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As you may know, I'm between jobs at the moment. When the last gig ended, COBRA coverage for health insurance was offered. I considered getting insurance via New York's health insurance exhange, New York State of Health. But a cursory look at their website and the plethora of insurance plans available was daunting. I had bigger fish to fry at that moment, so I bit the bullet and went with the COBRA plan, despite it costing $1,300.
In late November, I got the open enrollement / renewal information for the COBRA coverage. It's going up to $1,500 / month -- this for a plan with high deductables and out of pocket maximums. Uhhh, thanks, but no thanks. So off to the exchange website I go.
As a fellow web developer, you know how things should work. And you know that feeling you have upon using a site that sucks. NY State of Health gave me sinking, frustrating, and WTF?! feelings over and over again. I got to the point of saying "there's got to be a better way."
Fortunately, the site uses jQuery, which I used extensively in my last job. So I whipped up a bookmarklet to drastically simplify downloading the insurance plan data. Throw in a couple of little shell scripts to extract the data into CSV files. As icing, I added some tips about deadlines, etc. Then I made it all available on Github. (All hail Github.)
https://github.com/convissor/new_york_state_of_health_spreadsheet
Enjoy.