Because it can be, and doing so provides a better experience. If you have the chance to design a system from scratch, you're going to want the best design you can afford, right? So why not create a marketplace where buying health coverage is as simple and straightforward as buying speakers on Amazon -- a list of products with prices and a buy button.
The asynchronous alternative is a menu of plans you may or may not qualify for, at prices that may change after you apply, based on inputs many people will get wrong (unintentionally and otherwise), with a true cost that won't be known until someone does your taxes up to a year later and computes what subsidies you qualified for.
Even if there's only a day between signing up and verifying your information, that turns an hour of "getting it done and over with" into a multi-day ordeal. Considering this is a mandated purchase for a lot of people, they want to devote multiple days to it about as much as they want to stand in a long line at their local DMV.
I don't think any of the questions being asked were particularly hard: certainly no harder than doing your taxes. The system could clearly say "based on the information you provided, here are your options".
I know it's nicer if it's instant, but I don't think anyone expected it to be instant; private health insurance is a multi-day process. Nobody is getting this health insurance until January. It sounds like the system is asynchronous anyway, in that it then goes off for further processing (no matter what the website promises).
In any case, we're talking about a delay of a week at most; I'm not suggesting that nothing be verified until tax season.
Because it's giving the user real-time access to which plans they are eligible for.
The only other two options I can think of would be:
-- Pre-verify all of the potential applicants, many of whom may already have coverage and never come to the exchange.
-- Ask users a bunch of questions that they may or may not know the answers to.
I really like the suggestion of doing the calculation for everyone in advance. We could even have sent a letter to everyone that would be better off if they enrolled.
Its a big database, but handling a db of that size isnt that hard of a problem (if you precomputed all results, and then threw the underlying details away because HOLY SHIT FIRE).
If you batch processed the delta from the other agencies every night (or as soon as they could if better), it could work!
