Consumer Reports Tips to Access Healthcare.gov: Use a Different Browser to Verify Your Identity? What the what?

This has to be the worst roll-out of a major website in the history of tech. Keep in mind that this fiasco cost $400 million.

Consumer Reports tried to give potential users some advice:

• First, follow very carefully the needlessly complicated instructions for creating a password that has at least seven characters and at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, one number and one symbol.
• Second, as soon as you encounter a problem logging on, start over, since you can’t believe what the error messages tell you.
• If you happen to make it through, keep a sharp eye out for an e-mail confirming your account, or you’ll soon be timed out.
• Finally, when verifying your identity on the site, you may want to do it from a different browser than the one you registered from.

Got it? The publication’s bottom line: “Stay away from Healthcare.gov for at least another month if you can.”

I don't even understand that last suggestion. What does your browser type have to do with verifying your identity? It is almost like that Healthcare.gov was created in the 90s and you can view the site with IE 5 but not with Mozilla or something. The snail mail solution via a call center is even worse.

Going old school isn’t much easier. Megan McArdle of Bloom­berg View talked to a representative at an ObamaCare call center who said you could fill out a paper form — but it would take three weeks for it to be sent to your house and, after you send it back, a couple of more weeks until you are notified of your eligibility for subsidies. The representative wasn’t clear on what happens next.

So 5 weeks or more to find out if you are even eligible for subsidies or not? This is in a world where I can buy a million different products from Amazon and have them at my doorstep tomorrow morning. Hell, I could order something from Best Buy, while driving to Best Buy, and pick it up when I get there. This is a world where I can listen to every song I own on my phone, in my car, and then on my TV nearly seamlessly just with a few taps. It just boggles the mind that it takes 5 weeks via phone to verify if you are eligible for subsidies or not. It is so sad that Ted Cruz shut down the government and obscured how bad signing up for Obamacare really is for weeks.