Huh. Even escort services like to talk about Obamacare...

As most people know, website owners have a variety of methods of tracking the metrics of who's visiting their site, including tools like Google Analytics and the like. Depending on which analytics solution you use, you can track not only how many people visit per hour/day/week/month, but their exact IP addresses, rough latitude/longitude, what type of operating system/web browser they use and even the resolution of the monitor they're viewing the site on.

You can also generally track how they found your site--that is, which link on which other website brought them to yours. For example, most visitors who don't load the site directly come from Twitter or via Facebook, as you'd expect, but other major traffic sources are links from the Washington Post, Slate, the MaddowBlog, Salon or other "official" news/opinion sites. Obviously whenever Paul Krugman gives me a shout-out at the NY Times, that causes a big spike. After that, it tends to be healthcare-specific sites such as healthinsurance.org, Modern Healthcare and so on, followed by other "unofficial" blogs such as Xpostfactoid, Lawyers, Guns & Money, Balloon Juice etc.

And then, every once in awhile, I'll receive traffic from...a different type of website.

Case in point: "ECCIE.net".

I had no idea what this one was, but several people have visited this site via theirs, so I decided to take a look at the context, and lo and behold...

Whoops. Huh. Um...ok, then.

Not just an "escort service" but apparently an "escort/client information exchange". An entire community devoted to the industry.

Apparently they have an active message board/forum community...and it appears that at least some of their members are just as concerned with health insurance (or politics, or both) as anyone else.

Anyway, while I certainly appreciate my work here being used to educate people about how well/poorly the Affordable Care Act is faring, and being used to debunk false claims, the level of discourse is...well, about what you'd expect.

(I was gonna link to the site, but it's absurdly NSFW, so here's a screenshot from the comment thread to give you an idea...

(sigh) Of course, they're actually wrong here: Only about 12.8 million people have actually selected a private policy via the ACA exchanges; of those only about 10.3 million are actually piad up and enrolled as of today; and of those, only about 53% are newly insured. The rest of the 16 million or so newly-covered folks are via Medicaid, for the most part. Plus, of course, I'm not the Robert J. Wood Foundation; they're just one of the companies advertising on this site.

Still, I guess I should be flattered...