Obamacare 101: Seven ways you can sign up, despite Web woes

On Oct. 21, President Obama acknowledged the technical problems with the Obamacare website. Although he talked about the importance of fixing it, he also emphasized that Americans have other ways of signing up for insurance. Here are seven options you may want to know about.

6. Use the website anyway

HealthCare.gov/AP
A computer frame grab shows the HealthCare.gov website displayed Oct. 11, 2013.

Yes, that HealthCare.gov thing remains one of your options. Obama acknowledged the problems, but said people are still using it to sign up. He offered little in the way of disclosure regarding the scope of the technical challenges or when they might be fixed.

According to some news reports, the glitches include not just an arduous experience for people trying to sign up, but also challenges for insurance companies trying to verify who is signed up and whether people’s information is accurate.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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