All this election year talk about health care seems to be about extending it to people who don't have it: children and the working poor.
But I wish a candidate would talk about people who have health care, but feel it slipping away like a greased watermelon.
Like me.
When my husband and I started in this working game, our companies each covered both of us. What the primary coverage didn't pay for, the secondary coverage did. I think I may have turned a profit on the birth of my first child.
Time passed, and his company offered a handsome bonus if he did not sign up for its coverage. Didn't matter. I signed him up for my company's coverage. And the bonus money was sweet.
Over the years, that bonus dwindled to nothing. And now I have to pay a penalty if I want him covered by my company.
Sorry, pal, I said. You are on your own.
Now he is covered by his company as a single person. Weird.
And expensive. The amount we now pay for medical insurance is almost double what it was.
The military has been paying the medical bills for my son since he enrolled at the Naval Academy, but I didn't think I had to worry about coverage for my daughter while she was in college.
Until this year.
I had to prove - with a tax return and an official college class schedule - that she was, indeed, still a dependent.
("Have they met Jessie?" one of my friends asked. "Have they seen your credit card statements?" asked another.)
And this year, my company's health coverage includes a financial penalty for smokers.
I don't smoke, but I have this little problem with pasta, and I am wondering if there will soon be a penalty if my BMI exceeds 24, or if my fasting glucose tolerance test hits some kind of red zone.
I am wondering when the premiums we pay will be tied to our driving record or the number of hours a week we log at the gym. Whether we wear our seatbelts 100 percent of the time, have more than two drinks a day or eat red meat more than once a week.
You are not paranoid if you can prove they are after you. So I asked a couple of experts in the field if companies will soon try to control rampaging health care costs by tying premiums to the good, or bad, health habits of employees like me.
Turns out, I am right.
They are just trying to figure out how to do it.
"We are inching closer and closer along this road," said Peter Cole at Crawford Advisors in Hunt Valley. His firm helps employers design and administer health care coverage.
