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Obamacare: I Have the Dish

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Ted Rall

For this week’s syndicated column, I’m going to continue my adventure with Obamacare (spoiler alert: it’s a disaster). Here’s a sneak preview:

Miracle of miracles, I was finally able to comparison shop on New York State’s healthcare marketplace.

If you’re like me, and you have a suffix (Sr., Jr., III, IV, V) in your name, the website does not know what to do. It kind of explodes.

All the plans offered by New York State do not allow you to go “out of network” for healthcare. In other words, you have to use a doctor in each private insurer’s list, or they don’t pay a cent of reimbursement. But — Catch-22 — there’s no way to find out whether your doctor, or your local hospital, or clinic — is on the list because the site’s primitive search function is “disabled” “due to overwhelming response.” Call me underwhelmed.

So that’s that.

Then there’s the rates: not low. Not affordable. Not, as Obama said, comparable to your cellphone bill.

New York State’s healthcare plans range from Fidelis Care’s “Bronze” plan at $810.84 per month to $2554.71 per month for something I didn’t bother to look up because if I had $2500+ a month to spend on doctors, I’d buy a doctor and have him/her live with me and dole out pills like I was Michael Jackson.

The deductibles — the amount you pay out of pocket every year before you the insurer has to give you anything at all — are outrageously high. Fidelis Care Bronze has a $3000/year deductible per person. I’m in pretty good health; it’s a rare year I spend that much on doctors.

After the $3000/year deductible, they pay 50% of your bills. So if you rack up $5000/year in medical bills, you pay $4000 and they pay $1000. Pretty damned crappy.

Worst of all, and contrary to the Obama Administration’s claims that we’d be able to apply for subsidies to offset these high insurance rates, there’s no sign of how or where you do that on New York State’s website.

This experience reminds me of Obama’s Make Home Affordable scheme, the voluntary refinancing plan the big banks used to avoid refinancing mortgages for distressed homeowners. I knew Obamacare would be bad, but I seriously had no idea it would be this bad.

Obamacare is Currently Unavailable

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Ted Rall

It’s Day 6 of Obamacare — and the healthcare exchange websites still aren’t working. Wanna know how not working they are? Here’s how much not: Google officially lists New York State’s healthcare marketplace as “Site Currently Unavailable.” Check it out:

This, President Obama + Obamabot defenders, is not a “glitch.” This is a fuckup. And it prompts some questions, like:

1. How many people will get tired of this shit and simply stop trying? If 47% of web users abandon an e-commerce website if it fails to load in 3 seconds, how many will give up and eat the $75 fine if it fails to load in 6 days?

2. Given that the available time to sign up is being eaten up by these inexcusable delays in implementation, will Americans get an extension, extra time to enroll?

Ted Rall at Medium.com

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Ted Rall

Medium.com rewards cartoonists whose readers click and share their work. So…My cartoon about how the Internet kills creativity – or at least creators – is at The Nib. Please check it out. It’s free for you, pays for me.

Live on BBC

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Ted Rall

I’m going to be on the BBC world service radio program at about 4:15 PM Eastern time today. We will be discussing the government shutdown and how cartoonists and other humorists are covering it and analyzing it – or not.

Obamacare’s Disastrous First Week

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Ted Rall

Watching the Sunday morning talk shows, it is striking how Democrats and members of the Obama administration are spinning the disastrous launch of the healthcare marketplace exchanges as glitches that they had anticipated.

They didn’t anticipate this. If they had, they would’ve told people a week before not to bother to sign up right away. It is unbelievable what a crappy job they did to get these things ready.

If I were Pres. Obama, I would be furious. How hard is it to set up a website? What do they mean, they didn’t expect millions of people to sign up? Why not? When you know that millions of people are uninsured, and then you open a website that purports to solve that problem, what do you think is going to happen?

Over 8 million people attempted to sign up for healthcare this week, but we have no idea how many of them succeeded. Probably fewer than a few hundred thousand. I wonder, how many people will just simply throw up their hands and decide to pay the $75 fine next year? I wouldn’t be surprised if as many as 1 million Americans decide to go uninsured because they were unable to get anywhere this week. Studies have shown that people get discouraged very easily online. People tend to leave a website if they can’t load it up within five seconds or less.

And that is completely Obama’s fault. What an idiot. Maybe if he spent a little bit less money droning Muslims and a little bit more money on his top legislative priority…

Isn’t surprising that they can’t hit the right people with drones. Maybe the Republicans are right when they say government can’t do anything right.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Ted Rall Signs Up For Obamacare, Part I

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Ted Rall

Here’s How It Went

My pre-October 1st cartoon about the then-impending launch of the Affordable Care Act (henceforth to be referred by the initially insulting, then appropriated, now drolly cute Obamacare) anticipated that the websites for the 50 states’ “healthcare marketplaces” would immediately crash.

