How 3 Young Coders Built a Better Portal To HealthCare.gov

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Doug Gross writes at CNN that spurred by the problems that have surrounded the rollout of the official HeathCare.gov website, three 20-year-old programmers in San Francisco have created an alternative website to help people get health insurance under the Affordable Care Act quickly and cheaply. The result is a bare-bones site called Health Sherpa, which lets users enter their zip code, plus details about their family and income, to find suggested plans in their area. 'We were surprised to see that it was actually fairly difficult to use HealthCare.gov to find and understand our options,' says George Kalogeropoulos, who created the site along with Ning Liang and Michael Wasser. 'Given that the data was publicly available, we thought that it made a lot of sense to take the data that was on there and just make it easy to search through and view available plans.' Of course, it's not fair to compare the creation of Health Sherpa to the rollout of the more complicated government ACA site, which even President Obama has acknowledged as a horribly botched affair. 'It isn't a fair apples-to-apples comparison,' says Kalogeropoulos. 'Unlike Healthcare.gov, our site doesn't connect to the IRS, DHS, and various state exchanges and authorities. Furthermore, we're using the government's data, so our site is only possible because of the hard work that the Healthcare.gov team has done.' But it does cast light on the difference between what can be done by a small group of experts, steeped in Silicon Valley's anything-is-possible mentality, and a massive government project in which politics and bureaucracy seem to have helped create an unwieldy mess. The three programmers have continued fine-tuning the site as its popularity has grown. In less than a week, the site has had almost 200,000 unique visitors and over half a million page views. '"The Health Sherpa makes it ridiculously easy for anyone to compare health care plans covered under Obamacare in 34 states," writes Connor Simpson at Atlantic Wire. "The result is a simple, beautiful, remarkably responsive website that anyone could use.'"

Doesn't Matter

[sycodon]

Lipstick on a pig is still a pig.

Old adage about number of coders on a project

[Andover Chick]

This proves the old adage that no more programmers should be involved on a project than you can fit into a VW Bug with pizza and beer.

Re:Doesn't Matter

[schneidafunk]

mmm sexy-bacon

Re:Doesn't Matter

[Thanshin]

Unless you've got a magical lipstick of transfiguration.

Lipstic of transfiguration on a pig is a standard action that provokes attacks of opportunity. And the pig may resist the transformation with a successful DC 17 Fortitude save.

The change would only be instantaneous if the pig has a volume of one cubic foot or less (1h/cubic foot, for fatter pigs).

Re:Just price?

[lgw]

My attempt showed me only plans to have my soul devoured by demons, but I think I accidently typed a negative ZIP code [xkcd.com].