Your Guide To Being Poor And Buying Your Own Healthcare Today!

Today is the first day that the Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges are open for business. So, if you’re over 25 and don’t have any health insurance then today is absolutely the day you’ve been waiting for. Look, I know that the very idea of this might be daunting but I’m going to literally walk you through the doing of this with screenshots and everything. It’s going to be great. Don’t be afraid. It’s just one of those new things that, once done, isn’t new anymore. Let’s get started.

You should be able to see that but if you can’t, it’s here

Now you have some options on the bottom. If you have any questions that you know of then of course you’ll click the start here button. If you don’t because you’re a genius and a boss then you’ll want to click the “find the marketplace in your state” button to access your state healthcare exchange which will provide you with all the plan options available to you. There you’ll sign up for an ID like you have to with most sites but for the sake of this tutorial I’ll be sticking with the federal exchange as if I live in a state that hates its citizens and hasn’t set up its own exchange….like my own state.

Well that sucks but the worst part is I now only have 181 days left to enroll…and then, after refreshing a few times, this happened. It’s an auto refresh page, thankfully.

Well hey, looks like there’s demand for healthcare after all. Within a half hour though I was in.

Where I was prompted to set up my account in a 3 step fashion.

That’s me, Mr. Testcase1, keeper of the unguessable password.

Here we go, entering my 3 security question answers…note, those fields are required. Once entered, it’s time to rock n roll, right?

Dammit! Okay, I’ve tried twice since getting this screen and still no joy. It puts you back through the entire process (admittedly it’s only two steps) in order to arrive back at the this page. “Live Chat” is also down. I can only imagine what the call desk is like at the moment.

A quick Google indicates that this is a common problem across the exchange system, basically it’s slammed. On the bright side, that’s a good thing. It means that the system is getting more requests than it can properly handle at one time which means that people like you and I are signing up and will be insured starting January 1.

I actually have every expectation that this will work and when it does I’ll run through it as above but with far far sexier results.