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Will Obama's health insurance mandate cause minority parents to lose their kids to foster care?

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on Sun, 07/26/2009 - 10:14am
Tags: 
single payer
health care reform

Check out this exchange on the mandate at OpenLeft:

Roughly twenty years ago
The US forced po folk to buy liability auto insurance.

It did get most folks coverage, but it costs 400 to 700 percent more for the folks who can least afford it. Even with perfect driving records. I have never heard of a credible fight to rectify this over twenty years. Courts and local jails are filled with po folks who miss a payment etc. Often the fines are as costly as the insurance... except that triggers insurance rates to double or triple.

It's debtors prison and indentured servitude of the worst western order.

Considering everything you know about private health insurance in the US... it should not be difficult to imagine just how awful it will be for the least informed, lowest income folks when being forced to deal with them.

by: Eureka Springs AR @
Sun Jul 26, 2009 at 00:54

It will certainly be a trigger
to put lots of minority kids into foster care...

miss that insurance payment and you are an abusive and neglectful parent.

by: bruce.dixon @
Sun Jul 26, 2009 at 02:08

RL calls, and I don't have the hours to pile through the 1000 pages of HR3200. Could any "progressive" exincrementalists who are reading this and really know the detail address the issue? Or start whipping to make sure it doesn't happen?

NOTE Of course, with single payer, poor parents wouldn't have to worry.

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Comments

Submitted by hipparchia on

parent, child, and a couple of other terms i can't remember now.

i didn't find anything that specifically addresses either taking kids away from parents/guardians, or protecting parents/guardians from having their kids taken away, due to inability to comply with the requirements of the bill.

that said, if inability to comply with auto insurance laws is allowing authorities to endanger kids by jailing their parents or guardians for said noncompliance, then this could probably be used that way too.

i didn't know all that about the auto insurance laws and their consequences. thanks for bringing it up.