\u00c2\u00a0mundanely relatable nonetheless<\/a>.<\/p>\nMy son was dropped from our family’s employer-sponsored health insurance shortly after graduating from college in May. While filling out the application for a new policy, he asked me how to answer a question about his marijuana use in the past year. I said, “Honestly.” He checked a box indicating he smoked very occasionally and was denied coverage. Now he is uninsured while countless pot-smoking liars have coverage. My husband thinks I gave our son foolish advice. Do you agree? — M.H., Montclair, N.J.<\/em><\/p>\nRandy Cohen gives the answer, with one dangling sentence lying about.<\/p>\n
And so, were I filling out that form, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d lie without remorse. (All right, with some remorse. Accompanied by resentment. I blame my upbringing. And my inept, albeit imaginary, therapist.) But I could not advise my child to lie \u00e2\u20ac\u201d even an older child, even to an insurance company. I would feel a parental duty to teach integrity and encourage civic engagement. So I would urge him to supply an honest answer on that form and write an urgent letter to his elected representatives, particularly those working on health care reform.<\/strong> The real solution here is to guarantee access to medical care to all people, not just those pot-smoking liars.<\/em><\/p>\nWhat?\u00c2\u00a0 Are you nuts?\u00c2\u00a0 The elected officials are really going to introduce recreational drug politics into a debate already blasted apart at the seams by auxiliary and tangental policies of — Joseph Wilson’s “You Lie!’ regarding goddamned immigration policy, and Stupak entering the fray against Abortion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Watching the basic thrust of the Health Care debating, and the rather easy manner some things get politicized in the most weirdly warped manner, within a legislative process laid bare to a root of fragility… the focus of\u00c2\u00a0the why bother\u00c2\u00a0here gets lost.\u00c2\u00a0 Here’s an example of perhaps not the most hard scrabbled case, but\u00c2\u00a0mundanely relatable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5350\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}