The Agora

Apparently, I'm one of the lucky ones:

For Middle Class, Health Insurance Becomes a Luxury

The majority of the uninsured are neither poor by official standards nor unemployed. They are accountants like Mr. Thornton, employees of small businesses, civil servants, single working mothers and those working part time or on contract.

"Now it's hitting people who look like you and me, dress like you and me, drive nice cars and live in nice houses but can't afford $1,000 a month for health insurance for their families," said R. King Hillier, director of legislative relations for Harris County, which includes Houston.

Paying for health insurance is becoming a middle-class problem, and not just here. "After paying for health insurance, you take home less than minimum wage," says a poster in New York City subways sponsored by Working Today, a nonprofit agency that offers health insurance to independent contractors in New York. "Welcome to middle-class poverty." In Southern California, 70,000 supermarket workers have been on strike for five weeks over plans to cut their health benefits.

We ought not to be surprised where the problem is worst. The home state of the "reformer with results":

The insurance crisis is especially visible in Texas, which has the highest proportion of uninsured in the country [~] almost one in every four residents. The state has a large population of immigrants; its labor market is dominated by low-wage service sector jobs, and it has a higher than average number of small businesses, which are less likely to provide health benefits because they pay higher insurance costs than large companies.

State cuts to subsidies for health insurance to help close a $10 billion budget gap will cost the state $500 million in federal matching money and are expected to further spur the rise in uninsured. In September, for example, more than half a million children enrolled in a state- and federal-subsidized insurance program lost dental, vision and most mental care coverage, and some 169,000 children will lose all insurance by 2005.

In the first decades after the death of Jesus, Paul and Jesus' brother James met to try to resolve the conflict between them and their followers. Both men were disappointed when that resolution eluded them. But as they parted, James said something that touched Paul. "Remember the poor," he pleaded. Paul died soon after that meeting, and he died trying to live up to James' reminder of Jesus' message.

The stories related in the Times article make a mockery of the phrase "compassionate conservatism", and the Texas governor and legislature disgrace the name Christian every time they utter the word:

Ms. Pardo, a 29-year-old from Houston, said that having no insurance meant choosing between buying an inhaler for her 9-year-old asthmatic daughter or buying her a birthday present. The girl, Morgan, lost her state-subsidized insurance last month, and now her mother must pay $80 instead of $5 for the inhaler.

[. . .]

Mrs. Stevenson's husband, Bill, lost his management job at WorldCom two years ago, when an accounting scandal forced the company into bankruptcy. They managed to pay $900 a month for Cobra, the government policy that allows workers to continue their coverage after they lose their jobs, but when the cost rose to $1,200, they could no longer afford it.

[. . .]

Carol Johnston cannot afford even doctor visits. A single mother in Houston, she lost her job in health care administration in May and said she was still unemployed despite filling out 500 to 600 applications and attending countless job fairs.

Cobra would have cost $214 a month, or more than one-fifth of the $1,028 in unemployment she gets a month. As it is, her monthly bills for rent, car, utilities and phone exceed her income.

She got a 12-month deferral on her student loans, and Ford pushed her car payments back by two months. The Johnstons rely on television for entertainment and almost never use air-conditioning, despite Houston's muggy, hot climate.

Now Ms. Johnston's 16-year-old son is losing the portion of his insurance that covered treatment for his learning and emotional disabilities because of state cutbacks.

Ms. Johnston herself does not qualify for Medicaid, the government insurance program for the indigent, because her income is too high, the same reason she qualifies for only $10 a month in food stamps. "I worry, I worry so much about making sure my son is safe," she said.

As for her own health, Ms. Johnston has two cysts in one breast and three in another but has had only one aspirated because she cannot afford to check on the others. "Do I have to move to Iraq to get help?" she asked. "They have $87 billion for folks over there," she said, referring to money Congress allocated for military operations and rebuilding.
8:22:45 PM    comment []trackback []

I never thought Iraq was another Vietnam--it was a totally different situation--but reading through some of the face the nation transcripts from the Vietnam era the other day, I was struck by how much of what officials said then sounds like what the government has been saying lately. No matter how bad the news from Vietnam was, official after official came on Face The Nation to say progress was being made, and the press just wasn't reporting it. From the day the war turned bad in Iraq, you could take the words that were said back then and put them into the mouths of today's administration spokesman and never notice the difference. Good things are happening, if only the reporters would report it. Then last week when the violence reached levels that could no longer be ignored, we finally began to get a story that was closer to reality. Major Combat was not over, we learned, because--despite previous denials--an organized, tightly controlled guerrilla force was coordinating the increasingly deadly attacks on Americans. One general said that thousands of Saddam's forces had not quit the war as it appeared when the American rolled in Baghdad, but had fallen back and further were using weapons pre-positioned for the kind of attacks we are seeing.

. . .

During vietnam three administration tried to build support for the war by hiding the bad news and emphasizing the happy news. It didn't work then and it hasn't worked now. Maybe this new candor means the administration has finally figured that out.

I think CBS just lost any chance they had for an exclusive Dick Cheney interview.
1:54:50 PM    comment []trackback []