Huff Post Top Five Forgotten Stories: #2- Health Insurance Crisis Impacting Marriage Decisions

Link: The Huffington Post

Excerpt:

Chances are, when you look back on the past week several years from now, there won't be much you remember about the news that dominated your life. Something about how a presidential candidate had to distance himself from a preacher that took racy photographs of Miley Cyrus or something. But at the same time, if you are anything like a typical HuffPo reader or commenter, you won't forget having yearned for more substantive, important topics to have found their way into the news cycle.

That's something that comes through loud and clear in the emails and comments I receive while liveblogging the Sunday morning political shows. Many of the people who read the Sunday blog do so because they just can't stand to watch the parade of empty-headed yammerers but can't not stay engaged. There's a real longing for a news that more actively delves into topics that matter, offers penetrating analysis of problems, and mounts a real critique of political policy. People expect better from print news, better from cable news...better from HuffPo!

So this week, we're beginning a new end-of-the-week feature to rise to this demand, if only a little bit. Five Forgotten Stories will be a briefing on the sort of news story that we felt could have, and should have, gotten a wider play from the newshole. We invite all our readers to delve, discuss, and come back and make suggestions of your own.

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2. Health Insurance Crisis Impacting Marriage Decisions

If there's two things the moralizers on the right love to do, it's deny Americans universal health care while enforcing their own definition of what a proper marriage should look like. But in a twist that's downright Freakonomical, the desperate times/desperate measures equation is forming an intersection with these two issues.

Some people marry for love, some for companionship, and others for status or money. Now comes another reason to get hitched: health insurance.

In a poll released today, 7% of Americans said they or someone in their household decided to marry in the last year so they could get healthcare benefits via their spouse.

"It's a small number but a powerful result, because it shows how paying for healthcare is reflected not only in family budgets but in life decisions," said Drew E. Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which commissioned the survey as part of its regular polling on healthcare.

A number of bloggers did mention this, including SusanG at Daily Kos, who commented:

Can't wait to hear the right-wing wurlitzer crank up to demand universal health insurance to preserve the sanctity of wedlock. Surely all those desperately non-insured brides and grooms hooking up are threatening the marriages of all the rest of us. Right?

[jw]