Healthcare.gov going offline nearly every Sunday for 12 hours during enrollment

[chrisacky]

I'm British, so bare with me with these questions..

Do people have any time between the 43 days of availability to pick their planned coverage plan?

That sounds fair?

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Political Comments:

I've tried to keep up to speed with the numerous Reddit threads[1], but from my understanding, even if the GOP are trying to sabotage the signup, this is just par for the course when it comes to GOP tactics to get their own way... but surely people can plan accordingly and still sign up?

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Tech Comments:

12 hours maintenance, every single weekend?! What the heck.. are they literally pulling out tape disks from production servers? None of this adds up.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/71w94m/heathcareg...

[mikeash]

This is not an insurmountable obstacle, but it will make it harder for many people, and anything that makes it harder will result in fewer people actually signing up.

[andrew-lucker]

I used to do development for a company with mainly government clients. The director of Operations (devops), had a policy of taking down the site every week for "maintenance" because it makes the customers trust you more.

It's like the story of the janitors that were too good: the executives decide that the office is clean enough, so they cut the budget and then everythings a mess... that's just how bureaucracy works at the high level.

[gok]

> Do people have any time between the 43 days of availability to pick their planned coverage plan?

Not sure I fully understand the question, but there are many exceptions to the open enrollment period. You can re-enroll if you change jobs, get married, have a child, move, lose your insurance, or a few other situations. Medicaid and CHIP are open all year long, as is short term health insurance.

[RandomInteger4]

Why is there an enrollment period at all? Why can't you enroll any time during the year? This limitation makes no sense.

[mikeash]

It's one of the things that attempts to ensure that people don't forego insurance while healthy and only buy it once they get sick. You have to prevent that behavior if you want to also allow sick people to sign up without massive expense.

[mikeyouse]

Same reason that they don't want to cover pre-existing conditions. If you're young and healthy, you could forego insurance entirely until you got sick and then sign up. Or you could sign up for the cheapest plan and then flip to the most generous if you found out that you were pregnant.

[arcticfox]

It prevents people from waiting to enroll until they're sick.

[moomin]

In case you were in any doubt as to whether this government had the interests of its citizens at heart.

[nodesocket]

I can tell you covered California is just as bad if not worse. The user experience is appalling. My tax dollars at work outsourced.

[DrScump]

The system is awful (design, resiliency, referential consistency), but the telephone help staff has been surprisingly first-rate in my experience.

[dang]

We've asked you several times to stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or breaking the site rules. We eventually ban accounts that keep doing this, so would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not do it any more?