Even after all these years and all this crap, there are still Obama defenders and they jumped down my virtual throat. Faithless! They cried. They were right. I am faithless. And I was right about the crashes. Though the pro-Obama media made excuses for the Administration’s lack of preparedness: “But it remained unclear whether the array of problems — many people received messages saying the system was down, and others were unable to create accounts to buy insurance — stemmed more from heavy traffic or from flaws in design,” reported The New York Times. I’ll pick “(b) flaws in design.” Cuz, like, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that millions of people would check out those sites yesterday.

Which is why I waited until today.

Here’s how it went.

Step one: Find the site. Not a problem for an English-speaking, web-savvy, former computer programmer who went to an Ivy League engineering school (though they did kick me out). To the Google! Honestly, though, I shouldn’t have had to do this. Everyone should have received a mailing containing the basics, including the URL. I get a postcard every year telling me where to vote. Why didn’t the government do the same thing for Obamacare?

Here’s what came up:

The website came right up. So far, so good. Yes we can! O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma! But then…an Error Message. Actually more of a You Might Get an Error Error Message. Which is even more confusing than an Error Message. It’s a like a store that puts a sign on its window reading “Maybe Closed, Maybe Open.”

Come back later? That’s not the American way! Did Chris Columbus come back later? (Basically, yes, but shut up. Telling people who know facts to shut up is the American way!) Did the Conquistadors come back later? (They were Spanish. SHUT UP!)

I need healthcare today, not tomorrow. Well, I do need it tomorrow, but you know what I mean. I hope, because clearly I don’t.

Anyway: onward!

What is an “insurance assistor”? Does it involve anal probes? I’m not asking and I’m not telling. “Get started” — that’s me!

Now I am not so happy. Registering for anything online sucks. Can’t I just log in with Facebook or Twitter or Klout like I do for everything else? Apparently not.

Let’s create an account:

Good news! The User ID I wanted is available. I’m ready to go on a mad shopping spree for some awesome Obamacare!

Or not so much.

I have to wait for the confirmation email to arrive.

Waiting…waiting…waiting…there it is.

I can click. I will click. There — I clicked.

A new browser window opens.

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OK, President Obama, you’ve got me back. Drones forgotten! Bankster bailouts a thing of the past. Who could resist the charm of a government program whose Secret Question Options include “first concert ever attended” (Sid Vicious solo) and “favorite comic book / cartoon character as a child” (Peanuts / Popeye)?  The “band poster” (Blondie, or was it The Clash) question is — dare we say it? — hip!

Let’s not dwell on the “last 5 digits of your favorite rewards card.”

 

I picked a password.

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There’s a lot of clicking “continue” to do. But I’m American. Like Coronado!

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Back to the first screen:

 

 

Obamacare is a metaphor for the Sisyphean metaphor for life: back to the beginning, under the virtual rock of the Sort of Error Message.

“Click Here to Login”? Sure. But then:

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Ooo, minimalism. I’ll reload.

Did you know, an artist once defined minimalism as an empty room containing one cat. I think he did. Or she.

Reload.

I tried to factcheck the cat line online, but I couldn’t find it. Maybe I dreamed it up. I slept a lot during art class. Reload. 9 am class with the lights off to show boring slides, what did they expect? Reload.

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Whoa, there it is!

I don’t need no stinkin’ “invitation code.” I’m me. I invite myself in, yo!

Hm. Rules of Behavior.

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Whatever. Not reading them any more than I’m reading the 57-page Terms and Conditions for updating to crappy new iOS7 on my phone.

Next up: a form where I’m asked to enter my full legal name (if you have a suffix bigger than “V” you’re out of luck), Social Security Number, gender, date of birth, address, phone number, email address, language preferences — can’t they get this stuff from the NSA? — and my consent to a General Privacy Attestation (the DMV? really?).

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But if I were blind, I couldn’t read the notice…

Next: some freaky Facebook-style (after you get locked out) identity verification questions that prove they already know all about you.

Reload…reload…reload…

Reload

It’s taking forever. Fifteen minutes so far. I’m afraid to hit reload. What if I lose all the work I put in so far?

The website moves glacially. Reminds me of that time I tried to buy train tickets in India online. I only got through at night New York NYC time because, it turns out, there’s actually someone processing the tickets manually on the other end, and they only work during the day.

So.

It’s been two hours. Deadline time is upon me.

