Only in America

Surreal item in the NYT about United Health Care offering a new product that lets you insure against your being uninsurable in the future. What’s that mean? Apparently you’d pay 20 percent of the cost of a premium for an individual policy now to preserve the right to buy an individual policy later without the usual medical underwriting, should you find yourself sick and outside a group employment setting, and thus unable to get coverage. Only in our hall of mirrors system would anyone sense a business opportunity in peddling so weird an animal as this. "It’s a great hedge" against becoming uninsurable, one executive said. If we ever get to universal coverage this will seem funny in retrospect. For now it’s just more sad proof of how screwed up our whole health care situation is.