Check out my interview about “Carrot Dating”.
LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: How I Kept Worrying and Learned to Love Drones
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I attended the Drone and Aerial Robotics Conference at New York University. I was terrified of drones…then I got to fly one myself. This is a long-form cartoon I drew for The Los Angeles Times op/ed page.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Saving Private Healthcare
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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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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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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.
LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: Santa Rosa Halloween
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I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week: Residents of Santa Rosa, California expressed skepticism Thursday about a sheriff’s deputy’s decision to shoot dead a popular 13-year-old boy who was carrying a pellet gun that looked like an assault rifle.
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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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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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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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.
