Congressman Blogs His Ridiculously Difficult Time Signing Up for Obamacare

Rep. Bill Flores (R-TX) signed up for Obamacare today. It didn’t go well. Rep. Flores has posted a series of messages on Facebook describing rounds of errors, phone calls to technical support, and other frustrations while dealing with President Obama’s signature policy and the multi-million dollar web site built to impose it.

In his first message on the subject today, Flores writes: “Just finished trying to enroll in #Obamacare using @DCHealthLink (the Obamacare website for Members of Congress). It was an AWFUL experience–hours of time, dozens of errors (printed dozens of pages of error messages–will post soon), at this point I am still not sure I have coverage, I had to install new browser because they don’t like Microsoft Internet Explorer or Firefox (still got crash errors!), my total phone time on hold in excess of 4 hours, and total time online was in excess of 8 hours. Wait until I tell what you have to go through just to change your password–only bureaucrats could have designed something so awful that it is laughable!

“Why does #POTUS think this is good for America?!!” Flores asks rhetorically.

“POTUS recently said that he was not incompetent, but that government is incompetent, so why make America subject to bureaucrats?”

A few minutes later, Rep. Flores, a second-term congressman who spent his private sector career as an executive in the energy industry, posted another note. This one dealt with the financial impact of the Affordable Care Act.

“Under my new #Obamacare coverage (if I really have it), my premiums are substantially higher (over 50% higher) and my deductibles and out of pocket limits are over 30% higher! This only good thing is that out of the 112 plans available, I was able to get one of the 9 plans that does not cover killing unborn children.”

In his next missive, Flores highlighted Healthcare.gov’s cryptic error messages.

“My favorite @DCHealthLink #Obamacare message:
“Error 500–Internal Server Error

“From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol — HTTP/1.1:

“10.5.1 500 Internal Server Error

“The server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request.”

The Brazos Valley congressman, who unseated longtime Democrat Rep. Chet Edwards during the 2010 wave that brought GOP control of the U.S. House of Representatives, adds that he still doesn’t even know if he really has health insurance after spending so many hours battling with Healthcare.gov.