

Obamacare's Exchange Website Needed Six Years of Development, Instead Of Two - bane
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/10/23/now-she-tells-us-sebelius-says-obamacares-exchange-website-needed-six-years-of-development-instead-of-two/?google_editors_picks=true

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zaroth
I've tried to register every night this week, and the site has always been
"down for maintenance" so I can't even begin. Tonight I finally got to the 2nd
screen in the signup process which asked me for a username/password, but every
possible input to username was flagged as invalid.

It says: "The username is case sensitive. Choose a username that is 6-74
characters long and must contain a lowercase or capital letter, a number, or
one of these symbols _.@/-". At first reading it sounds like an email address
would work as a username, but that failed. I then simply tried all
permutations of 10 character usernames with upper/lower/numbers/symbols and
every attempt rejected as invalid. Nice.

Since I haven't been able to seen it first hand, please correct me if I'm
wrong..

This is a website which collects total household income, zip code, and age of
each member of household. Then looks up a set of plans for those inputs, and
displays them on the screen?

The Medicaid eligibility check is gratuitous, but not complicated either. It's
just some boolean logic being run over < 10 user inputs. Yes, it's slightly
different for each state. But determining if someone qualifies for medicaid is
not black magic.

Also, you don't need to _prove_ someone is a citizen to check their
eligibility, you just need to ASK if they are a citizen. Just like you don't
need to prove their household income by querying the IRS, you just ASK. If
they lie, worst case is they are told they will get a subsidy, but in fact the
IRS will deny it when the time comes.

Shopping for health insurance is pathetically simple once you remove the need
to screen for preexisting conditions. This is a weekend hackathon project.
Please tell me what am I missing?

Since the government has clearly completely failed here, they should just
open-source the pricing matrices and let us implement it for them. We'd do it
for free over a weekend, but if they could provide a few cases of Redbull, we
could probably finish in 24 hours straight.

~~~
hga
I'm going to go from least to most probable here:

There's a _theory_ that the nearly last minute requirement that eliminates
window shopping was intended to hide the ugly details of unsubsidized prices
for the new, one size fits all gold-plated plan. Whatever the trade offs in
monthly premiums vs. deductibles, the minimum plan has a 10 or so less or non-
essential benefits, like covering your children to or through age 26; the old
"real insurance" high deductible major medical (catastrophic coverage) plan is
soon to be illegal except for around 2 of the 18 million who managed to
squeeze through the needle of grandfathering. Letting just anyone window shop
would enable a lot of bad press.

It was decided the Federal system was the only one that could calculate
subsidies, the state exchanges and insurers have to use it. Whoever does it,
this process is absolutely essential to avoid screwing worse many of the above
who will lose their insurance come Jan 1 and can't afford the new plans
without a subsidy. That, BTW, is the really hard deadline to all this, it's
one thing to be changed an already delayed once penalty for not getting
insurance, quite another to lose it altogether because your old one was
outlawed and the government can't get it's act together to let you buy a one
compliant with the new law. And to the extend young whippersnappers feel
public spirited enough to buy insurance they don't really need (beyond major
medical coverage) so they can help to pay for the 50-64 bracket this system is
truly subsidizing, showing them after subsidy prices makes that easier. The
initial financials of the system require about 3 million of them out of the
total 7 million.

 _Someone_ should do a bunch of verification things, and in theory we trust
"the government" to do this....

FICO scores are understandably part of new insurance policy pricing ( _someone
's_ going to be on the hook for when customers don't pay co-pays, deductibles
or premiums, so it's an input into pricing), so Experian is checked for yours
(which is currently a nightmare for those who don't have one, like sick
children who've never really needed to get a credit card etc.; there's
supposed to be a process, but it's hard/impossible to get to it on
Healthcare.gov or the phone numbers for it).

Credit scores are absolutely tied to real identities, and you can't let just
anyone find a particular person's one, directly or indirectly. Only way I can
see to have done this differently would still be a stiff identity check and
then telling a person what their's is, so they could plug that in along with
everything else prior to "window shopping".

I'd note that the current system doesn't allow "what if" games, which due to
the subsidy etc. system would be incredibly useful. E.g. the most common
advice on how to decrease your Obamacare insurance costs is to make less
money. Or someone using a Kaiser? calculator couldn't find any scenario where
being married didn't result in higher costs....

~~~
zaroth
I'm not sure where this FICO score rumor started.

Insurance pricing under the ACA can only vary based on your age, zip code of
primary residence, and whether or not you admit to smoking tobacco.

See:
[http://www.acscan.org/pdf/healthcare/implementation/backgrou...](http://www.acscan.org/pdf/healthcare/implementation/background/NewFederalRatingRules.pdf)

~~~
hga
A quick check with Google shows this cause, since walked back:
[http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/report-credit-score-
have...](http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/report-credit-score-have-big-
impact-how-much-people-pay-obamacare_762318.html)

Yeah, I'm seeing indications that Experian is for some inexplicable reason
being tasked with income verification, along with identification verification.
I can see the latter, whereas ... well, maybe the IRS just wasn't in a
position to do the former at scale, or was otherwise intransigent. They're
noted for pretty bad IT after the initial glory days when they first
computerized their operations.

After the fact the insurance companies can look at customer performance and
all sorts of things including individual or aggregate FICO scores to know how
to change the overall pricing of their policies going forward.

However subsidy levels obviously require more than the three details you
mention above, and they're critical for anyone using the system who's entitled
to one. A quick check with Google doesn't show any indication FICO scores are
used for that.

