The Middle Class: It was nice while it lasted.
June 11, 2008
From today’s Christian Science Monitor:
In what experts call a “startling” development, the number of people who have health insurance but not enough to pay their medical costs has spiked from 16 million in 2003 to 25 million in 2007, according to a new analysis.
They’re called the underinsured – working Americans whose employers don’t provide health insurance so they have to buy it on their own, or who have jobs that offer only catastrophic plans with high copayments and deductibles in the thousands of dollars. An increasing number are solidly middle-class.
Seems to me the evidence is mounting that America is dividing into a nation of the working poor and the very rich, with few people left in between. Anyone interested in preserving the Republic should be concerned. As Plutarch said, “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”
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June 11, 2008 at 10:06 AM
I always thought that universal health care could solve a lot of problems. It would make American businesses more competitive, give people less to worry about, allow people to have larger paychecks for short term spending, and would be one less thing people have to worry about.
I think if people didn’t have to worry about making a choice between medicine for a kid or getting some a tooth fixed on they could focus time and energy on other things and be more productive.
To me the positives of UHC vastly outweigh, if any, negs.
June 11, 2008 at 11:16 AM
And this surprises how? We live in a country that has never cared for the poor, ever.
June 12, 2008 at 4:49 AM
There is no middle class, profiting from the provision of healthcare is an obscenity. The quote from Plutarch is apt. I wish I could remeber who said that a society should be judged by the manner in which it deals with it’s most vulnerable.
Gloves off free market capitalism is dictatorship. Dictatorship of the markets – how crazy are we to allow such nonsense have precedence over human life?