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After my mother passed away in February of 2008, I naturally did not dedicate that much time to thoughts about my own health insurance. As it turns out, I did not need to because health insurance bureaucrats did that job quite nicely for me. You see, like virtually all American undergraduate students, my health insurance benefits, as a dependent, flowed from my parent's employment. Not too long after the memorial services - flowers still lively and colorful - I received a thick letter in the mail from her employer informing me of my "rights" under COBRA. COBRA - the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 - provides a mandate for certain covered parties to continue their health insurance after termination of employment. The huge caveat - and what renders the legislation utterly useless in 98% of cases - is that this "right" to continue the health insurance entails paying the totality of the premium (fortunately, part of President Obama's stimulus package included assistance to dislocated workers in covering this premium.) Even for a healthy, non-smoking 20-year old, I quickly ascertained that shelling out in excess of several hundred dollars per month for a health insurance policy while being a fully scholarship-dependent student would effectively crush my budget. And though I had a signed internship offer in my hands, KPMG - like virtually all companies - provides no benefits to temporary employees. I was starting at Carnegie Mellon that August and would receive health coverage then, but that did nothing for my current predicament.
And thus it came to pass that, between April and August 2008, I went without any type of health or dental insurance for the first - and hopefully the last - time in my life.
I never had even considered such a possibility before. After all, I wasn't exactly the type of person who tended to slip through "cracks in the system": I had a college degree and a job at age 21, admission to one of the best graduate schools in the country, and I led a stable, hard-working life. I did all of the "right things" that we hear extolled on TV by conservative pundits. Very few of these College Republicans who hark on and on about "personal responsibility" actually paid for their full college expenses - and I did. Not too long after I had grown to embrace social democracy as a political ideology, I saw a powerful affirmation of its validity in my own life - that even doing all of the right things, in a market society, provides no protection at all against falling into the abyss.
That time has now passed, of course, but I still cannot help but think back and ponder how incredibly fortunate I was. Had I undergone a major illness that summer, not only would I have struggled immensely to pay for medication and obtain preventative care, I could have quite easily ended up tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Simply for being sick - and simply for having been in a bad spot due to the death of a parent. How did I end up in this situation? As it turns out, each year thousands of middle-class heads of household find themselves pondering the same question; suddenly unemployed with a sick child, unable to afford their own medicine and finding that retirement savings have suddenly transformed into a health savings account. Perhaps if Joe Wilson needs something to shout about, might I suggest that he direct his inchoate rage to the fight for the rights of these families?
That I can have relevant life experiences in this realm and attain this simple realization before age twenty-five - a concept with which many balding, middle-aged men in Congress (all of them with health insurance) seem to still not be able to grasp - that outright infuriates me. That some malcontent, ill-informed, and quite possibly racist redneck from South Carolina apparently finds defending the Confederate legacy of Federal defiance in his state more important than providing protection to tens of millions of Americans - that pushes me to the point of wondering if a Congress with more than four hundred members is too unwieldy and irrational of a body to serve any sort of good purpose.
The right-wing has put on display a vast array of undiluted human ugliness in recent months, encompassing everything from blatant lies and distortion, wanton indifference towards the plight of the poor and sick, pure racism, ignorance of basic economics, hypocrisy (where were the "tea-bag" folks when George W. Bush paid for two wars with tax cuts for the wealthy?), and of course childish political gamesmanship - but perhaps none of these have been more shocking than the prominent emergence of the "It Won't Happen To Me!" mentality. To be clear, it certainly won't happen to members of Congress so long as they hold elected office, nor will it happen to those in the upper 5% of our society in terms of wealth, nor will it happen to the multimillionaire insurance executives who wield an uncanny amount of influence in this reform process. But for the rest of us, the reality isn't as rosy. To state otherwise is to affirm the degree of your naïveté, the degree of your lack of experience with the real world.
The tens of millions of people without health insurance - including those denied coverage due to these infamous "pre-existing conditions" - have every right to be downright infuriated at the inaction of our Congress. But it must be stated that people with health insurance have absolutely no logical reason to be complacent as our economy continues to shed jobs at a rapid pace; even those in secure positions ought to be mindful of rapidly escalating costs; and furthermore, even with a good job and health insurance, no current laws forbid insurance companies from essentially kicking you to the curb when you get a costly illness that might adversely affect profit margins. How long would your 401(k) and IRA last if you were forced to pay for cancer treatment for yourself or a sick spouse from those funds?
Every other industrialized nation in the world - including many far poorer than us - has solved the healthcare problem, with only minor issues, and while spending far less per capita than we do in our horribly botched, profit-hungry model. They have figured out the basic actuarial reality, which is that the only proven way to drive down costs is to cover everyone, the low-cost young as well as the high-cost elderly, the healthy as well as the sick. And they have done so in ways that oftentimes preserve private insurance as an industry, but not as an industry that can literally pull the plug on patients seen as deleterious to corporate profit margins. In all of the sophomoric rhetoric about "death panels", conservatives fail to note that we have them already - in the form of the corporate boards of Aetna, Humana, and the other health insurance giants, who have shown absolutely no hesitation at putting their profits ahead of your health and your life.
