Kevin Drum predicted that healthcare.gov would work fine by November 1. For that Sullivan gives him an award named for Dick Morris, the wrongest pundit not named Kristol in the known universe.
Is the site still a disaster? I suppose that a crazy person could subject himself to the eight hundredth hour of Darrell Issa searching for a nut, or you could log on to the website today and see how it works. I chose option two. Here is what I found: everything seems pretty snappy. I registered an account, answered a bunch of questions and shopped for plans without any delays or major bugs getting in my way. Having always lived with employer coverage I cannot say whether the plans are an especially good deal for my exact category of consumer, but I could definitely live with the options I found.
The site does have annoying bug where your only way to go forward is to click on a non-functioning big green button. That would potentially be a game-ender, but each time that happened I fixed it by reloading the page. Basically, setting aside one non-fatal bug and the final application submission, which I skipped because I like my work plan, healthcare.gov works fine. Please feel free to share any recent experiences, especially bad ones, in the comments.
Joel
The website issues seem pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. The people who need the exchange the most will be using the internet the least. Time to invoke Sayre’s law here.
Comrade Jake
It hasn’t been Sully’s finest moment. I think he was calling for Sebelius’ head within a day or two of the roll-out.
Don’t worry about fixing the problems, just fix the blame, because that always makes sense.
Mullah DougJ
Even the liberal Kevin Drum.
Jesus, what a wankfest it is over at Sully’s.
Mullah DougJ
@Comrade Jake:
He’s a raging misogynist.
JMG
The line between passionate advocacy and hysteric emoting is a fine one, which Sullivan often crosses.
Comrade Jake
@Mullah DougJ:
Well, except for Thatcher. She was DA BOMB!
Comrade Jake
@JMG: No shit. Boy was he in hysterics for a month plus after Obama’s first debate with Romney. I think he may have single-handedly generated a million page clicks for Nate Silver.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Comrade Jake: I think Sullivan has disproportionate influence in the Beltway, kinda like Morning Joe. His screeching about Obama’s Lie! has spread like wildfire, or at least like a fart in a small church.
OT: A shooter in a terminal at LAX. pretty sure the TV said a man managed to get a rifle to a check point (somebody said past security, but they’re walking that back to we don’t know) and started firing. Sounds like they too the guy out, but they’re hedging everything. “It’s over, is the best information we have”
NonyNony
@Comrade Jake:
Thatcher was an honorary man as far as Tories are concerned.
Tim F.
@Mullah DougJ: I think it is more basic than that. Sullivan has no patience. He latches on to stuff like the Iranian revolution with about half a second of reflection and seems to change the color of his website daily based on who is throwing stones at whom in the streets of what. He admires Obama and yet the thing that makes Obama so effective, his long view, patience and ability to trust his judgment over the daily dramarama at Politico and Drudge, are so alien to Sullivan that they might as well be the head-popping power from Scanners.
Elizabelle
Politico link, but it’s actually helpful:
Todd Purdum on The Obamacare Sabotage Campaign.
It’s literally worse and more comprehensive than I thought.
Some of these people need to be in jail. (Looking at you, Darrell Issa, with your subpoenas meant to delay and deny public health services by tying up providers with garbage requests.)
Todd Purdum is a Vanity Fair correspondent, formerly with the NY Times, and married to former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers.
(PS: found link on BJ comment on A Laurie’s 3% New Yorker story link below)
muricafukyea
Jesus titty fucking christ. You speak of Sully as if he knows wtf he is talking about. I mean just look at his record of failsauce for christs sakes! Why in the world does anyone with half a brain give a flying fuck what Sully thinks?!
Omnes Omnibus
@Comrade Jake: He is a Tory. Thatcher was the face of the Tory Party from 1975 until 1990. Or from the time Sullivan was 11 until he was 27 – his politically formative years. He had to accept her.
Elizabelle
When you think about all the healthcare Andrew Sullivan consumes, and the science behind it, you have to wonder why he craps all over Obama trying to level the playing field for American citizens.
