I first tried to access the New York exchange website last Friday. It was slow but I was able to bypass the first step (getting an ID and password) because I had one already from a few years ago but did not realize right away that it was applicable to use it again here.
On Saturday the website was running more quickly but I had some issues with the subsidy (I posted them in a spearate thread and my fellow forum members were able to get me a quick answer which got me through. It turned out that the question, "Do you have coverage now?" is really in the future tense, as in "Will you have coverage on 1/1/2014?" I do have coverage now but the bare-bones policy is not ACA-compliant and will be terminated at the end of 2013 (I knew this months ago). So once I switched my answer to "no" that made me eligible for the subsidy (I was being denied before I switched my answer to that key question).
I already had the prices of the Silver plans I was seeking thanks to someone in this forum posting a link to them for many states, so I already had a good idea of which to choose. Once I got to that page again, I was able to bring up more details about the plan.
Back to the subsidy, I hit another small snag about verifying one's income i order tohave the subsidy applied on a monthly basis against the total premium. But once again, thanks to the help of others here in the forum, I was pointed to a page in the IRS website about how the subsidy interacts with the federal income tax return and taxes due. Because I have income taxes withheld from my investment income, I pay estimated taxes a few times a year. What I can do is to use the "overpayment" (i.e. subsidy) of my premiums as a tax withholding method, eliminating one of my quarterly estimated income tax payments and it will all come out in the wash the following April. This saves me the trouble of sending in income verification and going through that process.
My only other minor annoying issue (anyone else have this?) is that I could not print key pages from the website such as confirmation screens. My printer and PC are working fine, as I can print other web pages and other things such as spreadsheets or Word files. What I did was to cut and paste the relevant part of the screen to a Word file then print it out. Some of the formatting and graphics got frigged up a bit but all the key text and numbers are there and quite readable.
So in the end I am just fine for now. Thanks to you in the forum who gave me some good info in advance and got me through my small crisis last Saturday.