Perhaps reform might proceed more briskly if fewer Americans lived in the fantasy world of total safety regarding their health. Perhaps until it has happened to you - perhaps until radically unforeseen events destroy your net of safety in an instant - you cannot understand just how fragile your healthcare rights are in our profit-oriented system.
Take it from someone who knows.
And thus it came to pass that, between April and August 2008, I went without any type of health or dental insurance for the first - and hopefully the last - time in my life.
I never had even considered such a possibility before. After all, I wasn't exactly the type of person who tended to slip through "cracks in the system": I had a college degree and a job at age 21, admission to one of the best graduate schools in the country, and I led a stable, hard-working life. I did all of the "right things" that we hear extolled on TV by conservative pundits. Very few of these College Republicans who hark on and on about "personal responsibility" actually paid for their full college expenses - and I did. Not too long after I had grown to embrace social democracy as a political ideology, I saw a powerful affirmation of its validity in my own life - that even doing all of the right things, in a market society, provides no protection at all against falling into the abyss.
That time has now passed, of course, but I still cannot help but think back and ponder how incredibly fortunate I was. Had I undergone a major illness that summer, not only would I have struggled immensely to pay for medication and obtain preventative care, I could have quite easily ended up tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Simply for being sick - and simply for having been in a bad spot due to the death of a parent. How did I end up in this situation? As it turns out, each year thousands of middle-class heads of household find themselves pondering the same question; suddenly unemployed with a sick child, unable to afford their own medicine and finding that retirement savings have suddenly transformed into a health savings account. Perhaps if Joe Wilson needs something to shout about, might I suggest that he direct his inchoate rage to the fight for the rights of these families?
That I can have relevant life experiences in this realm and attain this simple realization before age twenty-five - a concept with which many balding, middle-aged men in Congress (all of them with health insurance) seem to still not be able to grasp - that outright infuriates me. That some malcontent, ill-informed, and quite possibly racist redneck from South Carolina apparently finds defending the Confederate legacy of Federal defiance in his state more important than providing protection to tens of millions of Americans - that pushes me to the point of wondering if a Congress with more than four hundred members is too unwieldy and irrational of a body to serve any sort of good purpose.
The right-wing has put on display a vast array of undiluted human ugliness in recent months, encompassing everything from blatant lies and distortion, wanton indifference towards the plight of the poor and sick, pure racism, ignorance of basic economics, hypocrisy (where were the "tea-bag" folks when George W. Bush paid for two wars with tax cuts for the wealthy?), and of course childish political gamesmanship - but perhaps none of these have been more shocking than the prominent emergence of the "It Won't Happen To Me!" mentality. To be clear, it certainly won't happen to members of Congress so long as they hold elected office, nor will it happen to those in the upper 5% of our society in terms of wealth, nor will it happen to the multimillionaire insurance executives who wield an uncanny amount of influence in this reform process. But for the rest of us, the reality isn't as rosy. To state otherwise is to affirm the degree of your naïveté, the degree of your lack of experience with the real world.
The tens of millions of people without health insurance - including those denied coverage due to these infamous "pre-existing conditions" - have every right to be downright infuriated at the inaction of our Congress. But it must be stated that people with health insurance have absolutely no logical reason to be complacent as our economy continues to shed jobs at a rapid pace; even those in secure positions ought to be mindful of rapidly escalating costs; and furthermore, even with a good job and health insurance, no current laws forbid insurance companies from essentially kicking you to the curb when you get a costly illness that might adversely affect profit margins. How long would your 401(k) and IRA last if you were forced to pay for cancer treatment for yourself or a sick spouse from those funds?
Every other industrialized nation in the world - including many far poorer than us - has solved the healthcare problem, with only minor issues, and while spending far less per capita than we do in our horribly botched, profit-hungry model. They have figured out the basic actuarial reality, which is that the only proven way to drive down costs is to cover everyone, the low-cost young as well as the high-cost elderly, the healthy as well as the sick. And they have done so in ways that oftentimes preserve private insurance as an industry, but not as an industry that can literally pull the plug on patients seen as deleterious to corporate profit margins. In all of the sophomoric rhetoric about "death panels", conservatives fail to note that we have them already - in the form of the corporate boards of Aetna, Humana, and the other health insurance giants, who have shown absolutely no hesitation at putting their profits ahead of your health and your life.
Perhaps reform might proceed more briskly if fewer Americans lived in the fantasy world of total safety regarding their health. Perhaps until it has happened to you - perhaps until radically unforeseen events destroy your net of safety in an instant - you cannot understand just how fragile your healthcare rights are in our profit-oriented system.
Take it from someone who knows.
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