Andrew Sullivan is sometimes good, sometimes awful. At least he likes dogs.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Tim F.: I think your point– he has a hair trigger and is always one click away from running screaming down the streets of the Village naked and smeared with beagle poop, in the deathless phrasing of Betty Cracker– is more relevant to this immediate discussion, but he is a misogynist with that one notable exception, which is like Republicans saying they’re not racist because of Michael Steele, Herman Cain, Ben Carson….
Gypsy Howell
I got tired of waiting to get through identity verification – I’ve been waiting for the promised verification email after I finally got my drivers license uploaded two weeks ago.
So I just started completely over a couple days ago. Got myself a new gmail email address, and opened a new account under a slight name variation for my account id. It worked perfectly. I was looking at plans within about 10 minutes. However, I haven’t actually applied for one yet – I’m still mulling my options – soi don’t know how smoothly that part functions yet. But I would say from my experience this week that Kevin was correct: the website is up and running pretty smoothly.
And man, am I going to be saving a shitload of money next year, even with no subsidies!!
Elizabelle
It was Xantar who put up the Politico link about the Obamacare sabotage campaign.
https://balloon-juice.com/2013/11/01/three-percent-more-aca-wonkery/#comment-4694913
srv
We really haven’t covered Sully enough this last month. I was starting to think there was something seriously wrong with this blog.
kd bart
Those who want to shutdown down Obamacare over some website technical glitches are the same group who are willing to pour billions and billions more into developing a missile defense system despite numerous test failures and a reduce need for it.
Hill Dweller
Wingnuts on the DC Circuit strike again:
KG
@Tim F.: you’re mostly right about Sullivan having no (or little) patience. I’ve been reading him for probably a decade plus now, and he does jump quickly on issues. But he’s also shown the ability, especially lately when he gets push back from readers, to reconsider his snap judgments. While I’d prefer more people to have some semblance of prudence in their political leanings, I’ll settle for people being willing to reconsider prior statements or conclusions. He’s not perfect, and can be annoying on occasion (hello, blogsphere), but I don’t get why people get so annoyed with him – he’s not the party hack that Hewitt is nor the personification of the wingularity that Malkin or Gellar are.
chauncey1186
I completed our family’s enrollment last night and even paid the initial premium online. Happy days! Now after 10 years of “patchwork” healthcare and little to no insurance coverage, I can breath a little easier.
Incidentally, I chair a Coalition of agencies, providers, non-profits etc in our county that started gathering in August to try and come up with a countywide plan to help folks get enrolled, and push back on some of the misinformation about the ACA. We just launched a website with local information and links to state and national ACA “stuff”, http://www.healthyallegancounty.org It’s a work in progess but we got it launched in less than 6 weeks. We are also planning a series of community forum events around the county.
One of the big bugaboos among the “nervous” folks in the group was the worry that sending folks to healthcare.gov when it’s not working would reflect poorly on the Coalition and the partner organizations. Many a heated discussion was had over doing something versus doing nothing. Thankfully, the “we have to do something” crowd won out!
I sent out an email this morning letting the Coalition know about my success with enrollment and that it looked like the site was doing fine. Not a peep out of the naysayers. Now…..as you all may be interested to know, my county is in Fred Upton’s District. I had contacted his office when we started meeting inviting him to attend the meetings. His aide has been promising to send someone ever since. No one has showed, surprise, surprise, but they wanted to remain on the email list for the Coalition and be kept informed. I have to say, I had a huge smirk on my face when hitting that “send” button knowing full well, that not only was his office going to hear about a local success story with healthcare.gov, but that the responses from our Coalition show that we are now more energized than ever to make sure this works for the 15,000 uninsured people in the county. Sucks to be on the wrong side of history, doesn’t it?!
raven
They are setting up a triage area, that shit ain’t good.
chopper
at this point most all of sully’s blog is just smugly handing out pretend sarcastic awards to other people.
Napoleon
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Thanks buddy – I just spit out some M&M peanuts I was eating when I read that.
Elizabelle
@KG:
Yeah, Sully prides himself on his blog being a place to think out loud.
But at least, on a lot of issues, he is thinking. And he can learn, sometimes, and he’s been very honest about recanting once he’s changed his mind.
The even “thinking”, which first requires “listening”, puts him way ahead of others in the “mocked” class.
