This article in today's Huffington Post reports the rollout of a new workaround that
lets people see the plans and prices that will be available to them on healthcare.gov WITHOUT
having to create an account.
It doesn't show deductibles or include premium subsidies you might qualify for.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
I just went on healthcare.gov, and was allowed to go to this information with no wait or passwords or account creation. All you have to do is answer a few generic questions, like is insurance for you only, or for a family, what state and country you live in, and it pulls up the plans. You can narrow your search to only silver, gold, etc. or to only plans from a specific company.
I had no problem navigating the site and it worked, with no hangups or delays.
I have been frustrated since day one with getting on the site, and having it accept my password.
I have my own insurance at present, but have been eager to see what would be available to me, and be able to compare it to what I presently have.
I was very pleasantly surprised with the prices, even without subsidies, as compared to the ones I had seen on the Kaiser site. They were less than half the amount on Kaiser, even before subsidies. The lack of deductible and OOP info was the major fault I found with what was presented. I imagine finding this information will require going to the site of the plan you are interested in. Then creating an account on healthcare.gov if you decide you want to purchase. Hopefully, account creation problems will be solved more easily, now that everyone doesn't have to create an account just to see the prices.
This new access to information should solve many problems, and at least get people started, and diminish some of the current frustration. It will let them know what to expect, and the probability that their costs will be less than what is posted, since most will qualify for a subsidy. It should relieve a lot of the pressure on the site at the account creation bottleneck. Check it out. I hope you are as pleasantly surprised as I was. They probably could have saved themselves a lot of bad press by doing this on day one, but at least they have done it now.