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Comment by meshko | Hacker News Reader

Not even going to click to find out how stupid people are. Did they implement integration with data streams from hundreds of national insurance companies? Didn't think so.

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Your point may be valid, but you put it so maliciously that I winced when I read it. Smart but malicious comments are the worst thing about HN. They are like dioxins where stupidity is mere sewage. PG has written about implementing a comment filtering mechanism. I hope he does and that it will catch stuff like this.

I don't mean to pick on you; it's just a cumulative reaction, plus it happened to be the first thing I read this morning. I agree that back-end integration is likely orders of magnitude harder than UI for a system of this nature.

You are right. I was a little too annoyed.

It is stunning just how much a lack of education and expertise went into this. This says nothing about HIPA, security, scaling, data source integration. It's staggering how much misinformation this PR stunt is going to cause.

Their site doesn't ask for any data except your zip code then forwards you on. Where does HIPA come into play?

HIPAA is not implicated in the new health insurance marketplace. HIPAA protects personal medical information, and under the Affordable Care Act, you cannot be asked any personal health information on any insurance portals because insurers are required to cover any pre-existing conditions.

HIPAA covers far more than privacy.

Now now now. They're only 20 but "have plenty of experience working at places like Twitter and Microsoft." Surely they \cough\ know what they're doing.

They dodged the hardest issues and politics by piggy-backing on the actual site to obtain the data. So you cannot really say that they did what the government contractors were unable to do.

But without a doubt they eliminated all of the cruft and whittled the site down to exactly what consumers want. I want the ACA to succeed and would love to see some variation of this "quick lookup" on the official site. The government would be wise to pay it some attention.

To say they have completely replaced healthcare.gov would be stupid, but have the developers said that? I went and had a look at thehealthsherpa vs healthcare.gov. The people how made thehealthsherpa don't seem stupid to me - in fact they've identified the main pain point with the healthcare.gov website for the user, and tried to do something about it. The experience was as follows:

http://www.thehealthsherpa.com/

Enter your zip

Look at a list of plans with filters for my info.

Click one of the plans for info and get a phone no

I didn't have to fill in some long forms, I got straight to the info which counts without giving out any identifiable info.

https://www.healthcare.gov

Click on see plans now - this leads to a page of info with no plans information - great! Hit back.

Go back to home and click 'apply online'

Choose a state - read some info on the problems with this state

Click another apply online button

Click 'get started' to really get started this time!

Am confronted with a form asking for all my personal details, I stopped here.

Now of course that doesn't mean they have replaced healthcare.gov, or done in two weeks what all those developers working for the gov took $400m, but I'd say they've delivered something which is more valuable because it delivers what people actually want - a quick set of choices about healthcare for their specific area, and contact details for the same. It's a good summary of a complicated situation, presumably based on lots of the hard work done for healthcare.gov (assume they scraped the data).

You're not going to sign up for a plan without verifying costs anyway (by phone or on the providers website), so providing a quick summary with contact info is really all they need. I'm not convinced the apply online side of obamacare is actually helpful...

In the UK and quite a few other countries, this monthly insurance cost comes out of taxes and we don't choose an insurer, I think I prefer that single-payer solution.

The original healthcare.gov allowed for as they call it "window shopping", but a decree from the White House less than 2 months before launch demanded they change it to require a signup.

edit: fixed time period

I also want to be an informed citizen, and "how much does it really cost" is an obvious question that anybody might be inclined to ask. In my view, knowing the magnitude of the numbers should help provide a reference point for political debate.

From one of the comments, below

> should help provide a reference point for political debate

So the official healthcare.gov is by design then.

Most Uninsured Americans Ignoring Health Exchange Sites Three in 10 are familiar with the exchanges
November 8, 2013

Eighteen percent of uninsured Americans have attempted to visit a healthcare exchange website. The percentage is slightly higher, 22%, among uninsured Americans who plan to get insurance through the exchanges.

____________________

== Working like a charm.

This is probably because a lot of them lack internet. Our internet penetration is around 75%. Medical insurance is 85%. I suspect there's a lot of overlap between the un-internetted and un-insured.

So, under this theory universal healthcare is impossible if it relies on the internet for adoption? Hmmm...

Single-payer wouldn't have had this problem, because you wouldn't have needed to sign up for anything ...

They didn't build a healthcare.gov clone, but a useful site that can give people much of the information they need. It looks like a very good MVP, and it's absolutely clear that they didn't try to brag how easy it is to build healthcare.gov, but actually tried to help people until the gov site is fixed.

It is a beautiful and commendable project.

I don't understand how it can help if it is just a facade on top the healthcare.gov. Creating alternative sites like this can only create confusion for average users. I don't know their motivation, but the reporting definitely as an undertone of "look, all these professionals couldn't do it for millions of dollars, and 3 kids did it in a week for free".

Of course not, the big government contracts did all that work, and they just sip it off from the top of healthcare.gov.

That said, they definitely did improve upon the government's front-end/implementation.

But ... but ... CSS3 transitions and WebGL surely are worth more than domain expertise!

What is that supposed to mean? Did you even look at the site?

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