<p>LOL, oh busdriver. I shall not explain, promise 
</p>
<p>I will give an update though if I ever get through to BCBS.</p>
<p>Please do give the update. I wonder what the secret is to getting through. I think there were a few on this forum that didn’t have problems, unlike the majority of everyone else out there. There’s got to be some good intel on how to make contact.</p>
<p>Michigan is all sorts of screwed up. I have no idea whether the system is the fault of the state or the national government- no clue! I know my friends in some other states aren’t having nearly the same issues we are. </p>
<p>This isn’t the first time I’ve had issues with BCBS. Their system has been down several times before. This is also the same company that had a rep ask ME what a “religious exemption” was when I called to ask if my plan covered Implanon. However, they’re the lesser of all available evils when it comes to insurance companies. </p>
<p>My fiance HATES talking on the phone and I told him that he needed to call to sign up. He started fake-whining and I told him that it was either call them or we’re moving to Germany (which seems easier at this point than dealing with insurance). He started speaking German (and then I remembered, oh yeah, he’s 75% German… it’d probably be like “home” to him). -.-</p>
<p>Good one, romani. You’d better come up with a more unappealing threat. Such as, we’re moving to Zimbabwe, how about that health care! Or you could just do what I do, call for him and when they insist on talking to him, give him the phone, let him whine and give you permission to talk for him. Of course, in my family, this works both ways.</p>
<p>LOL. For whatever reason, Germany was just the first one that popped in to my head. But he’s one of those eternal optimists so he’ll quickly think of the perfect reason to move to Zimbabwe, too. </p>
<p>I can’t wait until we’re legally married and I can just do things on his behalf. Life will be so much easier…?</p>
<p>Oh, I didn’t even think of the insurance changes we’ll have to make when we get married. Yippie, skippie -.-</p>
<p>Well, if you change your mind about him, I do have two unmarried sons. You never know.</p>
<p>Noted 
…</p>
<p>If you move to Germany you won’t have to deal with all of this health care mess. You’d get insurance via a Krankenkasse, paying a set percentage of your wages - see: [Structure</a> of the German Health Care System : AICGS](<a href=“http://www.aicgs.org/issue/structure-of-the-german-health-care-system/]Structure”>http://www.aicgs.org/issue/structure-of-the-german-health-care-system/) - so it’s kind of like buying via an exchange, only in Germany, their system works.</p>
<p>Agree that you could call with him beside you and speak with them and have him speak with them and authorize them to talk to you and also have him sign a written authorization as soon as he signs up with someone so you can use the form of that company. That’s how H & I handle a lot of things. He gets very agitated dealing with paperwork and bureaucracies, but I’m OK with it.</p>
<p>Romani, I too know how dysfunctional the folks on the phone can be at BSBC in Mi…but unless they were wrong about this too, your income needs to be at 16k to be subsidy eligible. Since there’s no harm in ths case to estimate optimistically given the stakes, when you call, use $17k as an estimate.</p>
<p>Part of MI’s mess up was its failure to extend Medicare until spring due to house shenanigans…so you got gapped!</p>
<p>Re: healthSherpa…I too thought it was cool and laughed out loud when I stumbled across it…but likely should have cried…I laughed that three twenty-something’s could make a simple, elegant front end where same seemed to elude the folks who sucked down in the neighborhood of 400 billon :)</p>
<p>But in fairness, the Health Sherpa guys weren’t trying to call and verify data from a patchwork mess of legacy governmental-silo agency databases. And of course, they didn’t have bureaucrats for clients :)</p>
<p>Personally, I think there’s been a bit of misinformation about how difficult this s/w project really was for the healthcare.gov people. I say that because this is my wheelhouse, so to speak. I’ve been in program management and software architecture for large scale projects for some time now. Ironically, the one area where I have an enormous amount of expertise is in designing an architecture for a system that must combine data for disparate databases.</p>
<p>I suspect, like kmcmom13, that the issue was more in having bureaucrats for clients than anything else. Additionally, with the number of subcontractors, etc on this project, there seemed to be no one cohesive plan and/or standards they wrote to for this site. We have some truly outstanding software engineers and architects in our industry in the US but I am pretty sure none of them were working on this site.</p>
<p>If the backend is as bad as I hear it is, I have serious doubts about that end of November drop dead date. I wonder what this will mean for all of us that need to get new insurance come January 1?</p>
<p>southbel - you won’t believe how many here (posting on this thread) work in the software industry and have ideas about what should have been done with that site.</p>
<p>
I bet! It’s really making all of us in the industry shake our heads and when we hear the reasons and excuses, that makes it even worse. Really, if they send someone out to the media to explain the problems, they should likely pick someone who can understand the difference between an app server and a dB server (or even the fundamental basics of software engineering). Just saying!</p>
<p>Kmc, fpl is 11xxx. Why would I use 17k?</p>
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</p>
<p>Its not like we’re just showing up and saying 'oh my code would have worked". </p>
<p>When they came up with a project plan that has less than weeks of testing the thing was already sunk. They were planning to fail. As soon as that project plan came out in January, Oct 1 was never a plausible date, and it was incompetent to still plan for it. </p>
<p>Even if Jeffrey Zients does gets this working by end of November target, that still means there should have been at least 2 months of integration testing in the plan. </p>
<p>No big deal as long as it works eventually? I dont think so. There is no reason to believe that SPI being entered now is secure.</p>
<p>argbargy - I agree. Plus, seeing as they’re dealing with PII and being such a prominent ‘target’ site, they should have been doing some pretty heavy pen testing. I bet money they never did that because they didn’t even have robust integration testing.</p>
<p>Based on what I’m seeing and hearing, this is not a simple session problem like they first claimed. This is a fundamental architecture problem. The initial traffic, while decent, was not even in the realm of super large scale. Thus far, I’ve heard them blame cast on server capacity (which I think they meant as simultaneous sessions), dB connectivity, and basic code bugs. I say it’s much worse than that. I think their app server and dB servers aren’t even talking to one another at all. That’s not good for a dB intensive site!</p>
<p>Time will tell but I would be shocked if they pull it off and even if they do, it’s still going to be buggy as heck.</p>
<p>What do you computer experts think of the security issues? I’m reading that with so much personal information not really protected it’s going to be a target of identity thieves. I heard a man on the radio saying that he got the personal information of a stranger emailed to him. Fortunately, the recipient was an honest man and notified his Congressman and the other man involved.</p>
<p>I think it will be an enormous issue. PII is Personal Identification Information. Anytime I’ve dealt with a system that had PII, we had to ensure there were extra security precautions we must take against SQL injection attacks and the like. Here’s the thing, it’s not just about the app server (front end of the website) that is the target. That’s the old school way of hacking. Now, they go after the database servers themselves. </p>
<p>They should be encrypting the databases. They should have the database servers behind a firewall which creates a logical separation between the app server and the database servers. They should have a separate DMZ for the database servers. The problem is I can’t tell you if they did these things or not. I must say I have my doubts on several of these points. I’m not a security expert but I know enough to know these basics. FYI - if you kids like STEM, tell them to get into cybersecurity. HUGE demand for that job.</p>
<p>I am betting they didn’t encrypt the data and if they can’t even associate the right user to the right records, that’s not speaking well for them. Since I don’t need subsidies, I’m sticking to contacting the insurance companies independently.</p>
<p>Okay, they want (need) people to sign up on this site. If everyone who doesn’t get subsidies avoids it like the plague won’t this be a problem? It does seem a little crazy to force solidly middle class working people into taking taxpayer funds to make something they were happily purchasing a month ago affordable under the new law.</p>