Skip to main content

Obamacare website outage forces uninsured to use 1800s technology

barack obama personal twitter account news cell phone facebook
Image used with permission by copyright holder

A week after launch, the primary Obamacare health insurance exchange website continues to suffer from performance issues that prevent uninsured Americans from purchasing healthcare coverage online. Instead, visitors to Healthcare.gov are met with a message that recommends they revert to calling customer service agents on the phone, a technology that has been around since the 1870s.

“In a hurry?,” reads a message on the website’s failed login page. “You might be able to apply faster at our Marketplace call center. Call 1-800-318-2596 to talk with one of our trained representatives about applying over the phone.”

Recommended Videos

Of course, the telephone workaround suggestion only serves as a reminder of just how broken the current system is. Were the site working properly, users of Healthcare.gov would be able to quickly and easily compare insurance plans and premiums side-by-side online. Now, they have to talk on the phone and write all the details down, like some sort of barbarian.

Healthcare.gov’s significant glitches stem from “design and software problems,” reports the Wall Street Journal, which rendered the site all but useless due to a faulty software infrastructure that rendered it unable to handle a massive influx of traffic that appears to have persisted since it first went live on October 1.

Some users report being unable to create an account on Healthcare.gov, while others have encountered drop down menus that fail to properly load. Those who were able to log in to the site were often unable to complete the enrollment process.

Administrators of Healthcare.gov took down key portions of the site during the early hours of Saturday, Sunday, and Monday in an attempt to fix the site’s woes. They didn’t work, apparently, as all of our attempts to sign into the exchange failed, as of Monday afternoon.

When it actually works (which, at the moment, is almost never), Healthcare.gov serves as the online health insurance shopping portal for 36 states. Fourteen states and Washington D.C. operate their own portals. Some of the state portals, including Connecticut and Kentucky’s, have successfully handled enrollees. Other states’ online insurance exchanges, like Maryland and New York, have suffered similar glitches to the federal site.

Bad as Healthcare.gov’s problems are, the problem is not yet an urgent one. Insurance purchased through the exchanges does not go into effect until January 2014, and payments are not due until December. So if stooping to a phone call isn’t your thing, just keep reloading the site – it’s bound to work eventually. We think.

Andrew Couts
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Features Editor for Digital Trends, Andrew Couts covers a wide swath of consumer technology topics, with particular focus on…
PayPal vs. Venmo vs. Cash App vs. Apple Cash: which app should you use?
PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, and Apple Wallet apps on an iPhone.

We’re getting closer every day to an entirely cashless society. While some folks may still carry around a few bucks for emergencies, electronic payments are accepted nearly everywhere, and as mobile wallets expand, even traditional credit and debit cards are starting to fall by the wayside.

That means many of us are past the days of tossing a few bills onto the table to pay our share of a restaurant tab or slipping our pal a couple of bucks to help them out. Now, even those things are more easily doable from our smartphones than our physical wallets.

Read more
How to change margins in Google Docs
Laptop Working from Home

When you create a document in Google Docs, you may need to adjust the space between the edge of the page and the content --- the margins. For instance, many professors have requirements for the margin sizes you must use for college papers.

You can easily change the left, right, top, and bottom margins in Google Docs and have a few different ways to do it.

Read more
What is Microsoft Teams? How to use the collaboration app
A close-up of someone using Microsoft Teams on a laptop for a videoconference.

Online team collaboration is the new norm as companies spread their workforce across the globe. Gone are the days of primarily relying on group emails, as teams can now work together in real time using an instant chat-style interface, no matter where they are.

Using Microsoft Teams affords video conferencing, real-time discussions, document sharing and editing, and more for companies and corporations. It's one of many collaboration tools designed to bring company workers together in an online space. It’s not designed for communicating with family and friends, but for colleagues and clients.

Read more