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Many More Glitches in O'care Sign-Up
 The federal health-care exchange that opened a dozen days ago is marred by snags beyond the widely publicized computer gridlock that has thwarted Americans trying to buy a health plan. Insurers sometimes cant tell who their new customers are because of a separate set of computer defects.I know you computer dweebs at the 'Burg are shocked. I'll try to break the news gently. The problems stem from a feature of the online marketplaces computer system that is designed to send each insurer a daily report listing people who have just enrolled. According to several insurance industry officials, the reports are sometimes confusing and duplicative. In some cases, they show correctly or not that the same person enrolled and canceled several times on a single day. Prolly thought they were voting. The flawed enrollment reports illustrate that the site is bedeviled by problems that go beyond what the Obama administration has acknowledged in explaining the creaky performance of the exchange so far. At the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services, officials have portrayed the exchange as a victim of its own popularity, Bad specs, designed to fail, no one understood clogging the I/O, or they really expected just a few folks to sing up for the free stuff? Evidence is emerging from the insurance industry and elsewhere, however, that the exchange also has flaws that show up further along in the process as consumers try to check whether they qualify for federal subsidies and as insurers try to find out who has enrolled. "Its a glitch that . . . needs to be fixed, said a spokesman for the plan, who, like most insurers interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing the Obama administration Whoa! THAT'S dumb! Starting Thursday, a new tool points consumers more directly to a list of the health plans in their community and sample prices. Before, this information was on the site only in an Excel spreadsheet that was hard to find and to understand. Like an 'overview'? Brilliant! Obama administration officials insisted that this was not a major change to the Web site, because consumers still need to create an account to find out about subsidies and the specific costs of various health plans for people their age. 279,487,328 minor tweaks, but no "major" changes, thank gawd!  One insurance industry official familiar with the daily reports said that they rely on relatively old technology. Rather than transmitting a file whenever a consumer enrolls, the reports are sent to each insurance carrier in a daily batch at 6 p.m.How mainframe! Also, the reports contain a stack for each consumer, so that if a person picks a health plan, then retypes his or her phone number, two reports are generated. Withouta time stamp. So maybe the unenrolled first, then enrolled? The confusion begins with the screen that lets them create a user name. It asks users to Choose a user name that is 6-74 characters long and must contain a lowercase or capital letter, a number, or one of these symbols _.@/-. It has been unclear to some whether they need a letter plus a number or symbol, or whether letters or numbers or symbols are sufficient. Some consumers are discovering they cannot erase profiles they created by mistake, while others are encountering error messages telling them that profiles they created do not exist. Still others find that when they click on a button to move to another screen, they cannot tell whether the system is stuck or simply slow, because the site does not show them an hourglass or any other sign that a step is underway. GOTTA be designed to fail!  James Turner, a software engineer from Derry, N.H., said he has spent seven hours since Oct. 2 trying to enroll but keeps encountering issues that make have made it impossible for him to complete the application. Turner, 51, one of a number of software engineers who have written online critiques of the system, said the most infuriating one involves his wife. According to the system, he said, I have four spouses. He said it has been impossible to delete the phantom family members from his profile.But he's only a software engineer, not a never-been-employed typical enrollee. Some Americans, however, are managing to enroll. Norbert Crabtree, 46, an accounting consultant in South Carolina, logged on to healthcare.gov at 4:30 a.m. Tuesday and finished enrolling about 90 minutes later. The main hitch, he said, was that they were asking me security questions about a street I lived on 20 years ago. I got that wrong and got kicked out once. That's interesting. Just exactly what else do you need to tell them to enroll? Posted by: Bobby 2013-10-12 |
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