would have that, but in most states an individual plan would have been priced by age (and sex and preexisting conditions). Obamacare still lets insurance companies charge more for older people, but not quite as much as it actually costs to provide health care to them. Obamacare also prevents charging women more for insurance than men of the same age. That was already against the rules in a lot of states.

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  6. I’m not sure why requiring an email address is a problem if you’re signing up online is a problem. There are multiple other ways to sign up, including over the phone, through mail, and in some places, in person, so people without email addresses, internet, or computers can use other methods. If you’re not tech savvy enough to get a gmail or hotmail account, then I’m not sure you’re tech savvy enough to fill out a reasonably complex online form. I’ve found that most websites which require even moderately sensitive information require email confirmation for registration, and I think that’s a reasonable safety precaution to require.

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  7. I would be very hesitant to enter any personal information. The site is so bad that I have serious doubts about the protection of personally identifiable information. I think it will be hacked before too long.

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