Coffee Break: Carla Leather Ballet Flat

82 Comments

1. in the morning post a lot of people seemed bothered by the fact that individuals can stay on their parents’ health insurance up until age 26. why? people in their 20s can’t be that expensive to insure. prior to the change in law, many plans allowed those who were students to remain on their parents’ plans and many family plans its the same cost for the consumer to have 2 kids on the plan or 3 kids on the plan. is this change really costing american taxpayers a lot of money? (and i say this as someone who did not benefit from this)

   1. I’m liberal and 30 (so yes, I did benefit from staying on my parents plan til I was 25. I also wasn’t paying attention to any of this pre-ACA to remember how it was). My personal views on healthcare would be that a public option (medicare or otherwise) should be available (and affordable) to all who want it, while still allowing private insurance — Basically Buttigieg’s “Medicare for all who want it” plan.

      Frankly, I think we have much bigger fish to fry when it comes to health insurance. I’d be happy to give up the “stay on your parents’ til 26” in order to get more progress elsewhere.

      Not to sound like a boomer, but I know a lot of 20 somethings who are just floundering. College graduates but no real career. Unable (financially) or unwilling to live independently, but also unwilling to hustle. They’re not choosing to live at home to set themselves up financially (as my sister did). Half of them still don’t have drivers licenses, despite living in the burbs. These are all kids who grew up in loving, supportive upper middle class households and graduated from college. A few made really questionable decisions with student loans (which yes, their parents should have counseled them better). A lot of these kids are my friends’ siblings or my siblings’ friends. It’s weird – many of the families have kids my age and then younger kids. Every single kid my age launched – job, apartment, “progress in life” by our early to mid 20s. Almost every single younger sibling did not. Some have hobbies and social lives, some do not at all (which is sad). It just feels like the kids are really stalling. They don’t even seem to want to be independent?

      I could see someone seeing the kids of this generation and thinking that they don’t want to support these kids and that they need a “kick in the pants”? I don’t know, it’s just a guess.

      A lot of my friends and cousins who are my age definitely needed to stay on their parents insurance, but they were doing something. Two friends are artists (one an actor, one a dancer), my one cousin played minor league baseball and another is making his way as a basketball coach, a few friends did Americorps, a few did PhDs, I work in non profits and started out making $30k. So, yes, it helped all of us a ton financially to be on our parents’ insurance. But also, we were hustling for our careers and dreams. My artist friends were working day jobs to pay the bills + passion jobs after work, my coaching cousin works like 16+ hour days, I was working a second job after my 9-5 at the non profit, obviously those getting the PhDs worked like crazy, and the Americorps friends chose to live in poverty and work physically or mentally hard jobs to serve their country. Everyone has landed on their feet – some of us pursuing what we set out to do and some pivoting when they realized the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. But we all gave our dreams a shot and hustled to make things work.

      1. This was interesting to read. I’m in my late 30s and have also noticed a lot of floundering professional students and failures to launch, but wasn’t sure if I was just being a snotty millennial. I made a comment about thinking it a bit much that we consider age 25 to be a “child” these days and I do stand by that, but it’s not a hill I’m going to die on or care too much about. I agree this is primarily a boon for the upper middle class (and beyond), and I know the job market is hard out there….but I’m also noticing a decided lack of gumption among the current crop of young adults and I guess I do fall prey to the “they need to grow up” thinking.

         1. Anon at 2:39 here.

            Yeah, I don’t know what it is but it seems surprisingly common place with the <27 crowd. It's happening with "kids" I've known forever and they seemed (to me) to be "normal" high schoolers. There's definitely a level of parental enabling – the "kids" that age who aren't floundering either grew up more working class or have parents who just won't allow the floundering. Meanwhile, I know a few kids who are shockingly financially or otherwise reliant on their parents. Like my BFF's younger sisters – they're 25 and 23, both work, both don't drive, and live at home. Their parents either drive them everywhere or the kids Uber on their parents' account. The one Ubers Dunkin coffee and breakfast sandwiches to their house! They live 1 mile from the Dunkin. They also live about a half mile from a train station and right off a bus route, but rarely take public transit. Meanwhile, my BFF got her license at 16 and started driving then. They live at home rent free but don't even help with basic chores.

