It’s Easier to Insure Pets Than Kids
If Bush vetoes the bill designed to provide state health insurance coverage for children, Barbara Ehrenreich proposes that we demand that he “open up pet health insurance to all American children now!”
This year, Americans will spend about $9.8 billion on healthcare for their pets, up from $7.2 billion five years ago. According to the New York Times, New York’s leading pet hospitals offer CT scans, MRIs, dialysis units and even a rehab clinic featuring an underwater treadmill, perhaps for the amphibians in one’s household. A professor who consults to pet health facilities on communication issues justified these huge investments in pet health to me by pointing out that pets are, after all, “part of the family.”
Well, there’s another category that might reasonably be considered “part of the family.” True, they are not the ideal companions for the busy young professional: It can take two to three years to housebreak them; their standards of personal hygiene are lamentably low, at least compared with cats; and large numbers of them cannot learn to sit without the aid of Ritalin.
