Heeeeeeere's Obamacare!

Fudbucker said:
This is exactly the sort of negative press the ACA didn't need. This is a failure on Obama's part. He should have been leaning heavily on whoever was in charge of rolling this out:

"What do you need to make this work on day one? I don't want ANY snafus." That sort of thing. Everyone expects minor glitches, but not the systemic problems we're seeing.
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A fair criticism. I wouldn't be surprised if Kathleen Sebelius is quietly asked to "retire" early next year after everything gets ironed out.
 
MattusMaximus said:
To be fair, I think there is an element of truth to the above statement. So I consider it a fair criticism.
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Thanks, I think that's the most likely explanation too. If the Republicans had just sat back and let this thing pass, Obama would have probably asked for a delay to get the technical side of things going. But events overtook everything.



In another few months to a year, whether or not the roll out of the ACA was a bug-riddled mess or not will hardly matter. If the GOP wants to try to make short-term hay out of it, fine with me; but they have to stop stepping all over their own dicks first.
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This is totally true. The cost of insurance, as I pointed out in another thread, is incredibly low for a typical middle-class family of four. Like $250 a month for a 70% plan with a $1600 deductible. Granted, it's not the best coverage, but it's also not bad coverage. There is free preventative care, and you won't go bankrupt should something terrible happen. $250 is a small price to pay for peace of mind for a family of 4. Without the subsidies, that would normally run you $700 a month.

I wonder if a lot of people will bargain to drop the coverage they're getting from their employer, ask for 50-80% of the employee-sponsored premiums in cash, and just buy whatever insurance they need on the exchange. Because of the subsidies, both sides win. If you can get an extra $200 a month from your employer for declining employer-sponsored insurance, you can get even gold level coverage (80%) for an insanely low price.

I don't know if companies can just give you money and push you on the exchanges to avoid the employer mandate. Anyone know if they can fulfill their obligations that way?

My district gives us $10,600 a year for health care and I am chomping at the bit to ditch the district plan, take the ten grand, buy some nice platinum plan from Anthem for $600 a month, and pocket the rest. But it's a pipe dream at this point. I suspect it won't be in a couple years.
 
MattusMaximus said:
A fair criticism. I wouldn't be surprised if Kathleen Sebelius is quietly asked to "retire" early next year after everything gets ironed out.
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I haven't been too impressed by her. I think some heads need to roll after this. You can't do it in the middle of the crisis, but certainly when the dust has settled.
 
MattusMaximus said:
Yeah, Facebook gave me an error message earlier today... the same error message that I've been seeing for the last few days.

I don't think I'll ever talk to my friends again!!11! :(
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Nah, it just means you never had any friends to begin with :)
 
Tried again today, same "Your account couldn't be created at this time" message, also the same nonsense about the answers to the security questions. Thinking maybe it was an issue with my computer I tried my girlfriend's laptop, same exact issue.

I wonder if the issue is ISP or location dependent?
 
I would suggest trying with different security questions, just to test. Even if your answers are different there might be something in the string you provided that causes it to glitch.

MattusMaximus said:
That's exactly what the page displayed. See the big green button that says "Return to Create An Account Page"? You must have missed it. Look again.

:rolleyes:
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That's not what he meant. He meant that when the user enters invalid data, it should re-display the same form with all the previously entered data inside the fields, with a helpful error message on the page saying which field was incorrect (and in good design you'd even highlight the invalid field too).

Showing an error message and forcing the user to go back and start over is such a noob way of doing things, I wonder who are the clueless techs they hired for the job... :confused:
 
Now I can log in really quickly but it just goes to an error age and the error number is missing. Any attempt to navigate further logs me out again. Boo.

That said I have waited nearly 10 years for insurance so what's a little longer going to hurt?
 
Is every states health care site run by that state? It could explain the inefficiency and overload on the servers, if you have thousands of people flooding state sites that weren't used to that sort of traffic. I mean imagine how many people actually wanted to visit vermont.gov before the exchange opened?
 
