How's that healthcare.gov website working out for you?

I heard it was hinky, but it looks great from here, not that I need to use it. I've had excellent health-care insurance for decades. (The relevant promise for me is: If you like what you have, you get to keep it.) But I went over to healthcare.gov to see if it's up and running, to click on various headings, and run a bunch of searches, and it looked great. The front page came up instantly, and every link I clicked and every search I ran went through instantly. There was nothing slow or unfinished-looking about it.

But Drudge's top headline right now is "OBAMACRASH":



That links to a Twitchy article with the headline "Surprise! Obamacare health insurance exchange websites don’t work; HealthCare.gov a total mess." At that top of that Twitchy page is this blackly comical banner:



The real nightmare for the anti-Obamacare crowd will be if Obamacare works well enough and people are reasonably satisfied. Myself, I'm tired of the drama.

ADDED: "In Debut, Affordable Care Web Site Baffles Many Users," according to the NYT.

While the site’s search feature seemed very intuitive, often returning detailed results for queries, including “sign up for account” or “sign up for coverage,” some questions returned a blank page that simply said “No Results.” In a bit of unintentional irony, the page then asked if an answer was helpful.

Those who did make it onto the Web site seemed to appreciate the design and aesthetics. The site looks like one for a typical start-up, with clean typography and large identifiable buttons that provide direction. Unlike most government sites, Healthcare.gov feels like it was built for today’s Web users, rather than something that still belongs in a 1990s-era Web browser.

But not everyone was happy with the look and feel of the overall experience. Some complained that the site was too busy and complex, and that navigation was baffling....

"Republicans... are a bunch of dead white people. Or dying white people."

Said the college professor, secretly videoed by a student in the back row, now playing on YouTube, linked by Twitchy.

And I say: Look out all you professors. Anything you say may be taken out of context and posted on YouTube. Your hyperbole and casual humor and reenactments of the arguments of others will look quite different as the world looks over the shoulders of the captive audience you think you're talking at. The back row is no longer the back row. There are a million more rows behind that, full of people with no motive to act like they respect you.


And by the way, if you live in Wisconsin and are at least 60 years old, you have a legislature-given privilege to attend — free of tuition — classes at the University of Wisconsin.

Welcome to the future. Feel free to rant about the Panopticon wherein you find yourselves, but please at least notice you are here.

I feel like recording myself teaching and taking my own quotes out of context, as I paraphrase some argument that's made in a case, putting it in starker words to reveal problems lurking within the carefully framed language of lawyers and judges. I'd like to demonstrate how easy it would be to make me sound like a monster. (And I'm saying that partly to inoculate myself! I've got paraphrase paranoia.)

The man in the video — which I chose not to embed — is said to be a creative writing teacher. Who knows what he was up to? Maybe cranking the kids up, trying to get juices flowing. Come on, somebody, get angry. Look alive.

It's an old game. Waking up the students, but the professors need to wake up. Those students who look sleepy and blank to you all have videophones and they may be wide awake and 10 steps ahead of you.

"Washington Post’s ‘second look at statutory rape’ click-trolling inspires #WaPoPitches."

"Is the Washington Post getting into Slate’s business of click-trolling, or do the paper’s editors really think it’s time for a national conversation on sex between teachers and underage students?"

I'm skeptical that Twitter drives traffic to websites. But if it does, this ought to work...

What's more disgusting than late-term abortion? This scheme to exploit it by hiring actors & secretly taping doctors. wapo.st/11wBHIW

— Will Saletan (@saletan) April 29, 2013

Via Twitchy, which calls Saletan "soulless."