Healthcare.gov going offline nearly every Sunday for 12 hours during enrollment | Hacker News Reader

Healthcare.gov going offline nearly every Sunday for 12 hours during enrollment

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78 pointssmpetrey34 comments

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I'm British, so bare with me with these questions..

Do people have any time between the 43 days of availability to pick their planned coverage plan?

That sounds fair?

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Political Comments:

I've tried to keep up to speed with the numerous Reddit threads[1], but from my understanding, even if the GOP are trying to sabotage the signup, this is just par for the course when it comes to GOP tactics to get their own way... but surely people can plan accordingly and still sign up?

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Tech Comments:

12 hours maintenance, every single weekend?! What the heck.. are they literally pulling out tape disks from production servers? None of this adds up.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/71w94m/heathcareg...

This is not an insurmountable obstacle, but it will make it harder for many people, and anything that makes it harder will result in fewer people actually signing up.

Right. Why not 7pm to 7am Tuesdays and Thursdays? Even if this maintenance is somehow necessary and would take that long they seem to have chosen one of the most inopportune times to do it.

I was reading through some of the Twitter outrage, and the only comment alleging significance of that particular time period that stuck out to me was: it coincides with many religious organizations typical gathering times. It would be interesting to see the enrollment numbers/day&hour from previous years. I know there are a lot of churches/faith based organizations that offer volunteers to help people with enrollment.

Yeah, some historical data would really help show how much impact this can be expected to have.

I guess if churches are organized enough to be helping people sign up, they will be organized enough to do it at noon. Doesn't make any sense to disrupt them doing it earlier though.

Just like voting lines and shutting down polling stations, it's all about tilting the numbers in their favor. Modus operandi for the GOP.

I used to do development for a company with mainly government clients. The director of Operations (devops), had a policy of taking down the site every week for "maintenance" because it makes the customers trust you more.

It's like the story of the janitors that were too good: the executives decide that the office is clean enough, so they cut the budget and then everythings a mess... that's just how bureaucracy works at the high level.

> Do people have any time between the 43 days of availability to pick their planned coverage plan?

Not sure I fully understand the question, but there are many exceptions to the open enrollment period. You can re-enroll if you change jobs, get married, have a child, move, lose your insurance, or a few other situations. Medicaid and CHIP are open all year long, as is short term health insurance.

Why is there an enrollment period at all? Why can't you enroll any time during the year? This limitation makes no sense.

It's one of the things that attempts to ensure that people don't forego insurance while healthy and only buy it once they get sick. You have to prevent that behavior if you want to also allow sick people to sign up without massive expense.

Sounds more like an argument for why we should move to single payer, because then the idea of random expenses from sick people signing up goes away, as we'll all have health coverage anyways.

There are plenty of eligible people that don't sign up for Medicaid. Single payer won't just hand wave away administrative problems.

Numerous people eligible for medicaid don't sign up because they try to and get turned away with some bullshit excuse about not filing the paperwork properly or whatever, either due to innocent bureaucratic bullshit or because the state is explicitly hostile towards government assistance.

With single payer, people wouldn't have to sign up; they would be signed up and have to opt out of they so chose. That's how it should work and it's not hand-wavy in the least.

I agree, but with the system as it stands now, that’s why this particular aspect exists.

Or we just avoid this whole mess and go universal healthcare and stop treating health as a luxury.

But that would massacre the thousands of middlemen companies making a profit off the inefficiencies of this current govt-subsidizies-private-industry system.

Or we just avoid this whole mess and create a free market in health care.

Unfortunately that doesn’t fix the mess of sick people dying of easily treated diseases because they don’t have enough money.

Do you have any examples? Which people, which diseases, and who denied them care?

Google “death due to lack of health insurance” for numerous examples.

If you want some specific ones here, consider a diabetic who can’t afford insulin, or someone with cancer who can’t pay for treatment.

If we’re talking about a true free market where ERs can turn people away, then it could be something simple like having a heart attack while you’re out and forgot your insurance card at home, or being mugged, beaten, and left for dead.

I did.

"death due to lack of health insurance"

4 results.

I'm not trying to be pedantic, but I think it is important to ground this broader discussion in actual specifics. I keep hearing all these insane stories of people dying on the streets, which simply doesn't reflect anybody's lived experience.

Of course that's not to say there aren't significant real problems, but the discussion is so hyperbolic and far from reality that it's almost not worth having. This problem underlies both the "universal health care" and the free market absolutists. They're both selling different versions of utopia, which don't exist.

You kept the quotes on the search phrase and ignored everything else I wrote? You’re not arguing in good faith here.

Oh brother. I didn't ignore everything else you wrote. You presented hypotheticals and I explained how we need fewer hypotheticals and more grounding in reality.

Exactly. Free market would turn it into care only for the wealthy while the poor die at home.

Even the wealthy should worry about such a world, since you never know when you might end up in the ER with no papers.

Anything that can be prevented at a cost. Anything that seems like a less serious illness that wouldn't be worth missing a rent payment over.

You can get emergency care and just not pay for it if you can't afford it. You can't get preventative care if you can't afford it.

I'd like to see people that advocate for this do it in a straightforward way and start by advocating for the repeal of EMTALA.

It doesn't make any sense to legally require stabilizing care and then do nothing to get people to participate on the pay side.

It really is telling that there is essentially zero advocacy for repealing EMTALA.

Same reason that they don't want to cover pre-existing conditions. If you're young and healthy, you could forego insurance entirely until you got sick and then sign up. Or you could sign up for the cheapest plan and then flip to the most generous if you found out that you were pregnant.

It prevents people from waiting to enroll until they're sick.

In case you were in any doubt as to whether this government had the interests of its citizens at heart.

I can tell you covered California is just as bad if not worse. The user experience is appalling. My tax dollars at work outsourced.

The system is awful (design, resiliency, referential consistency), but the telephone help staff has been surprisingly first-rate in my experience.

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