Talk about spin:

“This fast pace of sign-ups shows that New York State’s exchange is working smoothly with an overwhelming response from New Yorkers eager to get access to low-cost health insurance,” said Donna Frescatore, the executive director of the state exchange.

We’ll see later this week whether I can finally snag some insurance.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.