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Ask HN: Why can't I access healthcare.gov from outside the US?

6 points by llamataboot ↗ HN
Currently living abroad. Need to access the exchange to buy health insurance. Do I really need to access it through a proxy server?

10 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 18.4 ms ] thread
jongibbins
I think the site may be down. Visiting http://www.healthcare.gov gives me an upside down IIS7 logo! http://www.healthcare.gov/welcome.png

(I'm in the UK)

caw
In the US -- getting the main page of the site. So either it's a CDN thing, they brought the site back up since the original post, or it is indeed region locked.
jongibbins
On further inspection it looks like it's just diverting to show my localhost:80 here.
llamataboot
I can access via a proxy, but not from a European IP address. Seems strange to not even show an error page and just block entire regions from accessing the site.
meerita
I see this:

"It works!"

Wich to me is an insult. You can work on something much better and informative for the people that such message.

yebyen
This is the default index.html for Apache

I think from what others are saying, it's redirected you to localhost:80. You must be running a default Apache config on localhost. I don't think they (healthcare.gov) are.

munimkazia
That's funny because I am seeing nginx's default page. They are probably balancing the load across servers with different setup.
hiciu 

  $ dig healthcare.gov +short
  92.123.189.103

  $ dig www.healthcare.gov +short
  www.geodirector.hc.gov.akadns.net.
  bh.georedirector.akadns.net.
  127.0.0.1

  $ wget healthcare.gov -O /dev/null
  --2013-12-11 15:57:05--  http://healthcare.gov/
  Resolving healthcare.gov (healthcare.gov)... 23.8.119.205, 2a02:26f0:59:38e::1ce1, 2a02:26f0:59:396::1ce1
  Connecting to healthcare.gov (healthcare.gov)|23.8.119.205|:80... connected.
  HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
  Location: https://healthcare.gov/ [following]
  --2013-12-11 15:57:05--  https://healthcare.gov/
  Connecting to healthcare.gov (healthcare.gov)|23.8.119.205|:443... connected.
  HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
  Location: https://www.healthcare.gov/ [following]
  --2013-12-11 15:57:06--  https://www.healthcare.gov/
  Resolving www.healthcare.gov (www.healthcare.gov)... 127.0.0.1
  Connecting to www.healthcare.gov (www.healthcare.gov)|127.0.0.1|:443... failed: Connection refused.
waffl
Oddly enough, I just wanted to take a look at the site, living in Germany.

downforeveryoneorjustme shows it's online.

Also checked on my NY based vps via Lynx and the site loads. So it must be region locked.

munimkazia
I am from India, and I am getting the default nginx page. That does not look good.