Who do you trust trying to use Healthcare.gov (Obamacare). President Obama's reassurances? Media covering the efforts?
How about Consumer Reports? Here is a post they put last week.
Let’s jump to the advice that will get you thinking.
Clear your cookies.
Your next hurdle after creating a functioning user name and password is to reach the identity verification section. If you log in to Healthcare.gov and get nothing but a blank page, what’s likely happening, Simo says, is that in your previous visits to Healthcare.gov, your browser got loaded up with lots of cookies, bits of data and code that are implanted for later retrieval and use by Healthcare.gov. The problem is that the cookie files are bigger than what the website can accept back (yes, a design error). Result: a blank page. Solution: either delete the Healthcare.gov cookies from your browser (typically found in the “privacy” settings in Preferences), or log back in from a browser you’ve never previously used to access Healthcare.gov. That advice rang especially true to me because that's how I finally got an identity verification screen: by switching from my usual Safari browser to another that I rarely use.
If all this is too much for you to absorb, follow our previous advice: Stay away from Healthcare.gov for at least another month if you can. Hopefully that will be long enough for its software vendors to clean up the mess they’ve made. The coverage available through the marketplaces won’t begin until Jan. 1, 2014, at the earliest, and you have until Dec. 15 to enroll if you need insurance that starts promptly.
What is hysterical is the unique ID is the reference ID, a 128 bit unique. Which is good from a technical standpoint, but not when you use it as the users reference number.
Three weeks may be a short time in government software development, but it is a very long time in Internet time. If you call support, I wish you a good connection as you try to read that 36-character reference ID over the phone....A GUID is actually an integer type - it's a 128 bit integer (16 bytes).
It's often represented as a string of 36 characters - but the actual value is a 128bit integer value.
