You’ll be taxed unless you buy for-profit insurance under Obamacare. But the websites you’re supposed to use to sign up don’t work. They crash. You can’t check if your local hospital or doctor participates in a given plan. You can’t find out if you’ll get a subsidy.
Unexpected Error
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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Are all states experiencing identical problems? Are some worse off than others (due to local action)? I’m sure that all of them make checking to see what hospitals are covered an impossible thing, but I’m hearing conflicting reports about how uniformly screwed up the system is.
There is the federal website, whose problems are well-documented, and then there are the state websites and the District of Columbia website, most of which don’t work well or at all. Apparently Kentucky got plaudits for doing a less than crappy job, so there is that. Performance has varied across the spectrum, as you might expect.
Elsewhere on the Internet, I have engaged in spirited discussion with Obama defenders who deny that anything is wrong at all and say that they themselves, or someone they know, or someone who knows someone they know, has been able to successfully buy a plan. But then when I ask how they are able to purchase a plan without being able to know whether their doctor is included, they go silent.
Bear in mind, and this is something that is very easy to forget, the White House and both political parties employ thousands of full-time Web commenters to go out online and place Democratic or Republican Party talking points in comments sections such as this one. That’s not paranoia. That’s a fact.
So when you see comments that don’t stand up to logic, that’s very likely explanation.
Not to worry, Ted – I’m certain that if someone dies trying to log in to one of these sites, the tax surcharge will not be levied. Of course, this mess could have been avoided by going for a single-payer solution directly over the national (federal) budget, as in many countries, including my own, Sweden, but that would have meant depriving the insurance companies of their pile, which is simply not done in Washington….
Henri