Maggie's Farm

I am not an Obamacare fan, Barrister, and I agree with many of your points.

But if you had any children under 26 you might not make such snarky comments about giving health insurance to this group of people. Bear in mind that most people who have health insurance at work are paying more and more each year for it, and the deductibles, copays, etc. are constantly increasing. It's merely a matter of a couple keeping on paying for a family plan rather than just paying for one or both of the couple. They are paying for this insurance.

My friends at work and at church have children just out of college with excellent degrees in things other than grievance studies who are all under 26. I'm fortunate to have one who is employed full time. Most of the kids are feverishly paying off student loans. Most of the kids who are not independently wealthy and following their bliss making movies are now working multiple part-time jobs and borrowing their parents' car to get to work at all, while living at home, because they cannot find full time work with health benefits and cannot afford the 2000 a month rents around here. Not everybody has a pack of 4 friends to get an apartment with.

Many of these kids are actively involved in helping their parents care for aging, sick or disabled family members, and are also helping married siblings in the area by giving them relief babysitting. These kids are decidedly NOT slackers but young people with a strong sense of family obligation, and also young people who (like most of us if we are honest about what we were really like in our twitter pated youth) don't know exactly what they want to do with the rest of their lives professionally.

Most of them resist jumping into graduate school to escape unemployment because they don't want to emerge with hundreds of thousands in debt into an uncertain job market.

Not every kid is cut out to be a hedge fund pirate (or to marry one) or to be an entrepreneur. The kids who have been scholars and academic stars all their lives are no longer going into academia because universities have become PC and there aren't enough jobs any more in serious academic disciplines. Creeps who insist on "relevant" college majors have gutted universities of classics, history, archaeology, art history, and religion departments out of the belief that students who major in Greed will somehow create a better America....

The blue collar kids I know who skipped college (as this blog irresponsibly encourages young people to do) largely languish between part-time jobs they get when Mom harasses Uncle Vinny to bring them on part-time to his construction site. But they only get a day or two (unless something like Sandy hits which provides jobs for everyone for awhile) because the contractors prefer to hire non-English speaking illegals who will not sue them if they get disabled in unsafe working conditions and who they can pay below minimum wage. The kids I know who are eager to work manual labor or skilled trades can't get apprenticeships because the electricians, plumbers, etc around here don't do those any more. They just hire illegal Russians or Mexicans or whomever. Easier than training an American kid, even an eager and willing one. The American kids get part time and summer jobs, and get turned down at all the fast food and Dunkin Donuts type jobs they apply for (take a look at WHO is working there, it isn't native born North Americans).

Now, you might suggest that they just go West or South in search of work, and some of them do.

The bravest ones join the services. We recently mourned a paragon of a kid who came back from brave service in Afghanistan and committed suicide. PTSD. God rest his soul.

But the part of the equation that I never hear discussed on this blog is family ties. A young person who worries about the parent starting to show signs of Alzheimer's, or the sibling who is depressed, or the working mommy cousin they want to help with the kids. People try to stay places for positive reasons, not just inertia.

My father's peer group of bosses sneered at working class unwillingness to leave a neighborhood for the sake of work opportunities, but my parents moved us all over the world to places where we never saw extended family and were isolated. Personally, I think the blue-collar perspective of staying close to family is far wiser than the insanity of moving across the country for a company that has zero loyalty to you and will not give a damn if the move breaks up your marriage, destroys your kids lives and breaks your parents' hearts.

As far as insurance til kids are 26, this is an absolute God send. There is a chance that a child will get a full time job with benefits by the time they are 26. So it tides them over.

The other issue is simply one of what do parents do who have disabled or ill children? Many of us can breathe a sigh of relief that they are at least covered til they are 26, and then maybe one of us parents will die and the life insurance from them will help pay for the medical care for the kid while the surviving spouse tries to care for them. Rich old white guys have the luck to die suddenly of a heart attack, but parents of disabled kids pray that at least one of them will live forever so they can take care of the kid.

Excuse my rant, but I think some sympathy for this generation of kids would be in order. I am extraordinarily impressed by the ones I know. They are decent, intelligent, dedicated to friends and family. They have grown up in an era of revoltingly corrupt political leaders, dishonest bankers, and companies that would consider Captain Jack Sparrow too sentimental and kind to keep on the payroll. They have had their chidlhoods blighted by parental narcissism, parental divorce, parental unemployment (take a look at the stats on how many American middle class males over the age of 45 are actually in the workforce any more--they aren't all millionaires, and it isn't that they are voluntary hippies). We in our generation have set them an abominable example. We indulge ourselves and, on our watch, this country has accrued vast debts that will weigh down these kids for life.

To be niggardly about covering their doctors' visits for a few more years on top of everything else? Really!

You should stick around, and perhaps the intelligence and good manners of the regular commenters may rub off. This is a blog that prides itself on spirited and polite discussion.

I agree with your comments. Especially about the end of life care. A coworker recently died agonizingly over months being literally tortured by chemo that may have prolonged her life by perhaps a few weeks but that made her last months terrible (and cost tens of thousands of dollars a month).

By contrast, when my golden developed cancer at age 11, we were told that the expensive treatment proposed wouldn't significantly prolong his life. So we didn't inflict it on him. He lived happily two and a half years, then died two days after galloping on the beach with his friends. Why do we torture people when a dog is allowed to die so much better?

I like Gone with the Wind's plan. Show some respect to Americans to decide for themselves. But commenter jma highlighted the core problem: there are still going to be 30 million uninsured, and what to do with them? Because in this country plenty of people refuse to pay for their own insurance but then they still expect the rest of us to cover their care when their denial has to give way to a bad diagnosis or an accident and they need expensive treatment. People can fight about whether sick people should pay higher premiums than healthy ones, but at least people who buy their own private insurance are buying into the notion that they are responsible to cover their own risk.