Kurt Mitman | Obama-Doesn’t-Care

The clock was about to strike midnight. My boyfriend and I were lounging in bed — we were about to do something we never thought we’d do together. After months of prep, lots of waiting and a ton of research, it was going to be our first time…

…signing up for government health care.

Although the government would be shutting down when the exchanges opened, we figured that as the hallmark program of the Obama administration, it would still get off without a (major) hitch.

It appeared to be working great, until we got to the part where we had to select security questions.

Uh-oh. The question drop-down menus wouldn’t populate. We entered in answers anyway and clicked next.

We waited. And waited. And waited.

Then we got the error message. We tried a few more times and got the same result. We then tried the online chat. I facetiously asked: “If the government is shut down, why are you working?” My question went unanswered — apparently there wasn’t anyone on the other side of the chat bubble. Finally, we gave up and went to sleep.

On Monday, I decided to give it another try. I clicked the “Create Account” button. Nothing. I reloaded the page. Clicked the button. Nothing. I tried accessing the login page through different navigation. Clicked the button. Nothing.

OK, I thought, the government is always several years behind on technology — maybe they didn’t think to test their site in Chrome to make sure it worked. I tried Safari. Same problem. Then I tried Firefox. No dice.

Well, maybe the problem was that I was using Mac OS. I hopped over onto my Windows computer and tried again. I went through Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer. Same result. I gave my iPad and iPhone a try. Nothing.

Then I thought, maybe my previous efforts at setting up a username were successful. Granted, I had forgotten what I had chosen as a username. So I clicked the “Forgot your username?” button. The site returned an error that the “Username” field is required when clicking the “Forgot your username?” button. For added humor I put in what I thought my username had been, and then clicked “Forgot your password?” And, you guessed it, a password is required.

As a last ditch effort, I asked my officemate, who’s running a Linux box, whether I could try creating an account on his computer. Voila! It worked. It’s great to know that the healthcare.gov site is working for the massive 1.6 percent of the population that is running Linux.

Now I would be able to create an account, start filling out my profile and look for health insurance options. I clicked on the link in my email asking me to verify my account and then proceeded to sign in. And then … nothing. I was greeted with a blank page. I clicked the healthcare.gov link at the top, which proceeded to sign me out and take me back to the homepage (have the federal government web designers not heard of cookies?).

The administration reported that the website is getting better. Page load times are down to one second from eight, and pages only fail to load two percent of the time, which would have been really impressive in 1994.

Yes, there are millions of people trying to access the website, but that’s just a server capacity issue. In terms of the complexity in what’s being offered, I’m sure the number of options are less than a standard mom and pop e-tailer. Since those sites work pretty damn well, you’d think the government could put something like that together. Obama’s campaign team certainly could.

At first I thought that perhaps the government shutdown contributed to the morass, and that in a potential masterstroke, the Republicans were able to further sour the public on Obamacare. But no, it appears that the administration is just inept.

As of now, I still haven’t been able to sign up. As a graduate student, I think I’d be able to buy cheaper insurance through an exchange than the $2,800 Penn Student Insurance Plan … that is, if the government could just get its act together.

Kurt Mitman is a 7th-year doctoral student from McLean, Va. His email address is kurt.mitman@gmail.com. Follow him @SorryToBeKurt. “Sorry To Be Kurt” usually appears every Friday.

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