I participate heavily in the baby/pregnancy/TTC chat thread in the Journals section. We have people pregnant and trying to get pregnant and parenting littles all across the world. It has been eye opening to see how that whole experience compares whether you live in the US, Canada, England, Australia, and other places. Through example after example it has become more clear to me how much harder it is to be a parent and would-be parent in the US. I get the sense there is this general sense of pity for us in how stingy our system is and the lack of support when we are at our most vulnerable.
The vulnerability should not be much of a surprise, and should be hedged for, much like MMM advocates having an emergency stash of money. Who's burden is this vulnerability, considering that producing children is optional now?
The experiences of ladies who encounter trouble is most telling. Scary diagnoses in other countries are scary because you don’t know what the outcome will be and whether your little one will be okay in the end of not. Scary diagnoses in the US are doubly scary because in addition to all the medical concerns, you have to worry about getting time off to care for your medical needs, you have to worry about job protection while off, you have to worry about paying the bills while off because you generally have no paid leave, you have to worry about being able to pay for whatever medical procedures are recommended because they may or may not be covered and you can’t know that in advance or what it will cost, and you likely end up having to fight with the insurance company to convince them to cover what they should. That is in addition to the average lower quality of care and, if you are in a bad state, the restrictions in care that is available to you. One of our friends from Canada had her doctor advise her to avoid traveling to many of the states in the US that provide sub-quality care while pregnant due to reduced access and average poorer outcomes.
Do you "worry" about digging a well when you start getting thirsty? Perhaps you should worry before the crisis hits.
My liberal hellhole of a state provided me paid family leave to me and my husband so we could care for our premies. It provided me job protection when my FLMA ran out before my babies had even reached their due dates. It provides paid maternity leave before you reach your due date so you aren’t dragging your exhausted self to work in the third trimester in a desperate attempt to preserve what little vacation you have for after the baby comes. It has expanded Medicaid so people who make too little for ACA subsidies but too much otherwise for Medicaid aren’t left uninsured.
Glad to hear the childless were kind enough to help pay for this. Perhaps they, too, could one day increase their post-tax income to a point where they could also afford children.
May you be so lucky as to never find yourself in a vulnerable position, as happens to so many people for reasons outside their control.
Well that control thing is a pretty big deal. Many people do not go out of their way to control risk, which is probably where a lot of our disagreement stems from. Also, I am high earning, ambitious, competitive and single, male and young-ish, so it's reasonable that I would disagree with you. Perhaps when I am older I will change my mind, but as it currently stands, I'd prefer my wealth stay in my own hands.
So I don't sound like a complete flippant monster in this post, I'll point out that high value people like skilled medical practitioners should have a right to their own negotiation, rather than having their skills bestowed upon the masses since they are a right(not sure how you can have a right to someone's labor...). Also, a lot of buying power leaves Canada since people can't pay for an MRI here, for instance. That spending would be better off staying within the border if possible, but it doesn't.
Finally, in my experience, it takes about ten pages of an economics book to realize why socialism sucks--namely, because it has no framework to deal with scarcity(who gets beachfront property? There isn't enough of it for everyone), and it has no ability to ascertain price, so price just careens upward.
