A photo from Terri's site
Suppose you’ve got an incapacitating genetic disorder that prevents you from holding a full-time job—and from getting health coverage. Suppose you’ve been a stay-at-home mom for the last quarter-decade, so you don’t qualify for social security insurance benefits. Suppose every health insurer in the state has rejected you, because your disorder counts as a preexisting condition. And suppose the COBRA benefits you received after a divorce are about to run out, leaving you no way to cover your astronomic medical bills.
Well, then you’d be Terri Carlson of San Diego.
And Terri’s decided she might just have to marry someone to get health benefits. At 45, she’s posted a website (willmarryforhealthinsurance.com) that pleads her case to would-be romantic suitors, complete with photos of her in various black-dress-wearing poses. She also supposedly posted a YouTube video (which I can’t find—she appears to have taken it down).
Her proposal has netted her more than 5,000 emails, according to a story in the North County Times. The story goes on to say that she’s combing through the correspondence with the help of friends, and that she still hopes to find “the right man and love, something she said she won’t marry without.”
Terri Carlson is in a terrible, terrifying position. And our health care system obviously needs an enormous amount of work. I actually wrote about some of the problems with health insurance as part of this story for Money magazine a few years ago.
But I also wonder about the following:
What about a new employer? Terri’s web page indicates that her condition doesn’t allow her to hold a full-time job, but she works part-time from home for an organization that provides jobs for the disabled (with no benefits). It seems to me that if the loss of her COBRA coverage spells the end of the financial line for her, she might throw the same effort into finding a job—any job—that would provide health care. If she was receiving the same nationwide attention for an employment hunt, for something that might allow her to telecommute with allowances for her illness, she might be able to solve her problem without saying “I do” to someone she barely knows.
(Of course, “Will Work for Health Care” doesn’t have the same kind of ring to it, and maybe the attention from this story will cause an employer to step up and offer her a benefits-paying position.)
And perhaps I’m being naive, but if I was facing financial ruin because every single California insurer had rejected me, I might consider trying another state. Like, say, Massachusetts? Yes, it’s a huge move. But so is offering to marry someone for their health coverage.
Tell me again why about half of the U.S. is against a public health care option?
Wow, this is so sad. I hope something works out for her. Two points come to mind:
1. Given the fact that she has a genetic disease that often puts her out of commission for weeks at a time and lack of work experience, I imagine it’d be difficult to find an employer who can accommodate that. So I don’t think we can assume that Terri isn’t doing everything she can to find a job. Maybe finding a husband with health insurance is the last-ditch effort.
2. I don’t know if we should be so shocked by this -marriage has traditionally been about sharing resources and legalizing benefits. If people can marry for fame, citizenship, money, status, etc., then why is it so bad that people are marrying for health insurance? Many people, whether they admit it or not, have criteria for selecting a spouse other than simply “love”, Terri is just making her criteria very clear from the get-go.
By: WellHeeled on February 1, 2010
at 2:24 pm
WellHeeled, thanks for your post! The lack of work experience and education are, of course, a factor, but she’s doing something part-time for an organization that helps the disabled, so she’s not without skills. And she was hospitalized for one week last year, which is awful, but that still seems manageable on the average job’s sick leave. Still, I get that it’s crazy tough to find a job with her background, especially in this economy. To your second point, sure, people marry for all kinds of things. But we tar and feather people who publicly marry for money or status, and marrying for citizenship is illegal. It’s not shocking, but it’s definitely a sad result of our broken health care system.
By: Kate Ashford on February 1, 2010
at 3:10 pm
[...] brings the concept of marrying for health insurance to our minds. I had heard of marrying for citizenship, marrying for money, and of course marrying [...]
By: Friday Finance Followers – Snow Bunny Edition | Suburban Dollar on February 5, 2010
at 7:48 am