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Healthcare.gov going offline nearly every Sunday for 12 hours during enrollment
- moomin 9y agoIn case you were in any doubt as to whether this government had the interests of its citizens at heart.
- nether 9y agoThis will save trillions. MAGA
- dang 9y agoWe've asked you several times to stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or breaking the site rules. We eventually ban accounts that keep doing this, so would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not do it any more?
- RandomInteger4 9y agoWhy is there an enrollment period at all? Why can't you enroll any time during the year? This limitation makes no sense.
- arcticfox 9y agoIt prevents people from waiting to enroll until they're sick.
- mikeyouse 9y agoSame reason that they don't want to cover pre-existing conditions. If you're young and healthy, you could forego insurance entirely until you got sick and then sign up. Or you could sign up for the cheapest plan and then flip to the most generous if you found out that you were pregnant.
- mikeash 9y agoIt's one of the things that attempts to ensure that people don't forego insurance while healthy and only buy it once they get sick. You have to prevent that behavior if you want to also allow sick people to sign up without massive expense.
- dawnerd 9y agoOr we just avoid this whole mess and go universal healthcare and stop treating health as a luxury.
- RandVal30142 9y agoBut that would massacre the thousands of middlemen companies making a profit off the inefficiencies of this current govt-subsidizies-private-industry system.
- leifaffles 9y agoOr we just avoid this whole mess and create a free market in health care.
- maxerickson 9y agoI'd like to see people that advocate for this do it in a straightforward way and start by advocating for the repeal of EMTALA. It doesn't make any sense to legally require stabilizing care and then do nothing to get people to participate on the pay side.
- mikeash 9y agoIt really is telling that there is essentially zero advocacy for repealing EMTALA.
- mikeash 9y agoUnfortunately that doesn’t fix the mess of sick people dying of easily treated diseases because they don’t have enough money.
- chrisacky 9y agoI'm British, so bare with me with these questions.. Do people have any time between the 43 days of availability to pick their planned coverage plan? That sounds fair? ------ Political Comments: I've tried to keep up to speed with the numerous Reddit threads[1], but from my understanding, even if the GOP are trying to sabotage the signup, this is just par for the course when it comes to GOP tactics to get their own way... but surely people can plan accordingly and still sign up? ------ Tech Comments: 12 hours maintenance, every single weekend?! What the heck.. are they literally pulling out tape disks from production servers? None of this adds up. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/71w94m/heathcaregov_to_go_down_for_maintenance_during/ https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/71w94m/heathcareg...
- mikeash 9y agoThis is not an insurmountable obstacle, but it will make it harder for many people, and anything that makes it harder will result in fewer people actually signing up.
- MBCook 9y agoRight. Why not 7pm to 7am Tuesdays and Thursdays? Even if this maintenance is somehow necessary and would take that long they seem to have chosen one of the most inopportune times to do it.
- drewmol 9y agoI was reading through some of the Twitter outrage, and the only comment alleging significance of that particular time period that stuck out to me was: it coincides with many religious organizations typical gathering times. It would be interesting to see the enrollment numbers/day&hour from previous years. I know there are a lot of churches/faith based organizations that offer volunteers to help people with enrollment.
- maxerickson 9y agoYeah, some historical data would really help show how much impact this can be expected to have. I guess if churches are organized enough to be helping people sign up, they will be organized enough to do it at noon. Doesn't make any sense to disrupt them doing it earlier though.
- tiggybear 9y agoThis reminds me of my student loan servicer, they don't take any online payments on Saturday or Sunday even if your payment is due on Saturday or Sunday. After several fuck-ups, I now pay my student loan 4 days early every month in case my due date falls on the weekend. It's super fucked and the only reason it's designed like that is to take advantage of people. Yay.
- nodesocket 9y agoI can tell you covered California is just as bad if not worse. The user experience is appalling. My tax dollars at work outsourced.
- DrScump 9y agoThe system is awful (design, resiliency, referential consistency), but the telephone help staff has been surprisingly first-rate in my experience.