So, the lesson is that If you have insurance, don’t use it, or you’ll never get insurance again. What’s the point of health insurance if you’re afraid to get care when you need it?
When I went to my unemployment seminar lo these many months ago, the one thing everyone wanted was health insurance. Most of the crowd there had been at Bay Bank or Fleet for years and was part of the giant Bank of America buyout/layoff. Many of them were getting close to retirement. They’d have been happy to retire early, but they needed insurance. For the rest, the feeling was “I don’t care how bad the job is, or what the pay is, as long as there’s insurance before my COBRA runs out.”
It’ll get worse before it gets better, especially since political discussion these days seems to consist of illiterate xenophobes advocating English-only policies when their parents should have been practicing abstinence-only policies, and social discussion is limited to Paris Hilton in a pink leopard-print sailor outfit.
Secretly Ironic 
Love him or hate him, Mitt Romney, with the passage of the Mass. mandatory health insurance bill, has put this as the number 1 issue for the 2008 Pres. race.
The cool thing this time around (round 1 – Hillarycare) is that everyone seems to agree (Red/Blue, Rep/Dem, Con/Liberal, Libertarian/Progressive – have I covered them all?) that health care should be independant of employment. It shouldn’t matter if I run a hotdog cart, or a hedge fund, I should still have access to a doctor.
It seems to me that the alternatives today are Universal care and Health Savings Accounts. There might be others but I think they all boil down to “one payer”, or “many payers”. We may be at a point were we pick one (neither are perfect) and live with it.
Now if you’ll excuse me, its time to take my vitamin-L (Lipitor – for us over 40 types š
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