That was interesting. All I need to get me some Obamacare is to:

  • Finish confirming my identity with creepy Facebook-like questions
  • Enter info about my family
  • Do something called a “Public MEC”
  • Enter my income details
  • Summarize my income, which apparently means something other than income details
  • Other stuff, whatever that is
  • Shop for a plan

As the Aetna insurance company says: “Exchanges are new and easy to use.”

If I’m ever able to access one, I’ll surely be able to confirm that.

(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

P.O. Box 2760, New York, NY 10163; (917) 864-6545 / TED RALL ONLINE: rall.com

RALL     10/2/13

 

Book News

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Ted Rall

So there’s quite a bit going on on the book front.

Coming out on March 25, 2014 is “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.”  The book will include prose chapters, comics, graphic journalism, and photographs from my 2001 and 2010 trips to Afghanistan. The theme of the book is comparing and contrasting Afghanistan at the beginning of the US occupation with the end: what got better, what got worse, and what didn’t change at all. It’s a look at America’s longest war and the folly of rampant interventionism abroad. People who supported my trip to Afghanistan in 2010 will receive copies in advance. As always, I will offer signed copies here through the website, and you can order them directly through me. If you prefer, you can also order the book online as a pre-order. That also helps me. So it’s really up to you.

If you enjoyed my graphic novel “The Year of Loving Dangerously,”  you will soon have a chance to help support another collaboration between me and Spanish cartoonist Pablo G. Callejo.  Pablo and I have a new project: a fictional graphic novel that comments on the state of journalism and war correspondency in particular, and the desperate ends that some journalists will go to – well, at least one – to save himself and maybe go a little further than that. It’s kind of like Breaking Bad meets To Afghanistan and Back. It’s a very cool project, and one that I look forward to finishing, but unfortunately there’s no way to get this thing off the ground without asking your support through Kickstarter. There will be some pretty cool incentives, so hopefully when the time comes, you’ll be interested. Watch this space. Probably looking to do this within the next month or so.

I have a number of possibilities for what comes after that.  And I’m very much interested in your opinion. Which of the following appeals most to you?

  • A book-length editorial cartoon about drones?
  • A book targeted to the young adult market about young people, modeled on Occupy Wall Street but more militant, who succeed in overthrowing the government of the United States?
  •  A sequel to The Year of Loving Dangerously?

I am discussing the possibility of collaboration with two extremely funny writers about wildly divergent projects.

ANEWDOMAIN.NET COLUMN: NSA PRISM Social Network: Why I’d Quit Facebook

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Ted Rall

Here is my latest column, not syndicated but exclusively for ANewDomain.net.  Since she will ask, and since I appreciate the fact that you care about such things, yes, they pay and they pay a decent rate. But that won’t keep happening unless they get a lot of click throughs from people like you. So please check out the piece and if you like it please forward it. And if you don’t like it please forward it anyway.

The topic is the latest revelation by Edward Snowden: the NSA has developed the world’s most sophisticated social network to track your movements. Congratulations! You’re already a member and you’ll never even know it.  Which is too bad, since the more big data you have access to the easier it is to create a great social network. The least the NSA could do is let us be active participants.

A Cartoonist Called It

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Ted Rall

Two days ago I published a cartoon, Get Ready for ObamaCare, that predicted that the websites for the new Healthcare Marketplaces would crash.

Here’s what happened.

Countless Obamabots slammed me over that cartoon, saying I was wrong. Shall I hold my breath waiting for those strident suck-ups to admit they were wrong?

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Is Rand Paul America’s #1 Liberal?

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Ted Rall

Libertarians Replace Democrats as Warriors Against Crazy Presidents

There once was a time (before the 1980s) when liberals were a powerful force against executive overreach. Democrats like George McGovern opposed wars of choice. Democrats like Frank Church exposed the CIA, which led to an executive order (by President Ronald Reagan!) that banned political assassinations. A Democratic Congress held impeachment hearings against Richard Nixon, in part because he violated the privacy rights of a few hundred Americans by tapping their phones. Millions of lefties marched against the Vietnam War — it didn’t matter that the president was a Democrat.

Things have changed.

A “liberal” president and his Democratic congressional and media allies aren’t fighting the good fight. They’re committing the worst crimes.

And so, following what Chris Hedges called “the death of the liberal class,” where the Hellfire missiles fly and in streets that ought to be full of protesters, naught but crickets, here’s what’s left:

The most liberal politician in America is a right-winger.

Rand Paul, who in May led a 13-hour filibuster in the Senate over Obama’s drone war, is the mainstream’s point man against dystopian killer air robots. This is the kind of thing that, had even a Democratic president like LBJ had been up to, would have had Democrats and the liberal media up in arms.