Biscuit said:
Now I can log in really quickly but it just goes to an error age and the error number is missing. Any attempt to navigate further logs me out again. Boo.

That said I have waited nearly 10 years for insurance so what's a little longer going to hurt?
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If that is anything like an *ice age* your 10 year wait will pale to insignificance. :)
 
I can't get through the identity check, which I suppose is a problem with Experian. Even then, I don't understand why I need to do that JUST TO LOOK AT PRICES.
 
Newtons Bit said:
I can't get through the identity check, which I suppose is a problem with Experian. Even then, I don't understand why I need to do that JUST TO LOOK AT PRICES.
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Pro Tip: You can just go to the insurance companies' websites and price out policies starting in 2014. You'll get the new ACA rates.



Or so I've been told by a coworker who has spent some time doing his research and comparing. YMMV.
 
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Upchurch said:
Pro Tip: You can just go to the insurance companies' websites and price out policies starting in 2014. You'll get the new ACA rates.



Or so I've been told by a coworker who has spent some time doing his research and comparing. YMMV.
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My insurance carrier does not have the prices listed yet on their website. They emailed me to tell me that they are mailing me a packet about the upcoming changes. The pricing will probably be coming soon. Wee...
 
SkepticalDrew said:
Is every states health care site run by that state? It could explain the inefficiency and overload on the servers, if you have thousands of people flooding state sites that weren't used to that sort of traffic. I mean imagine how many people actually wanted to visit vermont.gov before the exchange opened?
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About a third of the exchanges are run by the states. Most of these seem to be working better than the main federal exchange at this time. The state exchanges are separate from existing official state web sites.
 
Heeeeeeeere's Obamacare!

White House warned months in advance the system would not be ready.

Major insurers, state health-care officials and Democratic allies repeatedly warned the Obama administration in recent months that the new federal health-insurance exchange had significant problems, according to people familiar with the conversations. Despite those warnings and intense criticism from Republicans, the White House proceeded with an Oct. 1 launch.
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Two allies of the administration, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the controversy surrounding the rollout, said they approached White House officials this year to raise concerns that the federal exchange was not ready to launch. In both cases, Obama officials assured them there was no cause for alarm.
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MattusMaximus said:
Well, with iron-clad logic like that, why have the CBO make estimates or predictions at all? Derp.
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To appease the ignorant masses who believe that if the government says it then it's obviously true...

;) Joking, of course, but honestly, the government's got i's to dot and t's to cross too. And when it comes to this sort of projection, there are a LOT of assumptions. And many of those assumptions are made with very little actual information to inform them - it's a materially different marketplace than it has been in the past. From my prior (long time ago) looks at it, at least some of the assumptions that the CBO used seemed rather rosier than I would consider reasonable. Being inherently skeptical of the government as I am, I wonder how many of the assumptions were politically influenced. There's no good way to know though... only time will tell.

On a more serious subject... By what reasoning do you imply that questioning the validity of the CBO's estimate means that they should never do any projections at all? Isn't that rather all-or-nothing false dichotomy-ish? Why not acknowledge that the CBO is comprised of people making difficult assumptions about something with many, many unknowns? Uncertainty is endemic in it, and a refusal to acknowledge that their projections could be materially wrong seems to indicate either ignorance of the process involved or dogmatic devotion to the rightness of anything government (just to throw my own false dichotomy back at you ;))
 
MattusMaximus said:
Well, to be fair, there are some technical glitches (which was to be expected and not surprising given the size of this thing). However, I think the implication is correct that most of those here on the Forum who are complaining the loudest seem to have a political ax to grind.

It's almost as if they want the ACA to fail.
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I am not familiar with most of the posters, but this seems to be an unfounded impression on your part. So far as I can tell, the people complaining loudest are the people with experience in IT and web-design, and other magical elves type work in the indecipherable black box of computery-type things. Thus it is professional complaints on the system, rather than any actual complaints about the ACA or the plan offerings. Indeed, one must be able to actually get to the plan offerings and prices before one can even begin to complain about those...
 
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