JUST TO CLARIFY: I am NOT the Customer Service Representative for Obamacare.

Earlier today I had a rather infuriating exchange with someone who's pissed off at the all-new Massachusetts Health Connector because they dare to require him to (wait for it)...re-enter his personal data this year!! Can you believe it?? The nerve!!

I tried giving a reasonable response: Yes, it's annoying, but there could be plenty of reasons why the MA data has to be re-entered. Perhaps the database was corrupted. Perhaps it was hacked and riddled with backdoors. Perhaps it was just in some sort of weird, proprietary format which couldn't be migrated. Perhaps it could have been, but it would've cost gazillions of dollars and/or time more than it already did. Perhaps the MA exchange officials are incompetent (this last was certainly true for Take One, anyway).

But that wasn't good enough for this guy. He wouldn't let it go; kept pestering me about it for like another 15 minutes on Twitter before I finally told him to talk to the MA exchange and leave me out of it. Then I had to block him because he just wouldn't shut up about it.

Look, folks: I agree whole-heartedly that the MA Connector was seriously hosed from start to finish last year. I've posted repeatedly about a guy named Ed Lyons who literally wrote the book about everything that went wrong. I've posted about the Cover Oregon debacle, and have even poked fun at Vermont's will-they-or-won't-they-go-live drama last week (answer: they did).

HOWEVER, I also don't work for the MA Health Connector, the Massachusetts Dept. of Health, the HHS Dept or any other government (or healthcare) agency. Griping about how annoying it is to spend a half an hour entering data into a website to me isn't gonna help you any. I don't have a hotline I can call, and no one asks "how high" when I say jump.

Complaining to me will only result in wasting my time and more of yours, without fixing your problem. OK?

Feeling grumpy this afternoon, in case you hadn't guessed.