Quaker in a Basement
Wait, you actually went to the site and tried it? Can you do that? If so, what’s the point of checking in with the seven million shouty gasbags wailing about it?
pharniel
Good gods that man is an ass.
Sorry – In a bit of a crunch with ‘hot projects’ landing around me like incoming arty so nothing constructive to add.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@KG: maybe it’s the Irish in me, I’ve got grudges that go back to my childhood, but having been called a decadent fifth columnist because I saw George W Bush and the Iraq War for what they were a long time before he did, I reserve the right to mock Sullivan at every given moment. You’re right that he’s willing to engage and change his mind, but he ought to learn a little patience and even moreso a little humility given his track record.
As to the “Oh god, why are we talking about him AGAIN?”, I think he has an outsize influence in our political discourse. The network morning shows were all quoting him after the first debate, and I’d be willing to bet the vast majority of their audiences had and have little idea who Andrew Sullivan is.
Xantar
@Elizabelle:
Thanks for the hat tip. Pretty amazing that somebody actually wrote that at Politico, isn’t it?
Dee Loralei
@Hill Dweller: I read that over at Benen’s place. Jesus Christ those people are horrid. And this is exactly why the Senate Repugs are doing their damnest to make sure none of Obama’s appointments to the D.C. circuit get through! Fuckers! If this ruling doesn’t force Harry Reid’s hand with respect to the nuclear option, I’m gonna personally go to D.C. and kick him in the shins! Both of them!
Botsplainer
The passengers at LAX clearly needed to be armed. The only answer to more guns is more guns.
Hill Dweller
@Dee Loralei: This is a radical ruling. They’re essentially saying an employer can basically do anything as long as they use religious freedom as the rationale.
Breezeblock
Here in NJ, I am still unable to access the site.
Elizabelle
@Xantar:
Thank you for bringing the story to my attention, although my blood pressure is up.
I think Purdum was guesting, but good on Politibloviate for publishing the story.
Elizabelle
@Hill Dweller:
Are they setting up a higher court challenge?
The Dangerman
@Botsplainer:
Only the passengers that are Good Guys; the Bad Guys, not so much.
Traffic near LAX is never that good; now, don’t even think about it. 405 will be a joke.
Tractarian
I consider myself a rational, practical liberal. Scrupulously fact-based. I do not subscribe to conspiracy theories, as a rule.
And yet, I can’t help but feel – despite the total lack of evidence – that there is nefarious intent behind the website failures. The entire machinery behind GOP big-business politics has made it clear that they will do anything, up to and including shutting down the federal government and risking national default, to make Obamacare a failure.
What better way to do that than to make the website (engineered by private entities) a failure?
It just doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to suggest that there were a few moles that intentionally wrecked this thing for political gain. Call it a conspiracy theory, but it’s damn rational if you ask me.
Mullah DougJ
@Tim F.:
The dude hates women, Hillary, Sarah Palin (understandably but he takes it a little too far), Sebelius, all of them except the Iron Lady.
Hill Dweller
@Elizabelle: It’s going to the Supreme Court, but do you trust the 5 wingnuts?
bemused
Today is lucky ducky day for people on SNAP. I watched 3 segments of Fox “The Great Food Stamp Binge” special from August and just cannot stomach watching the other 3 right now. Fox and the producers of this are soulless monsters.
danimal
I saw the Sullivan post and did the exact same thing. I registered and started poking around the site. It loaded quickly, the pages worked as designed and I encountered no problems. I didn’t go too far because I am currently insured and don’t live in a state that uses healthcare.gov, but I believe the bulk of the website troubles are resolved (or will be within a week or two).
I think it’s time to get out of the defensive crouch, Dems.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Hill Dweller: The judiciary of the United States of America is now more Catholic than the Pope.
If I believed in the afterlife, I’d imagine Jefferson and Madison weeping.
El Tiburon
@Joel: The website issues seem pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.
El Tiburon
How about this: we turn the entire shitting match over to Amazon.
Aunt Kathy
@KG: Yeah, I’ll dissent, too. As an actual Dish subscriber (don’t you dare judge me), I’ll acknowledge his knee-jerk emotional reactions to a lot of things. During the whole Iran election thing I kept muttering, “Come on, sweet pea, calm down now.”
