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Leave it to the
Washington Post, this overgrown company town’s paper of
record, to put things in perspective. Along with “how to get rich
in the new Washington,” the WaPo website announced Nov. 18 that
“NSA’s got nothing on German Stasi.” “Victims of the fearsome
Communist East German secret police say: not so fast” to
comparisons of National Security Agency spying with the Cold-War
era Stasi, the Post reports. Anyone “who dared criticize
their government” — even in private — “could wind up disappearing
into its penal system for years.” Of course the Stasi was orders of
magnitude worse than the National Security Agency, agrees Gene
Healy. How comforting should that be?

View this article.

Leave it to the
Washington Post, this overgrown company town’s paper of
record, to put things in perspective. Along with “how to get rich
in the new Washington,” the WaPo website announced Nov. 18 that
“NSA’s got nothing on German Stasi.” “Victims of the fearsome
Communist East German secret police say: not so fast” to
comparisons of National Security Agency spying with the Cold-War
era Stasi, the Post reports. Anyone “who dared criticize
their government” — even in private — “could wind up disappearing
into its penal system for years.” Of course the Stasi was orders of
magnitude worse than the National Security Agency, agrees Gene
Healy. How comforting should that be?

View this article.

In a Rose Garden
speech last month, President Obama defended his health care
law, and offered some anecdotes about people it would help. One of
those people  was Jessica Sanford, who’d written to President
Obama describing her health insurance predicament. President Obama
read from the letter in his speech.

I recently received a letter from a woman named Jessica Sanford
in Washington State.  And here’s what she wrote:  “I am a
single mom, no child support, self-employed, and I haven’t had
insurance for 15 years because it’s too expensive.  My son has
ADHD and requires regular doctor visits and his meds alone cost
$250 per month.  I have had an ongoing tendinitis problem due
to my line of work that I haven’t had treated.  Now, finally,
we get to have coverage because of the ACA for $169 per
month.  I was crying the other day when I signed up.  So
much stress lifted.”

But Sanford’s story doesn’t end there.
As CNN’s Jim Acosta reports, thanks to a series of glitches,
Sanford’s insurance premiums turned out to be far higher than she
initially expected:

After Obama mentioned her story, Sanford started having
problems. Sanford said she received another letter informing her
the Washington state health exchange had miscalculated her
eligibility for a tax credit.

In other words, her monthly insurance bill had shot up from $198
a month (she had initially said $169 a month to the White House but
she switched plans) to $280 a month for the same “gold” plan
offered by the state exchange.

Sanford said she was frustrated with the state’s error. But she
decided to purchase the new plan and thought everything was
fine.

It didn’t end there either. Eventually got a second letter from
Washington’s state-run exchange. That letter, according to CNN,
stated that “there had been another problem, a “system error” that
resulted in some “applicants to qualify for higher than allowed
health insurance premium tax credits.” And because of that error,
Sanford would have to pay more still:

The result was a higher quote, which Sanford said was for $390
per month for a “silver” plan with a higher deductible. Still too
expensive

A cheaper “bronze” plan, Sanford said, came in at $324 per
month, but also with a high deductible – also not in her
budget.

Then another letter from the state exchange with even worse
news.

“Your household has been determined eligible for a Federal Tax
Credit of $0.00 to help cover the cost of your monthly health
insurance premium payments,” the latest letter said.

Sanford, who is self-employed, tells CNN that she now plans to
avoid purchasing health insurance entirely, because it’s simply not
affordable on her budget.     

It’s worth highlighting the fact that this occurred in one of
the 15 state-run exchanges that is supposed to be working better
than the federally facilitated system covering 36 states. Indeed,
Washington state’s exchange has
frequently been
touted as one of the systems that works the best among the
state-run exchanges. But those reports tend to focus on the
consumer experience—the ability of a user to smoothly navigate from
start to finish in the insurance enrollment process. Yet as
Sanford’s story shows, a smooth process can still be frustrated by
inaccurate pricing and subsidy information. The same, naturally,
would be true of incorrect enrollment data being sent to insurers,
another problem that’s apparently pervasive in the federal
system.

Sanford’s story illustrates how some the Obamacare stories that
might initially look like successes might not be once the data and
pricing issues are all sorted out, and offers a reminder that
sometimes the process of getting things straight can take weeks.
That’s why we ought to remain skeptical about the White House’s
push to improve the enrollment experience for the “vast majority of
users.” It’s not just the user end that’s broken. And even if the
website works well enough to allow most people who want to enroll
to get through the process, there’s no guarantee that it will
continue to work once they’re inside the system. 

I review Ian Bell’s excellently detailed new book
Once Upon a Time: The Lives of Bob
Dylan over at
the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Excerpts:

“The only thing they knew for sure about Bob Dylan was that his
name wasn’t Bob Dylan,” Bell writes in one of his very few, but
very apt, uses of paraphrased Dylan lyrics to explain Dylan. And
this means that although much observational power is marshaled, in
many, many pages, at the level of blood and bone and mystery,
nothing is revealed. The Bob Dylan before he came into his power
comes across full, real, understandable; you know him. The Dylan
after still feels like myth, and more significantly, doesn’t feel
like he has much if anything in common with the kid who came from
Hibbing to Minneapolis to New York City, trailing lies and
self-mythology behind him, trying to eradicate “a teenager who had
seen little of the world and done nothing out of the ordinary,”
obsessed with spewing a “pointless, enveloping cloud of
self-created mystery.”

Robert Zimmerman succeeded. He killed that guy….Whoever Dylan
was at the beginning of that trail of vital self-murders was, Bell
posits, himself a child of an alien land, Minnesota’s Iron Country,
in an alien time, before TV and rock ‘n’ roll and the interstate
highway system, those wide-open and possibility-creating killers of
a nation and a way of life…..

Bob Dylan is big.
Intentionally or accidentally, his thought and emotions and
expressions indeed have moved the world. As Bell writes about
Dylan’s 1964 buddy road trip: “they drank a lot, did plenty of
drugs, took in the reality of segregation and other strange sights,
and rambled on.” It’s like the entire 1960s white intellectual
American experience in a sentence; Dylan cannot escape being an
avatar for his people.

In 1965 he began the album that many claim marked his departure
from political and social engagement, Bringing It All Back
Home, with the lines: “Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the
medicine / I’m on the pavement thinking about the government.”
Drugs and politics and a sense of foreboding — it’s possible, as
Bell suggests occasionally, at his most mystical, that Dylan just
couldn’t escape being in tune with the world. 

My 2001 Reason essay on Dylan’s
essential, and wonderful, inauthenticity, “The
Free Floating Bob Dylan.” Also, watch Bob Dylan wriggle
masterfully out of being
forced to say how much he loves Obama.