Any Deserving Uninsured?
posted by Frank Pasquale
Judging from some bloggers’ response to the Frost family featured on the radio last week, that question appears to be on the table. I found David Lazarus’s story a compelling example of the anxiety that lack of stable health insurance can cause. Having just been diagnosed with diabetes, he’s worried about the future:
[T]he quirks and complexities of the insurance system border on madness. Through my employer, I have about as much insurance coverage as anyone. . . . I have to wonder where else my private-sector insurance will fail me in years ahead. And what happens if I get fired tomorrow? With a preexisting condition, I’m virtually uninsurable in the individual insurance market. Will diabetes leave my family destitute?
The terrifying possibility of my own loss of coverage gives me an acute sense of what the uninsured must deal with, the dreadful awareness that you and your loved ones are only one medical misstep from catastrophe. That’s unacceptable for any person who lives in the wealthiest, most advanced nation in the history of the world.
Or consider the story of a potential whistleblower who finds his insurance gone along with his job. How many such stories must be told before we can all agree there is a problem?
October 10, 2007 at 10:20 pm
Posted in: Health Law, Law and Inequality
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Responses (3)
Moz - October 10, 2007 at 11:55 pm
To most people outside the US, the problem has been around for at least 50 years. Inequality sucks, especially when it’s promoted as a good thing. It’s not so much that you’re an iniquitous country as that you’re evangelical about it. I’d rather you swapped with the Scandinavians – you lot sit at home and feel smug about your escalating inequality rather than trying to force everyone else to do the same, and let them spread their techniques for national happiness through sharing and caring.
Maryland Conservatarian - October 12, 2007 at 10:45 am
“How many such stories must be told before we can all agree there is a problem?”
well, I can’t answer for all but I’ll need to read at least 326 such stories before I’ll agree…(and a link to an angry Ezra doesn’t count as even one)
Patrick S. O'Donnell - October 12, 2007 at 10:58 am
Which is why you unwittingly serve to illustrate the truths that animate Stanley Cohen’s book, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001).
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