Trio of young coders build health-care website in days

From CNN How hard is it to create a website to help people get health insurance under the Affordable Care Act? For three 20-year-old programmers in San Francisco, it took about three days' worth of work. Spurred by the problems that have surrounded the rollout of the official HeathCare.gov site, the trio created an alternative, Health Sherpa, quickly and cheaply. At first glance, it looks like a triumph of tech-startup nimbleness over government inefficiency. George Kalogeropoulos, who created the site along with Ning Liang and Michael Wasser, said all three of them had tried using the government website to get insurance. "We were surprised to see that it was actually fairly difficult to use HealthCare.gov to find and understand our options," he told CNN. "Given that the data was publicly available, we thought that it made a lot of sense to take the data that was on there and just make it easy to search through and view available plans." The result is a bare-bones site that lets users enter their zip code, plus details about their family and income, to find suggested plans in their area. "The Health Sherpa is a free guide that makes it easier to find and sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. We only use carefully vetted, publicly available data," the site reads. "The Health Sherpa is not affiliated with any lobby, trade group or government agency and has no political agenda." Tech experts enlisted to help fix Obamacare website The Sherpa are an ethnic group in Nepal, some of whom have long served as guides for people climbing Mount Everest and other mountains in the Himalayas. The name has come to be used generically for any kind of guide or mentor. Of course, it's not fair to compare the creation of Health Sherpa to the rollout of the more complicated government ACA site, which everyone from President Obama on down has acknowledged as a horribly botched affair.