Connect For Health Colorado Website Still Down

Try to sign on to the State of Colorado's health insurance exchange and it will tell you that your users ID and password are broken.  But, in fact, the system is actually down and everyone who tries to sign on is told this, the telephone support line will tell you (not that the website warns you of this fact).  The related Colorado Peak website for Medicaid applications is also broken, as is the automated telephone support prompt system that goes with Colorado Peak (and its phones are only answered during state government business hours).

We started our application around October 20, and finished the mandatory application for Medicaid which we know we won't qualify for on October 22.  As of November 6, more than two weeks later and a couple of days after the state said it would restore website service, we're still in limbo.  Eventually, a customer support line human being says applications are processed not instantly, but in 30 to 45 days.  Why it takes so long is a mystery.  It took me all of two minutes to determine that we don't qualify and the hyper for the system said you could get results in less than 30 to 45 minutes.

I've looked at the provisions of the law and information from other people, so I know that I will receive many thousands of dollars of tax subsidies and that the premium on a plan comparable to the one that I have now will be thousands of dollars cheaper.  But, I can't get to that stage of the application process.

The seemingly simple website application is still an unmitigated disaster more than five weeks after it was launched.

I have nothing against the law, and understand how Republican efforts to undermine funding of the website at the federal level undermined that process, but I'm still a bit baffled about why Colorado's website is such a dismal failure.