The holidays might be only half over, but that doesn’t mean there’s any time for ObamaCare to rest. Reason’s Ira Stoll recently tried to buy insurance like he’s mandated to do:
The Massachusetts Web site did eventually begin to function well enough for me to compare plans and find one that would work best for me. I stuck it in the shopping cart the way you would with a purchase at L.L. Bean or any other online shopping site.
Instead of a credit-card check-out, though, I found myself in a kind of tax-return hell. The annual pre-April 15 encounter with the IRS is bad enough, but the idea that one should be required to go through the whole thing before buying some health insurance is downright obnoxious. The website wouldn’t accept a hyphenated last name. It had strong opinions about abortion (“How many people are in your family? Include unborn child(ren) if someone is pregnant.”)
Finally, about two-and-a-half hours in, I got an error message that said “a connection to the server has failed. (status=503).”
This is after things got better.
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