
Health Insurance Exchanges are now Online (Affordable Care Act) - yapcguy
http://healthcare.gov
======
kvcrawford
This neatly coincides with my need to purchase my own health insurance: I just
accepted an offer with a startup that does not yet have a company plan in
place, but they are giving me a a monthly allowance to purchase my own.

May I solicit any recommendations from the other hackers and entrepreneurs out
there? Where have you bought insurance from? What private equivalents to the
Health Insurance Marketplace are out there?

Right now I'm running through the application on eHealthInsurance.com and it's
looking like I can get some pretty sweet PPO health insurance + dental +
vision for about $212 per month.

~~~
mgkimsal
Are those for the 2014 calendar year? Everything changes then. As of last
night, I was seeing 'good deals' on insurance from multiple places, but it was
all 2013 numbers.

My understanding is that you need to have an 'ACA-compatible' plan, and in my
state (NC) there are precious few, and effectively only one provider. HSAs are
effectively gone (at least for me in NC - it looks like for others in NC as
well) and my premium doubled for 2014.

~~~
r00fus
The lack of HSAs in NC is troubling - can you provide more details?

~~~
mgkimsal
I called coventry, and they said they have an ACA-compatible HSA, but they had
no info yet - getting a call on monday.

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yapcguy
For California, the website looks okay, but might not really be ready.

[https://www.coveredca.com/coverage-
basics/plans.html](https://www.coveredca.com/coverage-basics/plans.html)

Click 'Health insurance companies for 2014' and you get a 404. Ouch.

[https://www.coveredca.com/PDFs/English/booklets/CC%20health%...](https://www.coveredca.com/PDFs/English/booklets/CC%20health%20plans%20booklet%20rev2.pdf)

Does anybody know if things like this are developed internally or outsourced
to contractors?

~~~
beat
It depends on the state. Most states are actually using the federal system.
Some states did their own. For those, most were outsourced to contractors, as
the business rules are extremely complex and state governments tend to not
have much experience with high-volume consumer transactional websites.

A lot of the projects were handicapped by short schedules, due to political
interference. They weren't really free to work full strength until after the
2012 election was done.

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mhurron
Seems like they work about as well as any other major launch.

[http://twitchy.com/2013/10/01/surprise-obamacare-health-
insu...](http://twitchy.com/2013/10/01/surprise-obamacare-health-insurance-
exchange-websites-dont-work/)

Problem is, some people will spin this as a government failure and as more
ammo stating the government can't do health care.

~~~
evandena
I feel they should have made it more clear that no plans will take effect
until Jan 1st, so there is no need to rush to sign up.

~~~
mgkimsal
No rush to sign up specifically, but at least some states have had a blackout
on all pricing info, and people do need to start at least budgeting for next
year, and without knowing how much you'll need to pay, it's hard to do that.

Will it matter if I find out today or tomorrow? Probably not. It would have
been nice to have had a better functioning website, given that they've known
about this for a while and should have an effectively unlimited budget.

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mariusz79
Please change the title to "Health Insurance Exchanges are now OFFLINE".. as
most of them are not working :)

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vonmoltke
For some bizarre reason, the Federal site will not allow usernames that are
all letters.

Also, when I got to the security questions page, there were no questions in
the dropdown boxes. It let me continue anyway after I put BS "answers" in the
relevant boxes.

...and then I get a message about my account not being created because the
system is unavailable. Guess I'll have to wait until the initial rush dies
down.

Overall, though, what I have seen so far looks much better than I expected
from a Federal government product.

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mkr-hn
Georgia dropped the ball in general, so I'm still waiting for the federal site
to let me log in.

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yapcguy
Why are they even called 'exchanges'?

Are quotes coming in live from the healthcare providers?

Can we get a feed to the data to chart price changes over time?

At the moment it looks like the websites are fairly static and all we're
getting a look at is a menu of prices.

~~~
mkr-hn
You're thinking of a stock exchange. This is a marketplace. As in one person
has a set of goods and services, and someone has a need for those goods or
services. They exchange goods and services for other goods and services--or
money--on the marketplace.

I honestly can't tell whether you're trolling or genuinely confused.

~~~
yapcguy
Both words 'marketplace' and 'exchange' are being used so that might confuse
people.

Obviously I don't expect it to look like a stock exchange with bid/ask but one
of the ideas of having the marketplace was that competing healthcare providers
would (maybe) lower premiums.

That means there must be a mechanism for updated prices appearing on the
websites. Are prices updated on a daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly
schedule?

It would be interesting after a year to see whether prices really do fluctuate
or not, and what the variance from the mean is. Is this a free market where
health providers really do compete on price, or is this a stitch-up like
e-book prices?

~~~
mkr-hn
Our anonymous title-fixing vigilante is asleep on the job. The actual page
title uses marketplace.

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skilesare
www.healthcare.gov 's Backbone site is busted. Should have used knockout. 500
on [https://www.healthcare.gov/ee-
rest/ffe/en_US/MyAccountEIDMUn...](https://www.healthcare.gov/ee-
rest/ffe/en_US/MyAccountEIDMUnsecuredIntegration/fetchAllSecurityQuestions/ffm)
and they didn't handle the error.

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codva
So The Republicans really have no excuse for not showing us how they would do
it better?

~~~
krapp
We already had an election in which the Republican alternative was showcased.
The American people determined "get rich or die trying" was not a viable
option.

