After weeks of trying different user names, I finally got past the login to HealthCare.gov, the federal government’s website. The site is supposed to have new affordable health insurance options for uninsured people in Illinois and other states on its marketplaces.
The marketplaces are one of the key ways that the Affordable Care Act is supposed to expand the number of Americans who have health insurance.
But glitches have been a problem since the website went live on Oct. 1, keeping most Americans from finding out whether these insurance options are affordable for them.
The federal government has said that the website will be fixed by the end of this month.
There have been reports of some people getting through to HealthCare.gov, so I kept trying.
On Friday, I put in my user name “Sun-Times” and my password, and I was expecting it to say, “The information you entered isn’t valid,” as it has other times. Instead, it allowed me to verify my identity by replying to a message sent to the email account I had given.
Then, to figure out what kind of coverage I qualified for, the website let me put in my income before taxes, any family I had — though I made an error with that and couldn’t figure out how to correct it — and a bunch of other optional questions. Some of those questions seemed random, such as: “Did any of these people get married in the last 60 days?”
But when I got to the end to review what I had put in, it was all for nothing.
A yellow screen told me I was almost finished with my application, but it also told me that “our verification system is temporarily unavailable” and it couldn’t submit my application to determine my eligibility.
I couldn’t tell you how long it took me to get to that point, because I stopped several times to take screengrabs, tweet and deal with a breaking news story that came up that day. But my advice to you is to give yourself about an hour when you’re ready to explore the marketplace and have documents you’ll need handy, such as Social Security numbers for anyone you plan to have on your plan, and a recent pay stub. http://www.suntimes.com/23686155-761/finally-logging-into-healthcaregov-is-still-no-guarantee-of-success.html
An hour to be on the web site? Hell, most Americans don't have the patience to stay on a web site for an hour, especially if it is malfunctioning.
In this day and age, if something is not done in 10 minutes or less, especially on a web site of any kind, people are not going to stay focused and stay on the site.
Many American's, especially those who will need ObamaCare, have ADD or ADHD and are not patient enough to wait an hour... for anything.
Hell, I won't wait in a bar if it takes more than 5 minutes to get a beer. And an hour on an ObamaCare web site, no thanks.
Sigh. Really? Listen, we had to fax a document to Andy's employer to excuse an absence. It's a huge national airline. I had to refax it easily a dozen times due to failure on the other end. I've had trouble in the past with Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, Amazon, eBay and more. I've had to use a different browser because a major website wouldn't work in AOL, or Internet Explorer. I've had multiple failures accessing a site on a PC period, having to access it from my MacBook.
ReplyDeleteYes, it sucks that HealthCare.Gov is not working. But let's not pretend these things don't happen elsewhere, or that people aren't used to glitches with technology.