Lift Up Your Hearts!

Today's Mallard Fillmore comic inspired this post, which Li'l Writer Guy had actually been working on in the background ever since a conversation we had about the subject last night.

Mind you, I don't know any of the details of how it will work, and am only commenting on the theory that children should be covered on their parents' health insurance until they are 26 years old.

It shows the hazards of exposure to pop culture that I was tempted to respond to this idea with "WTF?"  Language I would never speak begins to look harmless as an acronym, and one commonly in print at that.  But I digress.

There are at least two issues here.  One is the need to address the health care gap many young people experience when they begin their adult lives.  An affordable source of insurance for those who are, as the Japanese so elegantly put it, "not in education or employment," opens up intriguing possibilities for self-directed learning, volunteer work, internships, and other ways of independent exploration that could better prepare a person for college, grad school, or a good career fit.  Too many people move mindlessly from high school to college to the workplace without gaining the life skills necessary to get the most out of them.

On the other hand, this is yet another instance of the bizarre phenomenon of extended adolescence.  Parents are not only paying for a college education for their children, but many are covering their graduate school expenses.  Worse, the schools expect this, and require information on parental income for scholarship applications.  (I think universities have some nerve mocking "helicopter parents" while freely expecting their money.)  Now the parents' insurance is expected to cover their children long after those children should be on their own.  We have come a long way, and not all for the better, from the days when teenagers—some of them quite young—routinely married, held responsible jobs, raised children, and supported families.  You can say all you want that it takes more education to acccomplish that in today's society, and I'll mostly agree, though I'll add that the amount of time given to acquiring that education is shockingly and unnecessarily high.  But in any case it cannot be good that we've removed a decade of strong, healthy, exuberant and enthusiastic youth from the years of independence and productivity.