Now I’m scared.
Jesus H. Christ on a raft.
"The Bush vision is quite radical. He essentially is dreaming of a world where there is no employer-provided insurance," said Uwe Reinhardt, a health economist at Princeton University. "You buy your own insurance, but you pay the first $2,000 to $4,000 per year out of your own pocket."
(Via Sappho’s Breathing.)
So, let’s see: what are my options if Bush gets reelected and his "no more employer-provided insurance" plan succeeds?
1) Get an MBA and head for a more lucrative career in management instead of librarianship, because I sure as hell want to be earning a lot of money if I’m going to have to sock away my income in a flexible spending account.
2) Find someone rich to marry.
3) Pray really really hard that I don’t get sick, or get hit by a car, or anything else unexpected that would incur major medical expenses.
4) Look for work in Canada. Frankly, option 4 looks better with each passing day.
There should be a conclusion to this post, but I can’t think of anything more articulate to say than "I’m not joking about Canada" and "Jesus H. Christ on a raft."
I don’t know about Bush’s plan, but I do think it makes sense to buy your own health insurance if you can. If you quit or get laid off and you cannot find another job, or if you become unable to work for some reason, in most cases you won’t be able to maintain employer-provided health insurance once the COBRA period expires. A friend suffered a stroke in his early 50s, can no longer work and cannot purchase private medical insurance. Had he bought his own insurance before his stroke, he’d still have coverage.
And no, I’m not an insurance salesman.
Aha! I think you’ve figured it out, Amanda. George W. wants us to get married. This is his way of coercing middle-class women, similar to his strategies coercing poor women with TANF. Compulsory heterosexuality for everyone! Sadly, there aren’t enough rich men for us ALL to marry one. Maybe we should just marry Canadians – we could choose our partner’s gender then, too. (Although I don’t know what legalized same-sex unions in some provinces have done for immigration policy.)
I have such a low opinion of the health insurance industry in general, that nothing related to it, even out of Bush’s camp, would shock me.
That said, I cannot envision this coming to pass. Benefits are one of the more lucrative bones a prospective employer can throw to the masses as they compete for decent employees (because not all markets are as depressed as the literature field) and sometimes use for compensation. Just think of the millions of people employed by the federal, state and local governments who would be affected by it to say nothing of those in the private industry and how it would affect their prospects to employ if they don’t have that.
It’ll never happen. People will burn down the White House before they’ll pay for health insurance out of their own pocket, after so many of us have been royally screwed by the industry.
I do agree with Cleis, though, on that possibility.
I think you’re right about people not standing for it, Michelle. I’ve just gotten incredibly paranoid in recent months. Then again, people always say you’re not paranoid if they’re really out to get you…
Outer Life, you do have a point — I’m just worried about “buy your own” becoming the only option, you know?
Cleis: hee! And also, sigh. That makes a depressing amount of sense. I’m starting to expect someone to propose a Compulsory Heterosexuality Amendment to the Constitution or something. (There goes that paranoia again!)
Who says you’re paranoid? Wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest.
With regard to the CPA (compulsory heterosexuality amendment), the saving grace is that NONE of them have read Adrienne Rich. (Then again, maybe they wouldn’t be such morons if they had.)
I’m horrified by it. I _can’t_ afford what my own insurance would cost me as an individual (it’s _four_ times what it costs for my employer! and I’m stretched quite thin as it is) and I sure as hell wouldn’t be able to afford my own medical bills if I had to go in for anything more than a check-up. And you can bet your boots that no employer, having been freed of the obligation to provide health insurance, would turn the savings into increased salaries for their employees. So such a plan would push me into poverty by increasing my expenses and reducing my salary. Whee.
This is further proof (as if I needed any) that Bush lives on a different planet than the rest of us.
(Oh, and about getting one’s own insurance before COBRA expires, and thus ensuring that one’s still insurable — unfortunately it doesn’t necessarily work that way. I had my iritis while still employed by my former academic employer, and the coverage was through one of the Blue Cross/Shield companies, plus I’d had coverage with them while a grad student. So you’d think that the company would be willing to insure me again, especially since the iritis had been resolved. Well, sort of — they were willing if I would pay them $400 a month on a plan with a $2500 deductable, and several other companies were not willing to insure me at all. And I have no other health problems! So I tried to do all the right things and was screwed until I became employed full-time again, and that sort of pre-screening was no longer required.)
Perhaps my perspsective on this is biased because I’m self-employed, but I see this as no big deal: I already provide my own health insurance, and it costs a hell of a lot more than $2,000 per year. I had to go the route of forming a corporation with my wife, though, so we could qualify for the company-insurance route: health insurance for individuals is extremely hard to get and I certainly had no luck getting it. (I’m very sympathetic to Rana on that front.)
As for Cleis’s comment, I don’t think compulsory marriage (assuming marriage is defeined as two consenting adults, irrespective of their gender) is such a bad idea. I like Bush’s promotion of marriage, but it should be extended to everyone! That is, in my view, the authentically conservative position.
Kevin, I’m glad to see there are at least a few people on the right who take the “consenting adults, irrespective of gender” view of marriage. But…compulsory? To my mind, the thought of having the government dictate one’s domestic arrangements is downright creepy. I’d have thought the conservative position would be more along the lines of “people have a right to manage their private lives as they see fit, and some things are none of Uncle Sam’s business.”
Amanda,
Just to clarify, I was expressing a personal preference for privileging marriage over non-marriage, regardless of the gender of the marital partners. For a variety of reasons, which you may or may not agree with, I see marriage as being preferable to mere cohabitation; I would like to see the legal benefits of marriage (property rights, inheritance, power of attorney, health insurance, etc.) expanded by allowing any consenting adult to marry. Extending the legal benefits of marriage to non-married, same-sex couples is, in my view, necessary only because they can’t legally get married; if such a legal barrier were removed, then I would see no problem with saying (to any couple, gay or straight), “If you want these benefits, you need to get married.”
The privileging of marriage over cohabitation may be, in fact, an entirely separate topic of discussion; I’m curious about your views on this question. Assuming that gay/lesbian couples could marry, is there a positive argument for allowing unmarrieds to have all the same benefits as non-marrieds?
Whoops, meant to say “is there a positive argument for allowing unmarrieds to have the same benefits as marrieds?”
Sorry, Kevin, I initially thought you meant that you were in favor of requiring everyone to marry (which was what Cleis and I were talking about, half-jokingly and half-seriously). I do think it’s quite reasonable to draw a line between legally defined marriage, expanded to all couples regardless of gender, and religious marriage; I think the best all-around solution would be to allow religious groups to define their own marriage ceremonies and customs as they see fit, and let people choose between having just the civil kind of marriage, or the civil kind plus the religious kind. That seems to me like the most reasonable solution from a church/state separation point of view. (Not that there aren’t people out there who want to undo the separation between church and state, but we won’t go there.)
As for encouraging couples to marry rather than just live together: that I’m less comfortable with, but I’m having a hard time articulating the reasons why it bothers me. Some of it probably has to do with my generation’s overall wariness about getting married; too many of us watched our parents get divorced for marriage to seem unproblematically like a Good Thing for Everyone. But there’s more that bothers me about having the government actively promote marriage. I may have to think about it some more and make it into a separate post.