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This article sums up one of the least talked about problems that currently exists on the domestic level in our country. It’s easy enough to talk about how the elderly and young children are lacking in health insurance, but seemingly, those people that are in my age bracket (post college 20-somethings) and trying to make their way in the world have fallen into an ever growing coverage gap that is eventually going to consume a whole subsection of our society, and I think that’s wrong.

There’s issues on multiple levels, really. For one thing, there’s been a huge change over the past few decades about how much responsibility there is on a corporate level to provide for employee welfare. I would point easily at Wal-Mart, which has had a history of doing as little as possible to provide health insurance to its workers, but it’s not just there. The people in that article don’t work in Wal-Mart. They’re waiters, artists, tradespeople, etc. Most small businesses can’t really afford decent insurance, I suppose, or they don’t feel a need to insure part timers or such. I’m not sure. The point I’m trying to make is that there was a time when employers were very big on paying benefits to their employees. People used to go to jobs out of school and work there for their entire careers and get health and social benefits. Even established companies don’t always do that these days (MTV, apparently, for example, as mentioned in that article).

The other bigger issue is that I believe this is a side effect of letting our health insurance industry become completely private and mostly unregulated. I’m not saying that switching to a fully socialized system is the answer for people like this (basically, you’ll end up paying nearly 50% of your income into the system to support it, and the quality of the care might not be any better), but we have to do something. This rift will only grow as health care becomes more expensive and more young people decide they can’t afford it on top of everything else they are trying to do to live their lives out (I’m not even going to go into what their priorities might be with their money, because it should not be an issue). We’ve become little more than a nation of business, and we will let our businesses run amok day in and day out with little regard for the rest of us.

It is time that this nation wakes up and decides that, at the minimum, basic health care is the right of every American citizen. Before long, health coverage will become little more than another sign of the elite, and the rest of us will be sitting on the sidelines with baited breath, hoping to God that we don’t trip, fall, or come down with an illness, lest we go bankrupt getting what a lot of other people around the world take for granted.