Week Later, Signing Up for ObamaCare Still Impossible

While my conscience will not allow me to actually sign up for ObamaCare, I am curious about what the process will be like and am even more interested in what my health insurance costs will be. Rather than jump in on day one, I waited a week after the launch to give it a test drive. Incredibly, a full week after the launch, I still can’t set up an account much less get anywhere near the point where quotes would be made available.

Yesterday, I tried four times to set up an account and this is as far as I got:

The most frustrating part is that the site doesn’t save any of your information. Each time to you try to create an account, you have start all over entering your name, email address, and answering three secret questions.

Today I tried again. It was even worse. I was told I had an account, but couldn’t sign into it. So, I tried to set up a new account all over again and again got the same error screen.

This whole process reminds me of when I first went online back in 1996 when signing up for accounts with online vendors at the time was a nightmare process.

The White House spin that customer demand is the problem makes absolutely no sense. If all 7 million people who need to sign up for ObamaCare on year one (to make it a success) wanted to sign up on day one, the government could have been ready. Plenty of websites can handle that kind of traffic without crashing for a full week.

Via twitter, I asked CNN’s Jake Tapper and NBC’s Chuck Todd what the baseline enrollment numbers need to be in order to make ObamaCare work. They told me that according to the CBO, 7 million Americans need to enroll on year one. Todd dug a little further and said that 3 million of those need to be healthy people under 35.

That might sound like a lot of people, but 7 million during this six-month enrollment period works out to fewer than 40,000 a day — nationwide.

If those few don’t sign up, the White House sure won’t be able to blame their website, no matter how awful it is.