As a small business owner, I turn out to be one of those people who doesn’t get to keep the health insurance I like. We got the letter from our provider yesterday, advising us to go right to the New York State site thus avoiding the healthcare.gov train wreck. Unfortunately, mystateofhealth.ny.gov isn’t much better. I tried to register about 30 times each time getting the message that my session had expired as soon as I hit the “submit” button. It didn’t help that I had to get over a check of my preferred username to be sure no one else had it, and answer a particularly hard to read Captcha. Why in the world would they think bots would be trying to set up health accounts?
My wife had better luck today and got a good way through the application before the website went down. There were two drop-down menus at different points, one to identify our current health carrier and the other to identify our auto insurance provider (not sure why they need this info). And here’s the thing: the menu listings were in random order, vs. alphabetical. There were easily 100 health carriers and even more auto insurers so you just have to scroll back and forth till you find the one you’re looking for, and I bet there are lots of mistaken choices. My wife was able to find our health insurer. But when it got to auto insurance she scrolled and scrolled, back and forth, and finally realized our carrier (USAA) wasn’t on the list. So she put down “none” because that was the best choice available. Doesn’t exactly help the state exchange with the actuarial part.
Where do they get the people who code these sites? Isn’t there any kind of darwinism in government that rewards people who strive harder to do a good job? I know a lot of you will say “what a stupid question” but I really do try to have faith that people entrusted to help other people will take that responsibility seriously. So this is discouraging, and I hope we don’t get sick before we get insurance.