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There is a lack of information here to correctly apportion blame between the government and the contractor here. While the general goals are certainly technica

There is a lack of information here to correctly apportion blame between the government and the contractor here. While the general goals are certainly technically achievable, there are 44,000 pages of regulations generated from the affordable care act, in addition to the over 1,000 pages in the law itself. Just to dig through that and pull out everything related to insurance policy offering is going to take some serious time. In addition, each state has unique health care laws and regulations regarding the offer of insurance in that state. However, the biggest problem I have heard of is simply stupid requirements from the government. Rather than have an open market where an individual insurance customer or any curious person could look at all of the products and prices, they make you verify your identity first. Why would they do this? They were afraid that people would get sticker shock from looking at insurance prices that didn't include the money they would be getting from taxpayers to defray the cost. This lack of trust in us has caused a lack of trust in their system. It would seem that one thing that independent developers that want to help out could do would be to extract all of the useful data from the site. Gather all of the data about the plans and the pricing, and then make that available in a static searchable, filterable, browsable fashion without having to log in. Then, once people were able to do that, they could then go through the arduous identity verification process to qualify for a subsidy and get one of the plans. If it takes to long to crawl it out of the system, maybe you should file a FOIA request? Once you get a basic information system up and running, and ad funded, you could then hook it up to connect you to the live site.

throwaway420 13y ago
> they make you verify your identity first. Why would they do this? They were afraid that people would get sticker shock from looking at insurance prices that didn't include the money they would be getting from taxpayers to defray the cost. There are subsidy calculators out there that ask a few basic questions about income levels and you can get this information without requiring somebody's exact identity. The cynic in me suggests that this system was specifically designed to get somebody's identity because at some point this information is going to get funneled directly to the IRS with the goal of going after and hassling people who still can't afford healthcare.
caseysoftware 13y ago
"While the general goals are certainly technically achievable, there are 44,000 pages of regulations generated from the affordable care act, in addition to the over 1,000 pages in the law itself. Just to dig through that and pull out everything related to insurance policy offering is going to take some serious time. In addition, each state has unique health care laws and regulations regarding the offer of insurance in that state." And don't forget that the "law" has changed literally every single week via policy changes from HHS. I was a government contractor for years and found it miserable enough.. but our milestones and requirements weren't constantly changing. I feel sorry for some of these guys.
vinhboy 13y ago
Whenever it comes to anything to do with the government, I hear the "44,000 pages of regulations" excuse all the time. But even if that was the case, there is no excuse for not having an adequate architecture to at least let people register for an account. It just seems like common sense to me that if someone gave me a 44K page rule book on how to build a site that serves millions of people, the first thing I would worry about is how to, at the bare minimum, get people through the door. We can't keep letting them get away with the 44K pages of regulation bullshit excuse.

throwaway420 13y ago

> they make you verify your identity first. Why would they do this? They were afraid that people would get sticker shock from looking at insurance prices that didn't include the money they would be getting from taxpayers to defray the cost. There are subsidy calculators out there that ask a few basic questions about income levels and you can get this information without requiring somebody's exact identity. The cynic in me suggests that this system was specifically designed to get somebody's identity because at some point this information is going to get funneled directly to the IRS with the goal of going after and hassling people who still can't afford healthcare.

caseysoftware 13y ago

"While the general goals are certainly technically achievable, there are 44,000 pages of regulations generated from the affordable care act, in addition to the over 1,000 pages in the law itself. Just to dig through that and pull out everything related to insurance policy offering is going to take some serious time. In addition, each state has unique health care laws and regulations regarding the offer of insurance in that state." And don't forget that the "law" has changed literally every single week via policy changes from HHS. I was a government contractor for years and found it miserable enough.. but our milestones and requirements weren't constantly changing. I feel sorry for some of these guys.

vinhboy 13y ago

Whenever it comes to anything to do with the government, I hear the "44,000 pages of regulations" excuse all the time. But even if that was the case, there is no excuse for not having an adequate architecture to at least let people register for an account. It just seems like common sense to me that if someone gave me a 44K page rule book on how to build a site that serves millions of people, the first thing I would worry about is how to, at the bare minimum, get people through the door. We can't keep letting them get away with the 44K pages of regulation bullshit excuse.