On the Third Hand: Exchange pilot

First, I’m not coming to conclusions here, either way, about whether the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) public exchange program should exist or can possibly work.

Or, if it can work, can it work for six months or six years.

To me, it seems as if surviving six years would be an ambitious goal, but, who knows. It’s a strange universe.

That said: I love happy endings. I truly hate to see people fail or be embarrassed. I’m biased toward wanting everyone I write about to live in a universe in which they succeed and live a life free from scary work-related calls and emails, let alone financial distress.

So, whatever happens to the Hawaii Health Connector as a marketplace for health insurance, I’d be happy to see the people working on it to get the enrollment website to work smoothly, and to at least get the attention of most of the consumers who would be candidates to use it.

As of last week, Hawaii was close to deciding to keep control of its glitch-plagued website in Hawaii hands and providing $1.5 million in financial support.

Then it hit me: Maybe Hawaii (and some of the other states with glitch-plagued enrollment systems), are going about this enrollment system improvement process all wrong. Especially Hawaii.

Why on earth would the government of Hawaii pay money for any fairly small tech project?

Why not call up HGTV and ask them to get the Property Brothers to work with the Discovery Fit & Health channel (and the Project Runway people?) to produce an exciting new reality television show: Exchange wars.

Encourage professional, academic and hacker teams from all over the world to come to a beautiful resort in Hawaii to compete to produce the best exchange enrollment and administration systems.