Cross-posted from the archived Media Trackers Ohio site.
The second day of registration for the Obamacare “Health Insurance Marketplace” in Ohio brought a new waiting screen and a new error making it impossible to complete the mandatory application for federally-approved, federally-subsidized health insurance.
After sitting through an updated “We have a lot of visitors on the site right now” screen for five minutes, I was able to complete the three account creation forms listed at HealthCare.gov as the first of four steps to getting coverage through Ohio’s Obamacare exchange.
I was able to complete the forms — but was not able to create an account.
“Your account could not be created at this time,” read the vague Obamacare error message I received at 7:57 AM in Google Chrome on Windows 7.
Late yesterday morning when I attempted to create an Obamacare account at HealthCare.gov, I could not do so because of buggy dropdown boxes on the third of three account creation forms.
Across the country, Americans have experienced the same technical issues with what should be the simplest part of the Obamacare exchanges. In many cases, would-be registrants have waited far longer before hitting a brick wall in the account creation process.
“It’s probably good that the exchange wasn’t working, though,” wrote Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) Research Director Jonathan Ingram at The Federalist. “According to the website, I can’t even look at the options available to me unless I apply for coverage, first.”
“That means I can’t even see what plans are offered on the exchange without handing over all kinds of personal information: my Social Security number, tax return and income information, the policy numbers of my current plan, etc,” Ingram explained.
He continued, “Or I could just go to eHealth.com, enter my birthday and zip code, and get a list of 81 plans currently available to me in under 60 seconds.”
Socialized medicine advocates, whose confidence in government yields to nothing, have blamed crippling bugs in the Obamacare exchange registration process on the law’s popularity.
In addition to basic programming errors in the most public-facing web forms for an extremely complex web application, the user experience at HealthCare.gov indicates a lack of web development best practices.
As I noted yesterday, the three Obamacare exchange account creation forms do not store session variables, which means users must reenter field data any time they use a “BACK” button at the bottom of any form.
On Step 3 of the account creation form, registrants must choose three unique security questions from a list of only ten options. Not exactly user-friendly.
The error page I hit today after completing the Step 3 form includes instructions to “provide distinct answers to the chosen security questions.” This is something any entry-level programmer would know to address in error handling on the Step 3 form, not as a footnote to a generic error message on a separate screen.
None of this affirms the federal government’s ability to manage the health insurance accounts and private data of millions of Americans.