In a New York Times column last month, Nicholas Kristof was flabbergasted to find that Leana Wen, the recent med school graduate who won the contest to join him on a reporting trip to Africa, didn't have healthcare coverage. I just had to laugh -- at Kristof. Only a middle-aged establishment liberal like him could be surprised to find out that bright, ambitious, well-educated young people are in the cross-hairs of the healthcare crisis.
I know plenty of people just like Leana -- people who struggle for coverage because they would rather do interesting, fulfilling work on their own than take a conventional job working for someone else. Take my friend, an incredibly talented musician, who goes by the stage name Honus Honus. His band, Man Man, is finally blowing up after years of thankless gigs in tiny venues. My friend has a college degree. He could surely find a job that would get him coverage. But the price of pulling himself up the charts by his bootstraps is going without insurance. He works a flexible but insurance-free coffeeshop job between tours and recording sessions.
Then there's the young Internet entrepreneur I met while working on my book, The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America. With his congenital heart condition, starting his own business meant risking disease, death, and bankruptcy by going without insurance. With no kids, he was willing to take the risk but, having traveled in Europe where coverage is assured, he understood how Kafkaesque his situation was. His plight convinced his business partner, a self-declared libertarian, that health care was an issue "where the government needs to step in and lead."
And then there's me. My career as a freelance writer is only viable because of sheer luck: my birth defect --a crooked rib, not a heart condition-- is minor and cosmetic so I can still buy insurance on the private market. Even so, my premium went up 25 percent this year (and I didn't even get the pleasure of taking up smoking!).
I'm sure Nicholas Kristof means well, but he's emblematic of a larger problem: middle-aged liberals who are slow on the uptake when it comes to realizing who's affected by our healthcare crisis. Even when their hearts are in the right place, they don't get it because they travel in circles of well-off middle-aged people. They assume the problem only plagues the underclass when it's really a problem for the well-educated and ambitious too.
There are lots of reasons we need a universal health insurance program ASAP. And one of them is, yes, to treat the poor with compassion. But it's also to help build a society where the ambitious can strike out on their own, as everything from musicians to entrepreneurs. That's what America --a nation founded explicitly so people could exercise their unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness-- is supposed to be all about.