Even though an out-of-control White House is leaving open the option of using drones to blow up Americans on American soil (not that it’s OK in Pakistan), Democrats are nowhere to be found. At least 4,000 people — by law, all innocent since none were charged by a court — have been assassinated under Obama’s orders. Meanwhile, liberal politicians sit on their hands. Progressive media outlets scarcely mention these horrors, and when they do it’s in tepid tones that rarely call out Obama as the blood-soaked mass murderer he is.

Is Rand Paul so far right that, like Pat Buchanan back when, he comes all the way around the back to the left? Are Paul’s maverick stances just a marketing program to draw attention to himself, in preparation for 2016? Or is his brand of libertarianism genuine? Whatever the motivation, Paul has become the most, perhaps the only, establishment political figure expressing a progressive vision on a host of incredibly important issues…issues that have been abandoned by the state-sanctioned Left.

Paul, a right-wing Republican who believes Israel can do no wrong, is nevertheless he establishment’s most passionate defender of privacy rights. The libertarian scion has sponsored a bill that would prohibit the NSA from intercepting and storing Americans’ phone records. (Because the NSA charter limits its activities to foreign intelligence gathering, the phone tapping and other Orwellian programs revealed by Edward Snowden are illegal. The bill would ban the phone intercepts explicitly.)

Only four senators are backing this progressive legislation. Paul is the only Republican; most Democrats continue to defend Obama and his NSA, whose totalitarian approach to stealing our information — they take it all — makes East Germany’s “Lives of Others” Stasi look like nosy neighbors. Paul, a free-market purist, wants to overturn the vile Patriot Act, get rid of the useless TSA (“The American people shouldn’t be subjected to harassment, groping, and other public humiliation simply to board an airplane”), and states openly that proposals for Congressional oversight of the NSA — typical, lame sops to public disgust, and Congress was supposed to be doing that all along, weren’t they? — won’t be enough.

“The Constitution doesn’t allow for a single warrant to get a billion phone records,” says the senator from Kentucky. “They basically, I believe, are looking at all of the cell phone calls in America every day.”

The most liberal Democrats in the Senate? They’re collaborators with Obama’s Gestapo.

Dick Durbin sporadically issues some pretty, progressive-esque, pro-privacy noises about reining in the NSA, yet voted to renew the Patriot Act, which captures Americans but not terrorists. Al Franken is pro-fascist security state. “I can assure you that this isn’t about spying on the American people,” Franken said. Actually, that’s exactly what it’s about.

When George W. Bush was in power, “liberal” California senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein railed against NSA spying on Americans, calling it an impeachable offense. Now that the president is a member of their party, Boxer is silent and Feinstein is the NSA’s PR flack.

On a lot of issues, Rand Paul’s stances are contemptible. Exhibit A: He opposed the Civil Rights Act as a violation of “state’s rights,” the clarion call of the segregationist Old South. Yet on many of the existential questions of our time, radical policies that have transformed the United States from a democratic republic to a terrifying authoritarian state that uses brute force to subjugate a vast global empire, Rand is on the side of the angels — far more so than the self-defined progressives who claim to value civil liberties while running interference for the insular, violent and repressive Obama Administration.

Rand stood tall against Obama’s fascist National Defense Authorization Act, which allows the federal government to kidnap U.S. citizens and throw them into prison forever without charging them with any crime. “His signature [on the NDAA] means indefinite detention without charge or trial, as well as the illegal military commissions, will be extended,” said Anthony Romero of the ACLU of Obama.

Naturally, the Republican establishment is pissed off at Paul.

GOP columnist Charles Krauthammer slammed Paul as “politically radical” and “socially liberal.” (No comment on whether spying on every American, or assassinating innocent civilians, is “radical.”) Chris Christie, a top 2016 presidential contender, calls Paul’s suspicion of endless wars against Middle Eastern countries “dangerous.” (Unlike the wars?) John McCain calls him a “wacko bird” (takes one to know one) for opposing drones.

If you want evidence of the crisis of the two-party system, look no further than the strange new bedfellows of the age of Obama. Even before the Snowden leaks, 70% of Democrats and 77% of Republicans believed the NSA was violating their privacy. Both Democrats and Republicans who felt this way thought the NSA wasn’t justified: 51% and 52%, respectively.

Even in Congress, a “loose alliance of lawmakers” is allied against the leadership of their own parties” on issues like the NSA and Obama’s desire to attack Syria.

Though nascent, the libertarian-left attack against the liberal-conservative establishment is a big deal. This tendency, as Marxists call it, can develop in one of two directions. There might be a dramatic political realignment such as 1932, when FDR’s New Deal began to move African-Americans and white Southerners into the Democratic camp. Or — I think this is more likely — newly exposed fissures will open, showing that the real split is between oppressed and oppressor, not “liberal” Democrat and “conservative” Republican.

(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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