With trepidation, I carved out time this afternoon to revisit Healthcare.gov, after having tried twice, and failed twice, to even set up an account in early October. (Firefox 25.0.1 on a Mac OS 10.8.5, on fiber.)
I am delighted to report that it is working flawlessly!!! Really. Wife and I are now just comparing plans, using their side-by-side comparison feature, and will probably pull the trigger on enrollment within a day or two. That delay is only b/c we want to think about it, not cause of anything on the site.
But, to this point, it's been amazing: fast and accurate through account setup, ID verification, subsidy eligibility assessment, etc. Just like a real site!
I was particularly nervous about ID verification and subsidy assessment, cause I had read such horror tales in previous weeks. But each of those happened in literally seconds.
As a Web producer, I have some extremely minor quibbles about navigational choices, the way a few things are explained, how they calculate income (month by month for each type of income, as opposed to just asking for line 37 of AGI on your tax return), how you jump to the top of the page each time after you click the "compare" button on plans. But these are so minor I dare to mention them.
I don't know how many days it's actually been working this well, but it is up and running. The insurance deals look quite decent -- only need to choose now whether save more money now, or possibly later, that kinda thing. Sure, it's still private insurance and still way too many choices to think about, but it's cheaper than we've paid ever before by a mile.
To this point, ready to enroll, took me less than an hour. And the site was fast at each step!
Spread the word. Healthcare.gov is working!