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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Saving Private Healthcare

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Ted Rall

Socialized Medicine Would Be Better Than Obamacare. In the Meantime, Let’s Waste Some Time on Some Lame, Doomed Reforms.

Anyone who has tried to sign up for Obamacare, as I have, knows that the launch of the Affordable Care Act has been — is — an unmitigated disaster.

Can it be fixed? Maybe.

But first, it’s important to digest the sheer ginormousness of this bastard cross between privatized grift — a wholesale transfer of wealth from individual patients to giant insurers subject to no oversight but their own absent consciences — and a spectacularly inept government bureaucracy run by careless, corrupt, connected buffoons.

More than 2 million people are getting booted from their existing health insurance because their current plans fall short of ACA standards.

Obama’s defenders say the cancelled coverage was “junk quality.” Which may be true. Still, it might have been nice to tell people about this provision, which the White House was well aware of, three years ago. When the president signed the law. As opposed to, you know, assuring us of the exact opposite.

Back in 2010, it turns out, the feds estimated that 50% to 75% of all current individual policies would have to be cancelled due to the ACA. So the current crisis is likely to expand in scope.

There’s no evidence that anyone has successfully purchased a plan. None. No one. Zero.

Six people managed to “sign up” on October 1st. Nationally.

As for the “signs-ups” — people who managed to register online or by phone, but couldn’t choose or sign up for an actual plan — it turns out that 90% of these people are so poor that they’ll get Medicaid. Only 10% might wind up buying the mandated private insurance plans. “When we first saw the numbers, everyone’s eyes kind of bugged out,” Matt Salo, head of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, told The Washington Post. “Of the people walking through the door, 90 percent are on Medicaid. We’re thinking, what planet is this happening on?”

Seriously?

The United States is not a rich country — well, it’s rich, but most United Statesers are poor. And anyway, who do you think is going to jam up the Intertubes to get healthcare first, 23-year-old “young invincibles” earning $10 an hour, or 53-year-old diabetics?

There may well be fewer Americans covered by insurance on New Year’s Day 2014 than on 2013 — due to Obamacare.

It’s been estimated that 45,000 Americans die each year because they’re uninsured. In other words, according to back-of-the-envelope arithmetic, 3,800 people will die because Obama and his underlings didn’t focus on the website launches until a couple of weeks before October 1st. Those are Katrina numbers. With more victims by the day.

I’m not counting those who will lose their existing plans without being able to replace them.

OK, it’s easy to complain (than to sign up for Obamacare, bapadumbum). What would I do differently?

Socialized medicine. Like in England. It works.

But an intelligent, pro-human solution is not in the cards. Not in bankster-owned America. Not now, anyway. Both the Democrats and Republicans are owned by the big corporate insurers that stand to make billions from the Affordable Care Act. Before the country, and eventually its political class, get real and get serious, we’ll have to waste a few years on attempts at reform.

If I were advising President Obama, here’s what I’d tell him to do:

Simplify the pricing structure. The current system’s complexity didn’t develop organically. It’s a feature. Deductibles and partial co-pays are hidden extra fees, like baggage fees charged by airlines. A plan that charges $7000 a year, but has a $3000 deductible, should be sold as a $10000 plan. Sticker shock is good. It encourages competition.

Price controls. Letting insurers charge whatever they want is ridiculous. The Department of Health and Human Services should set prices of everything from tests to drugs to visits to operations. They should squeeze the insurers to a reasonable, rock-bottom profit margin.

Eliminate sleazy out-of-network structures. Every plan should cover every doctor, every hospital, every drug. Americans shouldn’t have to live in a world where they can get a procedure at their in-plan hospital only to be told later — via a surprise bill — that the anesthesiologist, who works at the hospital, isn’t affiliated with it.

Suspend the stick, leave the carrot. The tax on Americans who can’t afford to buy for-profit insurance is unfair and cruel to working-class Americans — those who can least afford either the coverage or the fines.

Make it a national system. Rates vary wildly, not just between states, but even by county. We’re one nation. Let’s pool our resources as well as our risks. Under Obamacare as it stands, people who live in rural areas pay the highest rates — even though average salaries are lower away from big cities.

Whether these reforms fail in Congressional debate due to insurance company lobbyists or get enacted but don’t do enough to fix the system, they’ll get us closer to what we really need: a single-payer system. You know, like the rest of the First World has.

(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. Go there to join the Ted Rall Subscription Service and receive all of Ted’s cartoons and columns by email.)

COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL

Obamacare Update

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Ted Rall

Four consecutive weeks of Obamacare columns is enough to make anyone sick. But an update is clearly in order.

The latest ACA-related fiasco is the story, much touted by Republicans, that millions of Americans are receiving cancellation notices from their insurers because their policies don’t meet the requirements of ACA for coverage. Between that and the fact that it’s basically impossible to buy a healthcare plan online (you can register, but registration isn’t buying), it is entirely possible that by January 1st there will be more  people uninsured than before.

Granted, Republicans don’t enjoy any credibility when it comes to healthcare. After all, their solution was none at all. They were fine with the current, crappy, who-cares-if-you-die system. But that doesn’t mean the ACA is an improvement.

And if Democrats keep spouting talking points like the one I saw all over MSNBC yesterday, encapsulated perfectly by this post,  which I found on Daily Kos this morning, they shan’t long have any cred left themselves:

They are trash policies that would have left policy-holders paying thousands out of their own pockets at time of claims. Non-guaranteed renewable, limited in benefit coverage, no preventive care, and most have absolutely no drug coverage. The maximum limit of coverage, which is a lifetime maximum, and is soon reached in this day and age.

The insurance companies issuing these policies knew they had three years to comply with the mandates of the Affordable Care Act, and they decided this was the way to get rid of that line of business, and rack up more premiums on better plans. The small percentage of people whose policies are being canceled should really thank God that it is forcing them to re-look at what they have in the way of health care. Most don’t even know they had inferior policies they were paying for.

Let’s bring this country of under-insureds up to normal and reasonable limits for the 21st century.

The thing is, Democrats, President Obama didn’t tell the public “If you like your current plan, you can keep it unless it doesn’t meet the new standards.” There was no qualifier. Instead he said, over and over, so often that even Americans remember, “If you like your current plan, you can keep it.” The qualifier matters.

Democrats are whistling past the graveyard if they think this doesn’t matter. Getting a cancellation letter is a major pain in the ass. People who thought they were fine and didn’t have to worry about the ACA now have to break their routines, take hours out of their lives, to deal with shopping for new coverage. They’re not going to be happy about it, no matter how much they’re told their old plan was shitty and worthless in the first place.

Sure, I’d rather drive a Dodge Challenger than a Honda Civic. But what Obama is doing is pulling me over, towing away my Civic and telling me I’ll be fined — and have to walk home — unless I buy a Challenger that I may or may not be able to afford. That’s pretty bad, but the last thing he’d better add is that he’s doing me a favor.

So in other news, I received a letter from nystateofhealth, the New York state ACA marketplace. A letter. Via snail mail. Good news! “We have determined that you are eligible to enroll in a qualified health plan through the Marketplace,” it reads. “Your health insurance plan will begin shortly after you have selected a health plan and paid the premium payment (if applicable).

I went online right away to log in. But…

All my personal data, all the information I spent hours uploading, including three months of personal financial statements related to my self-employment business as a cartoonist and writer, were gone!

So I got on the phone. The phone mail tree is byzantine but eventually a person picked up, accessed my account, and confirmed that indeed, I do qualify for coverage. “Can I choose a plan through you?” I asked the agent.

“No,” he replied, “you’ll get a letter, probably in early December. Go ahead and disregard the one you received.”
Really? Disregard it? What will the second letter say?

“You’ll be able to choose the plan through the letter,” he said. Twice, because I made him.

“Through the mail?”

“Yes. Then your plan will be effective January 1st.”

Let’s hope this is true. And that it works.

Even so, I wonder: why’d they bother with the websites in the first place? Why didn’t they just do the whole thing by mail?

I’ll let you know what happens. Or doesn’t.

User registrations

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Ted Rall

Hey so if you have been having trouble registering in order to comment here, please try again. There have been some substantial fixes on the backend that will make it easier for you. This also applies to people who have attempted to register in the past but were never able to get through. It should work now.

Medium.com Column/Cartoon: I’m Tired of the U.S. Government Spying On Me. So I’m Running for President of France.

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Ted Rall

Exclusively at Medium! Check it out. It’s worth taking a few extra seconds out of your day to click over there.

This is a long form hybrid of cartoons and columns, written with a freedom of style and humor that I don’t normally normally get to do anywhere else. That’s because medium.com is committed to commissioning work by artists and writers for real, reasonable pay rates. So if you support this model, please show it by checking it out and passing it around on social networks.

