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posted by n1 on Sunday April 06 2014, @10:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the sign-this-form-and-we-can-cure-the-hemorrhage-with-a-money-extraction dept.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) open enrollment period for US Soylentis has ended. The website was plagued by problems from its launch and even had issues on the the last day.

So, did any Soylentis actually use healthcare.gov to sign up and how has your experience been with the Obamacare system so far?

For those that don't know, from Wikipedia:

The ACA was enacted with the goals of increasing the quality and affordability of health insurance, lowering the uninsured rate by expanding public and private insurance coverage, and reducing the costs of healthcare for individuals and the government. It introduced a number of mechanisms - including mandates, subsidies, and insurance exchanges - meant to increase coverage and affordability. The law also requires insurance companies to cover all applicants within new minimum standards and offer the same rates regardless of pre-existing conditions or sex. Additional reforms aimed to reduce costs and improve healthcare outcomes by shifting the system towards quality over quantity through increased competition, regulation, and incentives to streamline the delivery of healthcare. The Congressional Budget Office projected that the ACA will lower both future deficits and Medicare spending.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday April 06 2014, @12:54PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 06 2014, @12:54PM (#27047)

    Something I've never understood about how websites supposedly save money, is in your example, the cost of providing service via website is in excess of 5K per signup for only one year.

    Yet, if they used foreign call center drones, that means you could hire a call center drone for an entire year per signup. You'd have a personal butler for an entire year doing nothing but processing your signup. Of course a real drone could handle more than a case per year. Lets be generous and give them an entire day per case. That would only save 30000% percent of the website cost although it leaves a lot on the table for later scheduled performance target increases.

    Or, I've had work done with local lawyers (admittedly nothing complicated or stressful) and you can write a heck of a lot of sales contracts and wills and handle the execution of a will (is that the right term?) for $5K. So it would appear to be cheaper to just hire a lawyer and sue the companies until they provide service.

    Yeah yeah, I know, the whole point of the websites is massive .gov contractor corruption and all that, so its a feature if it costs a quarter billion not a bug.

    Still if they just went all medieval DMV style on them it, would be almost infinitely cheaper.

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