Sunday, May 31, 2009

Hard to Swallow

Kathleen Pender in today’s Chronicle does an excellent job in describing the health insurance choices for newly minted college graduates (those who don’t have jobs that have health coverage, of course).

Her valiant attempt in clear, not-even-college-level English shows that our health insurance system is terribly confusing. She introduces the concepts of COBRA, HIPAA, Cal-COBRA, Medi-Cal, and pre-existing conditions, but it’s easy to imagine that typical graduates in reasonable health may choose to punt on the whole issue and go uncovered. (They shouldn’t but many will.)

When a system is opaque, expensive, and “unfair” across several dimensions and documented by many horror stories that don’t need to be repeated here, the temptation is to turn the whole mess over to the government to fix. That an imposed government solution will produce a good result is not totally impossible, but to these jaundiced eyes that outcome is very unlikely because of the moneyed interests and paucity of wisdom and courage on the part of most political leaders.

Well, I suppose it is time to pass the baton to a new generation filled with enthusiasm and energy. I just hope that the guy leading the youthful parade isn’t the pied piper. © 2009 Stephen Yuen

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