Sick of It

Adventures in the land of the Best Health-Care System in the Worldâ„¢:

They borrow leftover prescription drugs from friends, attempt to self-diagnose ailments online, stretch their diabetes and asthma medicines for as long as possible and set their own broken bones. When emergencies strike, they rarely can afford the bills that follow.

The article is about how you get health care if you’re a 20-something living and working in New York City. However, I suspect this is true of vast numbers of 20-somethings throughout America. And I want to emphasize that we’re talking about children of the middle class. I’m not saying children from lower-class families don’t deserve health care as much. The point is that if this were a coal mine, the canary would be decomposed to a pile of bones and feathers by now.

Of course, some healthy young people who are eligible to get health benefits from employers choose not to do so because they are foolish. But many more, I think, either don’t get health benefits from their jobs or honestly cannot afford what they’d have to pay to join their company group insurance plan.

Today, the same people on the Right who fought S-CHIP expansion tooth and nail suddenly care about young people, although not about their health. Little Lulu and some of the other hysterical shriekers are pushing “porkulus” protests against the stimulus package. Lulu’s got photos of children and youths holding signs saying “I don’t want to pay for the ‘swindle-us’ package” and “Say no to generational theft.” But when Moveon produced videos like the one, for some reason the Right was not moved.

But as Steve M says, if the Right wants to waste its time with tactics that didn’t work for the Left, who am I to complain?