Consumer Reports is advising people to “stay away from Healthcare.gov for at least another month,” as technicians attempt to sort out what has been a rocky rollout of the Obamacare enrollment website, with an unending list of “glitches” hampering people from signing up.
In a post last week, as part of Consumer Reports’ series on the new healthcare law and how to navigate it, the organization offers tips from a software tester “How to successfully register for health insurance on HealthCare.gov.” The advice itself highlights a number of pitfalls.
For instance, No. 1) “Follow instructions when creating a user name” is a task described as “not as easy as it seems.” The post describes the instructions as “garbled.”
Ben Simo, the software tester, “says the instructions are needlessly complicated and logins will end up being less secure because users will be putting the info on Post-Its stuck to their computers, as,” the writer of the post concedes, “indeed I have done with my own.”
After a series of similar instructions, including the fact that you must check your email constantly in order to respond to the “account activation e-mail … promptly, because if you don’t, Healthcare.gov will time you out. If the e-mail never comes, you’ll have to go back to square one.”
Ultimately, the post concludes, it might be best to just wait until the glitches have been dealt with.
“If all this is too much for you to absorb, follow our previous advice: Stay away from Healthcare.gov for at least another month if you can,” the post says. “Hopefully that will be long enough for its software vendors to clean up the mess they’ve made.”