But he doesn’t want the ACA to fall on it’s face. He is still rooting for Obama. I think the point of Drum’s award is to spotlight what all the fortune-telling the punditry engages in, whether they are “our guys” or not. If Kevin Drum isn’t doing the website coding himself, then he actually knows about as much as you and I do. Which is s**t. Sorry, guy’s gotta eat his hat.
Sullivan’s take on the website seems to be close to mine: If you say you’re gonna do something, then, goddammit, do it. Don’t be half-assed about it. I love Obama, but his managemt skills aren’t what they could be. I saw on the news today that he is now getting daily briefings at the end of each day about what specifically got fixed that day, the status of other fixes, etc. Too bad he wasn’t doing that over the past 6 months.
drkrick
@Elizabelle: This one from the article ought to leave a mark:
Kay
@chauncey1186:
Good for you. That’s amazing.
Belafon
@Aunt Kathy: Because, normally, by the time the CEO of a corporation is getting daily reports on software fixes, the entire application is fucked and a whole lot of people will be fired when it’s over. The software in this case is special, and it’s development environment – politics – is not what you would want to be developing anything under.
I think the government picked the wrong company, and this company should never be allowed to develop for the government for a long time, but this doesn’t say much about Obama’s management skills.
Bill Arnold
@Elizabelle:
The most anger-inducing (at least for me) aspect of this sort of sabotage is that it is done with complete and justified expectation of plausible deniability because our press mostly (a) sucks or (b) is flat out in the right-wing camp.
Hill Dweller
@Belafon: Having to set up 36 state exchanges certainly didn’t help matters.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
For those who missed it, my similar experiments with heathcare.gov were posted here and here on October 26. The hang at the green Continue button seemed to me to be related to cookies or something – something on the client side anyway (but who knows whether it is really some Ajax issue or something more complicated). It’s not hard to get around if you’re willing to experiment a little.
I do think they’re fixing it – dunno whether they’ll make the end of the month deadline for having it “fixed” well enough that haters won’t complain about it though. :-/
At least it took Benghazi!!11 out of the news for a while, eh?
Cheers,
Scott.
me
I’ve tried a dozen times and every time it gives me an error telling me to call the 800 number after the final form submit. So, if you were trying on the federal healthcare.gov site and not one of the state specific site, you probably should have tried that.
Edit: Here’s what that looks like.
catclub
@drkrick: I suspect that if some of them did read that, they would say: “Hey, looks like we’re getting our mojo back.”
catclub
@Bill Arnold: “plausible deniability ”
Nope, plausible deniability assumes you will be asked. They have not been asked by the press.
Bill Arnold
FWIW, I tried the NYState site, as leg work to try to talk my stepson into getting insurance, so we’re not exposed (through parental guilt) if he needs lots of health care. Worked fine. One glitch; I gave a wrong digit in my social security # the first time. It allowed it, but a later check prevented continuing registration, and the ss # was not editable. Had to register again. No performance issues, plans look good and there are a lot of them.
Belafon
@Hill Dweller: Yes. To your point: This isn’t even your normal political climate, with, as the Politico article points out, the Republicans doing everything they can to sabotage the ACA.
jonas
@Botsplainer: I know I won’t feel safe until we have conceal/carry allowed in all airports and on every aircraft.
Stella B
@El Tiburon: you aren’t the first person that I’ve heard suggest Amazon. Twenty years ago, when Amazon was first starting out as “a bookseller”, their site used to crash all the time and they didn’t have to interface with a metric crapload of dissimilar systems. Twenty years from now healthcare.gov will be fine too. A better analogy would be to point to a complex start up that worked great right out of the gate. I can’t think of one myself….
I wish that Apple would fix IOS 7 and MSNBC would fix Benen’s site, too.
Elizabelle
@drkrick:
Yes. Brown vs. the Board of Education and Massive Resistance are ancient history to many now, (and to many others, not known), but talk about being on the wrong side of history.
And that is what the Democrats should push back with: the wrong side of history. It’s true, and anyone who’s not a Rush Limbaugh devotee or terminally stupid (yeah, that might be the same Venn diagram) can see that.
