CONFUSED

I confess; I'm confused. I know it's a reflection of my age, but I don't understand the whole hullabaloo over the Affordable Health Care website not working. I mean, if you want it, go and get it. You can do that over the phone – maybe with some delays – or you can go to a nearby center and sign up. What's the big deal?

Reflecting my age group, my wife and I avoid purchasing anything online. Here's why. Beyond the horror stories of identity theft, there's the hassle of navigating through all those “buttons” to click through endless pages of Internet stuff. Give me a person to talk to anytime. If I were in a position to sign up for one of these insurance programs, I would go wherever and whenever instead of getting into a computer nightmare. Is having to go somewhere an unreasonable obstacle? I know that when my wife and I signed up for Medicare, given our situation, we chose to go to two different places – instead of going online – to be sufficiently instructed about what we needed to know and do. No big deal. And, in terms of dealing with websites, I know of what I speak.

This past summer, my wife and I went on an extended car trip. We do that from time to time. We go to South Florida sometimes and we finally broke down and bought one of those toll booth gizmos that allows you to drive on expressways and turnpikes without having to pay a tollbooth attendant or chuck some change down the “coin catcher” – and in the process get to feel superior to all those who don't have one and are waiting in long lines. In Florida, the program is called SunPass – clever, huh? But for trips outside the Sunshine State, the thing isn't valid. Well, this past summer we went up to the Northeast. There they have a similar thing, but they call it E-ZPass. We have a lot of friends and family up there so we go there quite a bit. Despite that, we had not purchased an E-ZPass. We decided we would do so on this trip. In Florida, it's quite an easy process to get hooked up to their system. You go to a supermarket chain store and you purchase the contraption, go home, and make a phone call. You're signed up! But that's not how it works in Maryland – the first state it made sense for us to buy an E-ZPass. You start the same way; we stopped at a supermarket and purchased the little box. But then what we had to do differed in that we had to go online in order to complete the process. Well that night, after over an hour on the damn computer, I gave up. Among all the problems I encountered, there was the omission on a scroll option display of the exact model type of my car – I eventually chose the nearest option available. In disgust, I shut the computer and was determined to call in the morning. Of course, that option was silly because what I was given – via an automated system – was a list of options that didn't exactly fit our situation since we were just driving through the state. Anyway, I tried again on my computer and, maybe because I had a night's rest under my belt, I was able to get through the steps successfully, but not without any problems. I can hear you; these old guys can't do this stuff. Maybe, but we haven't departed the scene yet and whatever is out there shouldn't be beyond us.

Anyway, I digress. The point is, if you want health insurance, go and get it. We are told that with Obamacare all of us can now afford it – or nearly all of us. I beg you, go and get it. You will be helping all of us – by increasing the pool of healthy people – and you will be adding to your own peace of mind. None of us know how well our health will hold up in the future. Besides, I am tired of paying higher health costs because some of you show up at emergency rooms without the ability to pay. Those costs are shifted to the rest of us and it's simply not fair. So do your bit and sign up.

As for the website, why not just shut it down, get it fixed, extend the open enrollment period, and tell people to sign up over the phone or in person? Once the bugs are out of the computer option, then open it up. Of course, they could have just extended Medicare to everyone at the beginning when they were considering a universal health program and that would have been the optimal option. No: we had to try to placate Republicans and ape Romneycare which of course didn't work in satisfying them since they couldn't stand to win a major concession if it meant giving President Obama any credit.