For three 20-year-old programmers in San Francisco, it took about three days' worth of work.
Spurred by the problems that have surrounded the rollout of the official HeathCare.gov site, the trio created an alternative, Health Sherpa, quickly and cheaply. At first glance, it looks like a triumph of tech-startup nimbleness over government inefficiency.
George Kalogeropoulos, who created the site along with Ning Liang and Michael Wasser, said all three of them had tried using the government website to get insurance.
"We were surprised to see that it was actually fairly difficult to use HealthCare.gov to find and understand our options," he told CNN. "Given that the data was publicly available, we thought that it made a lot of sense to take the data that was on there and just make it easy to search through and view available plans."
The result is a bare-bones site that lets users enter their zip code, plus details about their family and income, to find suggested plans in their area.
"The Health Sherpa is a free guide that makes it easier to find and sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. We only use carefully vetted, publicly available data," the site reads. "The Health Sherpa is not affiliated with any lobby, trade group or government agency and has no political agenda." http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/11/tech/web/alternate-healthcare-site/
Here is the web site: http://www.thehealthsherpa.com/
My friend, Jamie, over at Greenlee Gazette, http://greenleegazette.blogspot.com/
is a computer geek and I'd be willing to be that if he was given about 1/8th of the money spent on the web site, about $50,000,000 he could come up with a better web site that works and encourages people to sign up.
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