Keith
@Tim F.: @KG: I’d beg to differ, somewhat. Sullivan has infinite patience, with his own quickly determined positions. Let us not forget the long journalistic slog to nail fown the precise time for breach of the Palin amnion at 30,000 feet – all with the goal of proving (?) that a mentally baked Alaskan was not the mother of a Downs’ syndrome child.
Gin & Tonic
@Belafon: I think the government picked the wrong company
I mentioned this a few days ago, but at my place of work we were involved in a pretty large project which we sort of inherited from (contracted with, but not by choice, actually) CGI, the prime contractor for healthcare.gov. Once we swallowed the scope of the thing, without getting into a lot of details, our technical leads and development managers worked their butts off to get CGI out of the picture as soon as practicable. We had little confidence in the quality of their work. Anecdata, I know, but that’s my one and only exposure to that company.
matt
andrew sullivan still exists? huh.
raven
donk
Ripley
@Breezeblock: Power button, usually on the front of the computer (near the keyboard on a laptop). Press it and wait a few minutes. This works in New Jersey, unless Christie borked that too.
@me: The horror. The horror.
Trollhattan
It’s November already and I’d like to know the front pagers’ plans for landing that 2013 Moore Award. I don’t think You People have been trying particularly hard, so let’s get cracking.
marianne19
@JMG: Yes, “hysterical” is a good description for what goes on over there sometimes. I’ll never forget the live blog of the debate Obama wasn’t so great at. He definitely had the sky falling. Nevertheless, I can’t resist the “View from your Window”, especially the contests.
Aunt Kathy
@Keith: I don’t think people really got the point of all that Palin amniotic fluid s**t. He may have been suggesting that Palin wasn’t that kid’s mom, but really I think he was just calling her out on her big fat fibber self-aggrandizing bulls**t story that she was leaking fluid during her speech, but didn’t want to disappoint cuz she’s such a tough Alaskan that she just troopered on, all the long way home to Alaska, when any normal woman with any sense would be, like, “S**t, I’m in labor, get me to hospital now.” She was a lying liar, and, to me, the point was to keep the presurre so that she would admit that she was a lying liar. But she never did, cuz, crazy-eyes.
Each post he wrote about the idiot story, I kept imagining this,,,
http://youtu.be/hafaW1uLE-4
jacy
Sully is all emotion all the time. He has no idea how things ACTUALLY WORK — like science. (Also the fact that he only cares about an issue when it’s his ox being gored, otherwise it’s all adolescent hyperbole cross-cut with religious certitude — which is an incredibly annoying combination.) I used to visit his site for interesting links even though he was off the rails far more than he was on, but recently I finally lost patience and just quite looking at it.
bobbo
I haven’t tried the website, but I have 100% certainty that Andrew Sullivan is an asshole who is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.
Trollhattan
@jonas:
LA Times is reporting on TSA officer killed and several others wounded.
Meg
@Comrade Jake: Is Secretary Sebelius a woman? If yes, then she deserves no credit but all the blames in Sully’s book.
Omnes Omnibus
@Aunt Kathy: I’m sorry but I don’t think I have every gotten something useful from Sullivan that I couldn’t get somewhere else with less drama. IMO he got famous for being an oddity, a gay Catholic Tory with HIV. I don’t hate him or even dislike him, I just have no use for him.
David Hunt
I have been running into the same problem for weeks, and it happens on every computer and web browser that I’ve tried it on. I get to the portion where I can view the subsidies that I’m eligible for and it says that I should view them before proceeding. That button always goes to a blank page. I’ve reloaded, the page. I’ve turned off the pop-up blocker. I’ve come back almost every day. It’s always the same. Has anyone else run into this?
NCSteve
@muricafukyea: Well it’s a curious thing: the only people who write/wrote for the Atlantic whose opinions are worth giving a flying fuck for (Fallows and Coates) are the two whose opinions are least cared about by Our Betters in the Village.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@David Hunt: See the links in #52 above. Maybe switching between normal and “private browsing” windows will help.
HTH. Good luck.
Cheers,
Scott.
Trollhattan
@Trollhattan:
And now they’re reporting the shooter, who is dead, was a TSA officer and his(?) victim was another TSA officer.
