In Sickness and in Health (Insurance)

Re “Health Benefits Inspire a Rush to the Altar, or to Divorce Court” (front page, Aug. 13): The grotesque reality of my life has been constant constraint by the need for health insurance. With a congenital heart condition and a degenerative eye condition, I married my wife while in graduate school because I was no longer eligible for my parents’ group plan, and at the time few graduate programs offered grouphealth.

My career choices were dictated by the knowledge that I needed group health: the tenuous life of an academic in a tough job market seemed too risky, so I switched to law school. I avoided private-sector legal jobs upon discovering that many firms do not provide group insurance but expect individual lawyers to find individualhealth plans, so I ended up working for the state.

Fortunately, things have worked out for me so far. It was not desperate need, such as you described, but a sense of obligation and responsibility that drove me to make major life decisions based onhealth insurance needs (I do not have family who could foot the bill for open-heart surgery). But only in America are people with pre-existing medical conditions forced to plan every aspect of their lives around the need for grouphealth insurance. I have often toyed with the thought of emigrating to Canada or Britain simply to escape the constant, gnawing, lifelong fear of what might happen should my grouphealth for any reason ever lapse.

news source : http://www.nytimes.com/