Digby Lets 'Em Have It Re: The Frost Family

The Republicans believe that people should be completely destitute, living in a one room shack and working two jobs before they "deserve" subsidized health insurance. The middle class who are one car accident or one cancer diagnosis away from losing their jobs, being unable to afford either the cadillac COBRA plans from their employers (my last one here in California was $1700.00 a month and I'm healthy) must not be allowed to keep ANY assets.They must be, as Steyn's pal wrote, "dying on the streets with sores on their bodies" before they qualify for aid.

But, of course, neither will they necessarily even be able to buy private health insurance at any price even if they do live in a one room apartment with their four kids and work two jobs. (I was turned down recently because I had had gum surgery in 1996.)

This is the world in which we live. Insurance companies only want to cover young, healthy or rich people. And even if you manage to pay the expensive premiums with huge deductibles, they will try to find a way to avoid paying for your care anyway. That's the way it works. If you are lucky enough to have health insurance at your employer you'd better hope you never lose that job. More importantly, you'd better hope you never get sick.

One of the things these snotty critics fail to acknowledge is that even if the Frosts had had private health insurance, after their kids got sick they would very likely have had to go bankrupt. Those kids spent five months in the hospital. The bills came to the millions of dollars and no middle class person, no matter what good "choices" they make, can afford to pick up the 20% or so they'd have to pay under an "affordable" health care policy when something like that happens. Medical bankruptcy happens every day, although our fabulous new bankruptcy laws make it far more difficult to get a fresh start than it used to be, even if you have a special needs kid and can't work full time.

If the free-wheeling capitalists of the right wing believe that you can keep an economy dynamic, growing and flexible in a twisted system like this, they are even more blindly ideological than I thought. This is not just a moral crisis, it's an economic crisis and if these people are determined to continue down this path then I suggest the rest of us start buying land in Costa Rica because this country is going to fail. Hugely. The numbers do not add up. . . .

Full post here.