Who’s watching the watchers?
Gypsy Howell
@David Hunt:
@me:
I ran into both of those problems and more. Ultimately, I gave up on my current application and started a new one, with a new gmail address and a variation on my login ID. Everything else was the same, and it worked perfectly.
Try scrapping your current application and just start over.
FYI, I did it using Safari
Let me know if it works.
Gypsy Howell
In other words, a homegrown rightwing terrorist?
kc
Tried for the first time today to set up an account on the website; couldn’t do it.
kc
@David Hunt:
You mean it let you get past the create an account stage? You lucky bastard . . .
boatboy_srq
… and my first thought on that was, are there no mirrors in Mr. Issa’s universe?
jl
If we stand by and do nothing about this outage, we will be letting the bigotry of low expectations allow Sullivan to completely devalue, degrade, disgrace and deligitimate his own Morris award.
And I would organize a campaign to save Sullivan from himself on this, but it’s time or lunch, and then I got stuff to do. So, it’s a damn shame what happened, I guess.
fuckwit
@Trollhattan: indeed, and the fluid is blood
mk3872
@raven: You need to understand software engineering lingo. In the software world, we have triage meetings DAILY for any bugs or fixes that are needed. NO major software application is bug-free.
What this entire episode has proved to me (a newbie political-watcher) is that political pundits need to stay FAR, FAR away from covering tech.
Omnes Omnibus
@mk3872: I think raven was talking about the LAX shooting.
El Cid
@muricafukyea: Thank you.
Skipjack
Tim, I think the big issue is the hand-off from the website to the insurers, that the information they have been given is no good. So if you didn’t actually try to enroll you didn’t experience the problems so many others have had.
There are many problems to fix, I don’t begrudge accurate criticism, but the part that chaps my hide are endless rounds of false equivalency. I heard on NPR this morning a comparison to the BP oil spill, particularly comparing Sebelius’ apology to Hayward’s. It’s angrifying in the extreme. No one has been hurt by the website failure yet, while the oil spill was an instant catastrophe for the environment. A conservative, I think Byron York, recently compared Obamacare to Iraq- it’s impossible to talk sense anymore it would seem.
TheWatcher
The Hawaii Connector website is a piece of junk. Was unable to use it to shop plans during my recent job change, support was non-existent.
Meg
@Elizabelle: I am not sure his learning is long term. I stopped reading him a couple years ago basically because of all his sudden unlearning of the things he learned.
One example is the Bush Tax Cuts. After a while he seemed to agree that rich people should pay more, and we should completely get rid of the Bush Tax Cuts. But then one day out of blue he just put out another post talking about flat taxes. It is just very frustrating to read and make sense of his mind.
Mnemosyne
@TheWatcher:
I was saying this to the folks in Colorado who are getting screwed by only having one or two choices — you guys really need to raise a stink with your state government to get them to fix the problems and not let them go, Eh, Obamacare, whatcha gonna do? California’s state site seems to be working just fine, so don’t let your state’s legislators pass the buck to the feds.
priscianus jr
@muricafukyea: Why in the world does anyone with half a brain give a flying fuck what Sully thinks?!
I have no idea, I certainly don’t.
me
@Ripley: Mine isn’t but for people who’s indiviual policy is being canceled, it might well be a horror.
me
@Gypsy Howell: That did work, thanks.
Jamey
Sullivan paywall is the greatest thing to happen to the Internet since free porn.
Moe Gamble
The Nevada healthlink site encouraged everyone to open an account before October 1, so all that would be out of the way and you could just show up and pick a plan.
But when I try to log in with my username and password, the site tells me they’re wrong, even though I wrote them down so I know they’re right.
So, I tried to apply for a new account, but then they tell me I already have an account.
I applied to have my username and password sent to me, thinking I could then change them and log in, but though there’s an online form you fill out that seemed to work, they never sent the username or password.
I’ve emailed them three times asking for help logging in, and they tell me to call a phone number.
When I call the phone number, the person can’t do anything to help me set up an account because when he enters my data he gets a screen that says I already have an account.
When I write in about that, they just keep giving me the same phone number to call.
I haven’t had health insurance in 30 years, and right now it looks like I may never have it.