A healthcare cost website that works has been completed by three individuals that aren’t on the government payroll. It works and they didn’t charge taxpayers a dime. They named it, TheHealthSherpa.com.
Different figures have been given as to the cost of the Healthcare.gov website. Though the actual figure has yet to be revealed, most estimates range from $93 million to as much as $643 million. Even considering the low end of these estimates, it was money wasted. From day 1 the website had problems. Simply put, it didn’t work. Now it has been revealed that personal information from people who were successful in registering has been hacked. The website wasn’t beta tested, nor was it adequately secured with protection of private information.
The website is a joke among those of us who do coding and build websites. On the tech forums I frequent, the discussions began about how much better many of us could have done in building a website that would have worked and how we would have loved to have been paid just $10 million. Most of us believe that we could have pocketed $9.9 million for ourselves, spending most of the remaining $100,000 throwing a party. What little was left would have been used to build a better website.
It doesn’t cost anywhere near what the government spent building that poor excuse for a healthcare website. Websites are “built” using coding – spending time at a computer and typing in computer language to create commands that makes a website appear as you want it to, and to work as it should.
Now comes, TheHealthSherpa.com, the website HealthCare.gov should have been.
Three young men, George Kalogeropoulos, Ning Liang, and Michael Wasser saw the problems with the government’s website and decided they could build a health care enrollment website better than the government and, no surprise, they had it accomplished in only a few short weeks. Also not surprising, it didn’t cost them anywhere near $100,000, let alone, $93-$643 million.
The Health Sherpa makes it ridiculously easy for anyone to compare health care plans covered under Obamacare in 34 states. (They left out the 16 states with existing marketplace sites, though those states may be coming, if those states allow them access to the pricing data needed.) Their baby is a simple, beautiful, remarkably responsive website that anyone could use.
Here are step-by-step instructions to using the Health Sherpa.
1) Type in your zip code to see if your state qualifies for their help. (Pennsylvania qualifies)
If it doesn’t work, you’ll get message similar to this California notice:
If Health Sherpa does support your state’s health care plans, proceed to step two.
2) Pick your plan.
There are different options to choose from on the left side of your screen. When you select the different options, the corresponding plans will immediately sort themselves by price on the left side. There’s almost no loading time between changing your options and the plans adjusting. Once you’re figured out which plan you want, proceed to step three.
3) Follow their instructions.
They’ve provided detailed instructions about how to purchase each plan included on the site.
Because the site isn’t the government’s website you can’t sign up directly from the Health Sherpa.You must go to the provider’s website, or make a phone call to them. That’s still a lot easier than using the government website. The Health Sherpa will adjust for any taxes or subsidies for which you could qualify, so make sure to double check your eligibility before signing up for any specific plans.
It’s easy, quick, and it works.
Perhaps it might be time to ask exactly how much the problematic government website cost us and where all the money went, because it obviously wasn’t spent toward paying people who knew what they were doing.
What is known, is that CGI Federal Inc, the company that created large parts of the error-plagued government healthcare website, which it says it is scrambling to fix, has recently been awarded several other government contracts.
Since Healthcare.gov launched on Oct. 1, government officials have signed at least five different agreements with CGI totaling $7 million, according to USASpending.gov, a government website that lists government contracts.
Disclaimer: On January 4, 2016, the owner of WestEastonPA.com began serving on the West Easton Council following an election. Postings and all content found on this website are the opinions of Matthew A. Dees and may not necessarily represent the opinion of the governing body for The Borough of West Easton.
