COBRA Time

For me, it’s COBRA time. I should be either downstairs at the mailbox, seeing if I’ve got the information on extending my health insurance, or calling the toll-free number that my old employer—you know, the people who laid me off, not my favorite folks on this hot August day—provided me. I will do one or both by the end of the day.
It’s weird to be worrying about health insurance again from a personal perspective. Especially at the exact moment that Americans seem determined to screw up any chance of serious and needed change. Every time I go to a doctor or a dentist I think about how Hillary Clinton was right a decade and a half ago when it comes to health care, at least to the extent that something big needs to be done. I want one of those "Hillary Was Right" buttons, but I guess if she is touring African nations, then she's not obsessed with the past. She's moved on. Lucky her. I'm still one of the people left in the 1990s, wondering and worrying about health care.
Covering the uninsured in the greatest nation in the world should hardly be a matter of such debate. This is a moral imperative. It is also an economic and social one.
The fight is not new, even though the GOP is pretending that it is. I like what Rachel Maddow did on her MSNBC show a few weeks back. She showed Republican stalwarts in Congress complaining about the rush to reform; then she ran clips of President Truman, among others, calling for national health insurance. Hilarious. We’ve been talking about this issue since before the 1948 presidential campaign.
I’m lucky. I have a couple of people in my life who are really looking forward to shelling out the costs of my health insurance. But I’m not that lucky…and I know people without insurance, including a neighbor who had major surgery last week. I heard her story in the lobby last week. It turns out you can hear a lot of interesting stories in the lobby, because there are so many of us without jobs sitting around talking to one another. I think we need to get a reality show up and running.
Anyway, I am following the story about health insurance with new-found passion. I don’t know how we ever got into the business of linking health care with our jobs. And I think that even employed people should be smart enough to realize that such a connection winds up forcing unhappy workers to stay in old jobs for a reason unrelated to whether he or she likes what he is doing. The president is right about health care spending being out of control. I hope he gets something done speedily. In terms of a timeline, this month would be good for me.
But thinking back to President Truman’s passion for the topic and his inability to get the job done, I’m not terribly optimistic about the future of health care reform.