President Obama said that glitches in the healthcare.gov website would be fixed by November 30. Now that that deadline has passed, we wanted to check back in to see how the website was running.
I tried to apply for coverage on October 1, the day the marketplace opened, which didn't work.
Though I checked back several times in the last two months, there were still a lot of glitches. I tried accessing my old application yesterday, and still there were problems. The website hung when I was trying to choose the amount of tax credit I apply toward my coverage.
Let's start over, shall we?
NPR reported that a lot of people who weren't able to shop for coverage are now able to because of a "reset button."
The website also has another new function that will come as a relief to a lot of people who have suffered through repeated problems until now -- an actual reset button. Although on the website it's called "remove." "That could be an option for some individuals who would simply prefer to start over in the process now that it is running much more smoothly," Julie Bataille, spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told reporters in a conference call Tuesday. "Essentially they can click a 'remove' button in order to get rid of their old application and something they may have been having a problem with, and then they would be able to go and create a new application."
This morning, it worked.
The only way I could actually enroll in a plan was to clear my first application and reapply for coverage, just as Bataille suggested.
To reapply, I had to reenter all of my tax and employment information, which took about 20 minutes.
Once I applied, I could enroll in one of the five health care plans: Catastrophic, Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum.
It was fairly simple to see what each plan would cost me on a month-to-month basis, and the website also allowed me to compare several plans.
So two months later, we have success.
-- Lucy Perkins, Michigan Radio Newsroom
