On-line shopping | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: Jim Bispo's weekly column appears in the Beaufort Observer.

    Have you ever made a purchase or ordered anything on line?? Surely most of us have.

    So how does that work?? First you look for whatever it is that you are interested in. You want items of hardware so you go to the Home Depot or Lowes web site and search for whatever it is you are looking for. You want a book and you go to the Amazon or Barnes & Noble web site (or some other bookseller) and search for whatever it is you want. Alternatively you go to Google or Yahoo or some other search engine and search for whatever it is you are interested in. Invariably you will find more folks peddling whatever it is that you are seeking than you ever imagined existed. And (beware) their prices are generally all over the ballpark.

    Then what??

    After you locate whatever it is, you "check it out". You read the description; you look at the "specifications"; you read the "reviews" - if there are any and always in the hope that the 5 star reviews have not been posted by the "seller"; you look at the price. You then check other sites for better prices; being careful to factor in the "shipping and handling" costs. Then, if you decide to make the purchase, you send the item to your "shopping cart". Click on your cart and you begin the check out process.

    At this point you will be asked for your "name, rank and serial number" (i.e. what the seller needs to know in order to complete the purchase and send you whatever you ordered - often including the opportunity for you to pay extra for a delivery date that is earlier than the "standard" delivery date). You provide all that information and then you will be asked for your credit card number. Assuming your luck is holding out (i.e. the card is not rejected or some other equally unpleasant thing doesn't happen) the sale will be finalized and you will frequently be given a "tracking number" that can be used to follow your purchase from East Overshoe OK (or wherever it is coming from) to it's ultimate delivery point (i.e. your house).

    It is a system that seems to work. At least it has been working for quite some time. E-tailing is big business. It wouldn't be if it didn't work and work rather well.

    So what does the Anointed One and his sycophant Kathleen Sebelius do when they set up their On Line web site to sell insurance. (Yes, I know - finding fault with an individual of the female persuasion makes me a misogynist) The first thing they ask you to do is give them all your personal information (SSN, health history, income and Lord only knows what else - I was unable to get that far on the site). This is a requirement that must be fulfilled before you even get an opportunity to browse the site to see what is available. I got this information from a young man (at least he sounded young) who responded to my request to speak with someone on the site. Getting to speak with someone is a whole lot easier than it is to "sign up". In this typically heavy handed government operation, you have to sign up before you can browse. (Whaaat??) In the lexicon of Ms. Sebelius, "signing up" does not mean "purchasing", although she tried to convince us how well the site was doing by quoting the "sign up" number and claiming to not know the "purchase" number. If she spent on the order of a half a Billion (with a "B") dollars and included a "counter" to keep track of the number of "sign ups" but not the number of "purchases" all I can suggest is that we are in far worse shape than anyone could possibly have imagined. So she either avoided finding out the number of purchases on purpose or she was lying through her teeth when she said that she didn't know that number. If it is the latter, she would simply appear to be adhering to what seems to be the norm for this administration..

    If, after giving the ObamaCare web site all your "information", you decide not to purchase the product being offered, we are left to wonder what becomes of the data you were required to provide before you could even look at the product being offered.. Do you suppose it is sent to the same "Chicago Group" of behavioral analysts (who reportedly were responsible for the Anointed One getting reelected in 2012) to massage and provide a road map for making Nancy Pelosi Speaker again following the 2014 election?? (God forbid.) Something to think about...

    It would seem to be a fairly straightforward task to be able to identify the alternative policy coverages available - including the "deductibles" and "co-pays" associated with each level of coverage; the amount of anticipated tax credits available at various marital and family statuses; income levels, and the resulting out of pocket cost. That information should be available without your having to provide a detailed medical history (which the site tells you is not "privacy protected".) You need to provide your SSN also - before you even decide you want to do business with them. That would seem to be analogous to Amazon asking for your name, address and credit card information before you are even allowed to browse their site. How long do you suppose they would last if that were the case?? Short answer: Not long... Surely not long enough to allow Jeff Bezos to purchase the Washington Redskins. (Speaking of SSNs, it would certainly be interesting to know if the first three digits of the Anointed One's SSN are 575. Those are the first three digits of the SSNs issued by and in Hawaii before, during and for a long time after the period in which the Anointed One was born.)

    I don't really believe that Ms. Sebelius and her troops are so stupid that they couldn't have figured any ways to make the shopping easier. However, I do find it easy to believe that they are concerned that full disclosure of the cost and terms before the purchase will scare folks away. I believe they have, therefore, consciously attempted to hide the truth from the very folks being forced to purchase the insurance to make ObamaCare come even close to being financially feasible. Surely, keeping the truth hidden increased the complexity of the system by several orders of magnitude. This from what we were promised would be the most transparent Administration in history. Yeah, right...

    After hearing reports of what the premiums associated with various levels of coverage are and the outlandishly high deductibles (I have heard numbers as high as $6,000) for one or the "lower cost" policies, it is not a surprise that they want to keep those numbers away from the public (i.e. the long suffering middle class taxpayers). Likewise co-pays tend to be rather difficult to discern. It comes as no surprise that the Anointed One and his spear carriers would want keep those unpleasantries hidden while they tout how marvelous ObamaCare is..

    D'ya think??