I found The Sun's editorial, "Beyond the website" (Nov. 23), about how well the new-and-improved Maryland Health Connection had launched to be ironic and not in a good way. Perhaps you should have looked beyond the health insurance website itself to see if the system really had been improved from last year.
As you may know, anyone who has received assistance with health insurance premiums this past year must reapply and be reauthorized or else they will be hit with the full price for their plan in January. I barely got through the start of the online application process before I was locked out. Even though I had gone through all this last winter, the state could not identify me. Maryland has farmed out the job of confirming applicants' identities to Experian. I took down the information that appeared on the screen, called the number, gave the man on the other end of the phone all the information he requested and still they could not identify me. I just don't exist.
The bureaucrat at the Maryland Health Connection who thought it would be a good idea to privatize a state job to a for-profit company failed to realize that Experian is not in the business of identifying people. They identify assets and debts and if you don't have either assets or debts, you don't exist to them.
In an attempt to cure this sudden case of invisibility, I've wasted two weeks playing phone tag with one of those "connector entities" with no results. That December 18 deadline is looming and I am no closer to saving my family the financial strain of a jacked-up, full-price premium every month for the next year.
It's time to call out the product liability lawyers. Maryland taxpayers have been sold another defective service.
Richard W. Bell