Has anyone tried the exchange yet? The company I work with opted out of it this year because they were afraid of it being a train reck. What is your experience with it?
OMIGOSH!! I'm a statistic. We are self-employed and therefore self insured. We've tried getting on the exchange about 6 times. (And my Facebook feed gives moment by moment updates of the frustration.) First, each page takes about 30 seconds to load. The questions are BEYOND redundant. (Example: you answer that you have a child who has no income, and then you have to answer three more questions about that kid and his income tax, deductions, and contributions, despite the fact that you already said he has no income.) It seems like blocking out future questions would be an easy technical fix. Anyway, we've filled out the application and it saves, but it never submits. You cannot just log back on and try to submit it again at a better time. You have to go back through every single page. Some info saves, other boxes you have to re-check. I finally just called the number and filled it out on the phone with a human. It took 90 minutes because they have to read EVERY SINGLE QUESTION to you. I'm sure it is a legal thing that they can't skip stuff, even inane questions like, after you tell the age of your kids (and they are clearly under 5 years old), one question is "Was this person in foster care after the age of 18?" The representative cannot simply skip it, knowing the kid isn't even 18 yet. So annoying. Anyway. I finally "finished" and it supposedly submitted. That was last Friday. We shall see how long it takes for the stuff to come in the mail. The representative clearly had cue cards for things to say, also. Like, at the end of the application (after we'd done EVERYTHING) she encouraged me to do the same thing on the website because it would be "faster." HAH. You'd think they could hire Google or some other major company that gets millions of hits a minute to handle the traffic.
