Health Insurance Marketplace, Affordable Care Act Live | Hacker News Reader

Health Insurance Marketplace, Affordable Care Act Live

healthcare.gov

20 pointscodegeek13 comments

There are many things broken on this site right now, mostly due to entirely predictable load issues. But my favorite one is the note at the top: "Don't enter any letters with special characters, like accents, tildes, etc." This after a page with a picture of a happy smiling asian grandma whose entire name probably consists of such characters.

Also it seems that even the US government uses regexps to (mis)validate email addresses. Would have thought they'd have a copy of RFC822 someplace..

Just to be clear, we already have a health insurance marketplace. This is a new government-mandated health insurance exchange.

The question is: after a few years of ACA, will the private health insurance marketplace still exist?

we better hope so.

the next drive is to stop companies from self insuring which is a large number.

Its not like recent attempts at large government programs have gone over so well.

Well, the last time a government tried to create an artificial market, it ended in disaster. Years ago, California tried to create an energy marketplace. This of course led to rolling blackouts, widespread abuse, bankruptcy of a Fortune 500 company, and the state signing overpriced long term energy contracts.

I believe these exchanges will fail. You can't add a whole slew of new policy requirements and then expect the prices to go down. But then, the goal of the exchanges is to make the prices go up, justifying the complete takeover of the healthcare system by the government.

I can't get any rates to come up, every option I've tried for small businesses just shows:

This dataset is currently private.

The login page doesn't load.

Whatever the reason - overwhelming user load, system error, political brinksmanship - do we really want a healthcare system susceptible to single-point-of-failure?

It loaded for me. Extrapolating a judgement for an entire system from the first public day of a high-traffic rollout of a website seems a bit premature.

Describing the login page of the exchange as a 'single point of failure' for the entire healthcare system seems a bit harsh. It's not like hospitals everywhere say "Oops, login page is down, shutdown the ICU - we're goin' home"

Any & all of it is subject to the whims of partisan politics, and we're seeing that on Day 1.

Why oh why does the big green button open a new tab... who thought that is a good idea?

Been borked all day for me, except for a short time I tried it at 5:30am.

Ruby is not web scale. Period.

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