Healthcare.gov website, another anecdote for the pile
My first account, which I started back in October, never managed to get out of "pending verification" limbo, so I started a second account last night. Took about 20 minutes, worked like a charm. I can definitely see why there are reports of "large numbers of accounts, much fewer enrollments" since, given the various options, we are definitely going to take some time to decide.
Overall, it looks like my spouse and I will be paying a little bit more than the estimate we got from the healthsherpa.com tool, which suggested we'd be paying less than we are now. We currently pay a combined total of around 1K a month for separate policies from different companies due to quirks in eligibility for various policies the last time we shopped for insurance (we are self-employed). So, I can see where the lack of finer age categories for healthsherpa.com can produce inaccurate results.
That said, both of our current policies are shot through with exclusions due to the fact that we both went for stints without any health insurance before buying what we could a couple of years ago. So, on balance, while we are going to go from around 1K a month to around 1.3K a month, what we will be getting for our money will be coverage that is a boatload better than what we already have. But to make a final decision, we have to do some thinking about what we want to trade off in terms of deductibles, co-pays, prescription benefits and so on. That's a much better situation than where we were before which was, "can we get anything at all".
But, as far as the website issues go, it worked like a charm. Coincidentally, though, today I got a call back from my support inquiry of a couple of weeks ago about the first account I had opened, and told them that it didn't matter anymore. So it also looks as if they are catching up on the backlog of support issues with older accounts.
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