Why does day-to-day living have to be so hard? We're supposedly in the best of economic times. Yet, for those of us who are lucky enough to have jobs, own homes and have some semblance of health care, living without worry is still a day-to-day challenge.
There's a difference between feeling secure and being secure. Being secure means that if you or a family member suffers a job loss or catastrophic illness, a safety net will cushion the blow, if not come to the rescue.
The first place we tend to turn for that safety net is our family. But that's not always as easy as it sounds. Take my family. There are four generations of us living. My retired father lives fairly comfortably in the country on his teachers' pension and has health care. However, a catastrophic illness could still break him. He is also tired of haranguing the depressing and dangerously understaffed long-term care facility in which his 90-year-old mother lives.
My mother, who lives close by, is still working. She has minimal retirement savings, inadequate health care and no pension. Her mother pays a small fortune for numerous prescriptions. My brother, a self-employed craftsman, pays for his own bare-bones but costly health insurance. For him, an injury would be devastating.
To some degree, they're all living on the edge.
Though they have worries, my parents will likely be able to rely on Social Security and Medicare for the duration of their senior years. But will those programs be there for my brother, myself and my 6-year-old son? Not if some people have their way.
Some of the nation's and our commonwealth's most well-heeled wheelers and dealers would like to privatize Social Security, a program that keeps more than half our elderly out of poverty.
In addition, Medicare - the health-care provider that Americans 65 and older rely on - is being preyed upon by the managed-care industry. Meanwhile, drug companies are making obscene profits off the backs of seniors who rely on their medications to keep going. And the icing on the cake is the flagrant and relentless attempts to reduce our right to the courts and a jury trial for injuries caused by corporate and medical negligence and misconduct.
These are the issues that will be front and center in the 2000 presidential and congressional elections.
But there are some bright spots on the horizon. Generation Xers, for example, seem not to be as apathetic as many would think.