This piece reacts to the fact that the NSA is finally going to get reined in. Not because they did wholesale spying on the American people, or on foreigners, or on foreign leaders, but specifically on the personal cell phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Spying on hundreds of millions of people? That’s just business as usual. Spying on an important leader of a country that is supposedly a US ally? That’s just rude.

The good news is, now us ordinary Americans can escape the prying eyes of the NSA. All we have to do is…

Well, check out my piece.

HARRISBURG PATRIOT-NEWS CARTOON: Gone to the Dogs

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Ted Rall

Gone to the Dogs

This cartoon is for The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

A Pennsylvania state legislator, made aware that the state does not ban eating cats and dogs, has proposed a bill banning that apparently less-than-widespread practice.

We don’t want no transparency

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Ted Rall

Check out the following passage from an article in Time magazine about the backlash against the American use of drones:

A slew of reports over the last two weeks detailing cases of U.S. armed drones killing civilians signaled a new wave of outrage over the unregulated use of drones by the U.S. There was one report from the United Nations, another from Human Rights Watch, and one from Amnesty International. The uproar—and the sense that Washington has done little to make more transparent its use of drones—is culminating in a debate Friday at the UN.

The italics are mine. Notice that section. Interesting spin, and you keep hearing it over and over, sometimes in the context of other classified programs such as the NSA’s domestic spying.

The people that I know aren’t interested in seeing the drone program become more transparent. The people I know who are concerned about drones, and I suspect this is true about most of other people who care about the issue, aren’t interested in greater transparency. We want the program to stop. We want the US to stop murdering people without any cause whatsoever. Transparency? That would be nice, but it really misses the point.

ANewDomain.net Column: Little Reportable Intelligence: With Friends Like the US Does Europe Need Enemies?

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Ted Rall

Here is my column exclusively for ANew Domain.net. Europe is pissed off at the NSA, but being American means never having to say you’re sorry.

What appears to actually be true, and exactly true to the extent that Clapper hasn’t said boo about it, is that the NSA tapped into the personal communications of the world’s heads of state, including close U.S. allies like German Chancellor Angela “Austerity R Us” Merkel, former President Felipe Calderón of Mexico and at least 35 other world leaders. NSA spies listened to Merkel’s private cell phone calls and read Calderón’s email. The 35-plus randoms, collected from eager-to-please U.S. government employees including State Department diplomats, appear to be personal phone taps. Yep, it’s another Snowden document.

With frenemies like the U.S., who needs terrorists?

SYNDICATED COLUMN: May Sarah Palin’s Stupid Conspiracy Theory Come True

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Ted Rall

How Obama’s Stupidity Might Get Us Real Healthcare

When it comes to Obamacare, Democrats have every reason to accuse the House Republicans of bad faith. Still, yesterday’s Congressional grilling of the private contractors hired to build the healthcare.gov federal marketplace serves as a reminder that editorial writers’ endless calls for bipartisan cooperation should never be heeded. We need adversarial politics; for that, the more polarization the better. If not for those pissy Republicans, who would get to the bottom of the disastrous October 1st rollout of the Affordable Care Act? Not the secrecy-obsessed Obama, who makes Nixon look like a paragon of transparency. Not his make-any-lame excuse Democrats.

Tea Party types love conspiracies. Obama is a Kenyan socialist. (So where’s the socialism?) 9/11 was an inside job. (But not a good one.)  But sometimes conspiracies turn out to be true — even if they’re weren’t planned that way.

The latest dastardly plot circulating among Tea Partiers is that the Obamaites deliberately screwed up the ACA websites to pave the way for their true agenda: socializing healthcare. (I use the plural because most of the online state marketplaces, developed based on consultations with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, are just as buggy and crashy as the federal one.)

Sarah Palin articulates this — hey, there are four words you don’t usually see at the same time — in an October 20th blog post:

“Obamacare in its current corporatist form isn’t meant to last. It’s meant to push us towards full socialized medicine with a single-payer system.”

“The broken websites and botched Obamacare rollout help push things to that inevitable conclusion by causing frustration and confusion that only the government can ‘fix,'” writes Palin.

She continues with a logical fallacy: Obama is smart, smart people don’t make dumb mistakes, therefore any “mistakes” they make are intentional.

“In fact,” Palin argues, “these unusable Obamacare websites make a reasonable person wonder how this administration could have made such a colossal bungle of the rollout when they are, after all, the same savvy experts who had the most sophisticated and precise campaign websites ever built. They could pinpoint voters down to a city block, but they messed up a website that cost the government over $200 million more than it cost Apple to develop the first iPhone. Purposeful?”

