Archive: Opinions

When the Obama administration launched the Affordable Care Act he got a lot of flak about an enrollment Web site that was non-functional. Theoretically that problem has subsided, and individual states have their own sites now.  But how functional are they?  I watched as one marketplace health care recipient attempt to renew his coverage for 2015, which he wanted to be the same as his 2014 coverage.  It wasn't pretty.

It started when a letter came in the mail, saying that a renewal notice had arrived.  A few days later it showed up in his email inbox with links to the New York State Of Health site.  It said a message is waiting in his inbox.

The links didn't work, but that is probably just as well.  For safety's sake you should never click on links in an email.  Instead you should manually go to the site in your browser, and log in secure in knowing you have not been directed to a malware site.

But when you go to the site there is no place to log in.  The site is geared toward new users, and there is a big button that says 'Get Started'.  If you are already enrolled for this year, presumably you already got started, so it is not obvious that you should click this button.  But you should.

The resulting page has an "Returning Users Click Here to Log In" place.  Most sites would just have a place to enter your username and password here, but you have to click again, and that gets you into the site.  But logging in is complicated -- the first link takes you to a State login for which the health site is only one service and it returns you to the home page.  Then there is another place to actually log into your account, and when you click to log in -- you are already logged in.Because you just logged in.  (Don't ask me to explain this.)  Or not.  Logging in may take you to your account at that point.  In any event, we reached the page with the inbox.

And we thought -- success!  Because finally there was an Inbox link.  Clicking it brought up a list of four messages, all named Template099 or Notice004.  There is no other subject line to hint at what they might be about.  Clicking on one initiates a download of a file of the same name, with no file extension.  The file is unreadable in a text editor, and it is not at all clear what the file actually is.

I Googled the problem and found a woman on Twitter who was trying to get a NYStateOfHealth person to say whether the file was actually a PDF file.  She was not getting a straight answer, but I thought it was worth a shot, so we renamed the file to Template0003.pdf (or whatever the template number was).  After doing that, voila!  It actually did load in readable form.

So let's review: a letter comes in postal mail saying an email that didn't come had come.  When the email came the links didn't work.  It said there was a new message and you have to log in to see it.

After 15 minutes of not being able to log into someplace where there was an Inbox we finally found it, but the messages were downloadable files with no file extension that would make the appropriate file reader load.  After two tries (and a visit to Twitter, of all things!) we could finally see the message.

Half way down the page the message began, "If you want to keep your present health plan for the next year and the information on your application is still accurate, here’s good news! We’ve re-enrolled you in your current health plan for another year and you don’t have to do anything more."

People who qualify for purchasing insurance on the exchange are grateful for the opportunity to do so -- if they're not they are ungrateful wretches, because it makes a huge difference in their lives to be able to obtain health insurance at, by today's standards, incredibly great rates.

When I was writing software my maxim was, 'If a computer CAN do something, the computer SHOULD do it.'  That meant designing software for human beings, putting things where they would expect to look for them, and making information available without making them do something extra.  If I had a feature that took three clicks I looked for a way to do it in two.  If it had two clicks I tried to find a way to do it in one.  Computers are only productivity tools if programmers make them that way.

But government is government, so nothing gets by without gratuitous complications.  A postal letter referring to an email that referred to a message you had to log in and download and rename the file to read just to say 'don't do anything'.  'Don't do anything!'  They couldn't have just said that in the first letter?

25 minutes of a citizen's life that he'll never get back.  That's government for you.

v10i43