Saturday, November 30, 2013

How a few geeks showed the government how to build a website.

One of the biggest problems with the healthcare.gov site has been the fact that folks need to sign-up, sign-in and fill out a long form before they can view the healthcare plans available. The complete failure of anyone involved in the government project to understand how to create a website is beyond belief. After spending more than $640 million taxpayer dollars we are still stuck with a flaming pile of dog excrement.
Of course the job could have been done better by someone with some true website savvy and a little bit of common sense. I am sure more than one computer geek out there has thought to themselves that they could have done a better job. It turns out that if you were one of those thinking those thoughts, you were absolutely right. You see, a few guys in California decided to do just that. Attention Kathleen Sibelius, someone has gone ahead and built a site that does what your government site should have done.
The folks who built the healthsherpa.com website did it in a matter of months not years. Sure it doesn’t have all the state exchange information on it (yet), but it does work for anyone normally using healthcare.gov. It gives you information on all the plans and the subsidies you may qualify for. In short, it shows you what you need to know, without requiring any personal information, before deciding on a healthcare plan. I tried the site using a zip code in a state where the Federal exchange site would be required and I got my information in about 30 seconds or less. It took only a few minutes to find a  plan and choose one. It appears that if you don’t qualify for any subsidies that you can just click the links and buy your insurance. I am not 100% certain that is the case because I didn’t go as far as purchasing a plan. If however that is the case, then you can avoid using the security hole riddled healthcare.gov website and you need not give the feds all your personal data. I intend to check on that with the website operators but even if you do have to use the healthcare.gov site in the end you would already be done with your shopping.
If you want to see how badly you are going to get screwed by the new Obamacare law I highly suggest you do your shopping on healthsherpa.com today. Then patiently wait for those morons in Washington, DC to fix the aforementioned flaming pile of dog excrement known as healthcare.gov.
I still recommend that no one use healthcare.gov for anything until such time as a third-party security firm checks the website front to back for security holes. I can’t imagine giving so many different agencies my personal information all through one transaction without a guarantee of proper security and a statement from the government telling me exactly how long and by who my data will remain stored.
You may now return to your regularly scheduled surfing.
Tim
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