The problem with this reasoning (which echoes 9/11 Truther theories that the Bush Administration couldn’t possibly be stupid enough to let hijacked planes fly around the U.S. for nearly two hours) is that Obama and his team aren’t really smart. They’re calm.

It’s not the same.

If Team Obama had been plotting Canadian-style socialized medicine all along, they wouldn’t have floated all those dumb “heckuva job, Barry”-style excuses that turned healthcare.gov into the president’s Katrina moment:

  • Too much volume. But corporate websites routinely handle more than the ACA sites. Besides, the feds knew that, in a nation with tens of millions of uninsured people, tens of millions of people were going to check out the website. The truth, as any idiot could plainly see, was that volume wasn’t the issue. Lousy coding was.
  • ACA is “more than a website” — and anyway, why don’t people use the phone? Actually, that’s not true. For most people, the ACA are the websites. That’s how Obamacare was promoted. People were told to go online. So they did. As for those who threw up their hands and tried calling — I was one of them — there was no way to buy a plan by phone.
  • Everyone knew there would be glitches. The problem with that Democratic talking point is that while Americans may suffer from short memories, they’re not totally retarded. We still recall September 2013. It’s not like anyone in the White House announced before the launch: “Hey, don’t freak if you can’t access the websites right away. Chillax, wait a month or two. We’re expecting a lot of glitches, and things could be less than cromulent for a while.”

No, Governor Palin, the truth behind the ACA mess is that Obama and his gang of golfing buddies are idiots.

OK, so there was evildoing. For example, as Forbes reported: “HHS bureaucrats knew [forcing the uninsured to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping] would make the website run more slowly. But they were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans would scare people away… Obamacare wasn’t designed to help healthy people with average incomes get health insurance. It was designed to force those people to pay more for coverage, in order to subsidize insurance for people with incomes near the poverty line, and those with chronic or costly medical conditions…This political objective — masking the true underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans — far outweighed the operational objective of making the federal website work properly.”

There was corruption too. UnitedHealth Group, which as one of the nation’s biggest insurers stands to make billions from the ACA, was a key contractor for the federal website.

Mostly, though, there was idiocy. Secondarily, in execution. End-to-end testing began in late September. For an October 1st rollout. What could possibly go wrong?

That’s right: secondarily.

Primarily, Obama and the Democrats were idiots to think that the ACA’s bastard hybrid of public and private could function properly — certainly not on “a project of such immense complexity. The federal exchange must communicate with other contractors and with databases of numerous federal agencies and more than 170 insurance carriers.”

Look at what happened to the Postal Service: neither beast nor fowl, the uncomfortable marriage of for-profit business and Congressionally mandated payouts has pushed an otherwise viable organization to the brink of collapse.

ACA was created in response to skyrocketing healthcare costs — a problem directly attributable to the big insurance companies, which are raping patients and doctors with extortionist rates in order to accumulate obscene profits. The common sense solution? Cut out the insurers; put them out of business. Nationalize hospitals and private clinics. Turn doctors and nurses into federal employees. Obama built the ACA to increase the big insurers’ profits even more. Thus, for example, no federal price controls on the plans to be sold through the government websites. It comes as no surprise, but sad confirmation that we were right, that insurance company stocks have soared since the passage of the ACA.

Now, with a little luck, we’re looking at the possible realization of Sarah Palin’s nightmare scenario:

“With Obamacare we have crappier health care (fewer choices, fewer doctors, and an IPAB rationing panel of faceless bureaucrats, aka the ol’ ‘death panel’ that has been admitted to existing in Obamacare), but it is very expensive for the individual American…Americans, if you’re faced with a 300% increase (or even a 65% increase like my family) in your health care premiums for crappier coverage, doesn’t ‘free’ socialized medicine all of a sudden sound appealing? And that’s how Americans will be led down the primrose path to a single-payer system. People will be frustrated, worn out, and broke under this new government burden. Many will end up concluding they’ll settle for — then demand — full socialized medicine because they’ll see how the unworkable Obamacare will break our health care system (where, presently, no one is turned away from emergency rooms and we have many public and private safety nets for people in need), along with busting our personal bank accounts.”

I never thought I’d say this, but: From Sarah Palin’s lips to God’s ears.

(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. Go there to join the Ted Rall Subscription Service and receive all of Ted’s cartoons and columns by email.)

COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL

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