Shopping the ObamaCare exchanges - a testimony to perseverance.

Having no use for ObamaCare or spending hours waiting for a computer program that doesn’t work, I was interested in the comments on another site that explained that you can’t really “shop” for insurance in the ObamaCare system. Not in the way people usually think of shopping, which means going to several stores, or sites, checking for the best prices. Instead, what other have found is that you have to provide all your personal information, basically going through the entire process of signing up before you can find out about the plans, what they offer and what they cost.

For people who are accustomed to doing their comparison shopping on the internet for travel and at sites like Amazon for everything else, this is going to turn people off even if it begins to work without computer problems. As I said, this is not personal experience so I stand to be corrected by people who have bent over and taken it in the ... gone through the process.

Here are some comments from an article by Megan McArdle at Bloomberg.com

ath716 6 hours ago

I actually managed to login today. It turns out the inside of the website is just as glitchy as the outside. Got partway through step 2, then stuck.

The surpising thing to me is that is appears you have to submit a signed, complete coverage application just to get price quotes. No window shopping, like you could on ehealthinsurance. That's probably going to turn off marginal customers.

JLawsonin reply to ath716 5 hours ago

I was able to get to a point where it asked for my SSAN. At that point, I said... hold on there. I'm looking for PRICES - and that's got nothing to do with it. I should be able to plug in age, gender and state and get prices.

Yancey Wardin reply to JLawson 5 hours ago

Yes, within the exchange itself there really should be the option to get a quote on age, gender, and state alone. You can do the calculations outside the exchange (or so I have been told), but who is to say they are even valid?

Yancey Wardin reply to ath716 6 hours ago

I have not gotten that far, but I have read other accounts of the same thing, and, yes, it will definitely turn people off almost immediately. The cynic in me thinks there is an ulterior motive for this lack of transparency on the policies for which you are applying.

ath716in reply to Yancey Ward 5 hours ago

There are all kinds of design problems. I started an individual application to see if I could get a quick quote. But it turns out you still have to enter information on the rest of your household. Then it got stuck there. But you can't back up and change it to a family application. You can't start a second application. You can't delete a old application and start a new one. Those aren't coding problems, the features aren't there.

Yancey Ward 6 hours ago

Day 8 Update:

Well, it looks like my success at creating an account yesterday on the federal exchange isn't a success. I tried logging in 10 times yesterday only to get error messages. This morning, it claims the userid or the password was incorrect. So I clicked the "forgot password" button, put in the userid, and they sent an e-mail to reset the password (which demonstrates the userid was correct). I clicked the link in the e-mail, and got the following message: "We weren't able to process your request because we couldn't find a Marketplace profile that matched the information that you provided".

So, tell me, if they couldn't find a profile that matched, then how did they send me the e-mail in the first place?

Clusterf*&K of epic proportions, and getting worse by the day.

Yancey Wardin reply to Yancey Ward 6 hours ago

Have tried two additional times to login and then taken the "forgot password" option. Same error message when clicking the link e-mailed back to me. In any case, I know 100% certain the password I entered the first time was correct since I had actually written it down yesterday.