By Alyssa Rosenberg I can't help but think that if Jane Austen were writing today, this New York Times story might have inspired her to begin Pride and Prejudice by writing that "it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good health insurance must be in want of a wife." The idea that health insurance has become both so valuable and so difficult to obtain at a reasonable price that you would marry someone you might not marry otherwise to obtain it, or divorce a spouse you want to remain married to in order to qualify for insurance for the low-income, is terrible. It's easy to forget that all the personal freedoms we have in matters of the heart and in personal relationships can be quickly eroded by economic necessity. In Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's masterpiece of reportage, Random Family, she follows a decade in the lives of an extended Puerto Rican family in the Bronx and Troy. One of the most persistent storylines is the ways in which financial need both ties people together and drives them apart. There's a man in the characters' neighborhood who gives away dollar bills to pretty girls. Women are bound to the fathers of their children and the men in their extended networks by need for the basic necessities of life. Family ties are strained by the inability to both pay the bills and deposit money in prison commissary accounts. Voice mail accounts are set to automatically accept collect calls from relatives in jail. Not all of us live at that level of uncertainty. But more and more Americans are like Austen's Bennet sisters: they're comfortable now, but just an entailment away from destitution. No matter how much society progresses on issues of autonomy and choice, those freedoms will never be guaranteed unless we can pay for them.
