Healthcare.gov is jacked up, and that's putting it kindly...
So, it took me about 30 minutes to create an account, now it could have been my fault, but I don't remember being able to create an account before today, so bear with me, and I hope my experience will prove fruitful.
First things first, I think my problem was that I signed up to get email updates, the system kept saying that my First Name, Last Name, email(Gmail account) combination wasn't unique, so refused to register me. I basically said fuck it, and went to aol.com, and for shits and giggles, used my old username and password from high school. To my shock, the fucking thing worked, and I was given a welcome email by aol's team, no registration required. So I registered under the aol account. Not a joke, this account hasn't been active in close to 20 years, if I remember right, I was barely out of middle school when my Dad signed us up to Aol for its free trial, and we also tried Compuserve, ahh, the good old days!
I got the confirmation email in just a few seconds after finishing registration, I clicked on it, and healthcare.gov returned an error saying too much time has passed. At first I was like, WTF? But then I figured that it was a scripting error, so I waited a few seconds, then clicked it again, success!
By the way, all this was after I cleared cookies on two different web browsers, and tried about half a dozen different username combinations, and also, just on the off chance that I had created an account, tried the "Lost Username/Password" links, nothing was emailed to my gmail account as a response.
So a couple of pro-tips, have a backup email address, and wait a few seconds or minutes before clicking the confirmation email.
Hopefully they will work out the kinks, also I would suggest they have real time checking of usernames, so you get instant feedback as to whether the one you picked is unique, also being able to correct mistakes without having to go through the entire process all over again. Do it like other websites, only blank out the password, so that, and the info that needs to be corrected, are the only things that need to be filled out again.
ON EDIT: Also, if you see something about a broken stream after trying to log in after creating an account, just keep refreshing, you'll get there eventually.
ON EDIT2: Site does not appear to be Chrome friendly, got a lot of errors, seems to be working on Firefox though.
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