            Another friend is married, lives with her husband (in a house the husband owns), and works full time (as a social worker… she has a Masters'. I know SW is a famously low-paid field, but you know that going in and plan accordingly). She also never got a license, okay fine, we live in the city (and her parents live near a suburban train station), but she only goes to visit her grandmother if her parents drive her. Her parents pay for her Ubers, some student loans, and a few other expenses too (I know they've gotten in a fight about her shopping and her parents not wanting to subsidize that).

            I'm sorry to be so old fashioned, but if you're old enough to be married, employed, and with a Masters' degree you're too old for your parents to pay for your Ubers.

            My sister is one of the two friends in her group who doesn't live at home. She lived at home for a while because she figured if everyone's still in our hometown why move out and pay rent? Well, she stayed so long she saved up quite a bit and was able to buy a house at 28. But the rest of her friends are still at home… and no one seems to have any desire to move out or go back to grad school or really do anything besides work a not impressive job and hang out.

            1. I was on my parents’ insurance to 26 (pre-ACA, but their employer allowed it). I wasn’t floundering, I was just in law school and it was an easy way my parents could help me significantly reduce my loan burden at a very minor cost to them. University health insurance is also usually not great. I don’t think it’s crazy to keep an adult child who’s still in school on your insurance if possible.

   2. Prior to ACA, my mom was able to find one plan thru her employer that allowed me to stay on her plan until I was 25. It was great because I was still in law school and could go to my annual gyn visits and get birth control pills covered by insurance, never mind be covered in the event of any emergency. I didn’t graduate until I was 26 and still remember the “year without insurance” – it was scary even though I was basically healthy and didn’t need much care.

      I don’t know who cares about this other than people who assume it adds to overall costs, which I don’t think it does. My plan thru work actually doesn’t even differentiate between whether it’s me and a partner, two of us and 1 kid or two of us and 10 kids.

      1. Fundamentally, how is it possible that it *doesn’t* add to overall costs? I can believe that the added costs are fairly low, because most <26 year olds have lowish health care usage, but it must add something – otherwise insurance companies would offer $0 premiums to any <26-year-old, regardless of whether they were insuring that person's parents

         1. In my case, the cost was off set by the fact that my mom was purchasing a family plan over an individual plan to keep me on her insurance until 25. As for my current family plan now, I don’t mean that there aren’t more costs to the insurance company by having to insure my 2 kids vs charging me extra for having each kid added but I have to imagine that the insurance companies did the math and that cost is negligible when spread out over the pool of insureds overall. That’s the entire premise of insurance and the plan I am in more than makes up for it when they get to charge a married couple the same as a family of 5. If that doesn’t work for someone with less dependents they can choose a different plan.

            1. Oh, gotcha, yeah I agree that most insurance companies aren’t charging per kid — they’re averaging it out over all the families (at companies I’ve worked for, they’re have been different employee costs for self+spouse vs. self+spouse+kids but not variation based on # of kids; although I’m certainly willing to believe some companies simply lump it all together). The effect is that the average family with 1 kid or 0 kids pays slightly more than they would otherwise. I think that’s a worthwhile societal trade-off, but was objecting to (my misreading of) your comment, thinking you meant there are literally no costs to offering “free” insurance to <26'es.

      2. Yes my employer is the same that the cost is identical to insure 1 kid vs 10 kids. One of the rare financial losses for a family with an only child!

   3. American taxpayers do not foot the bill for private insurance. They do bear the costs if young people are uninsured and need emergency medical care, though.

      1. yes, so why are people upset if young people can stay on their parents’ insurance. seems like it helps society overall?

         1. Americans seem to really react negatively to anything that might benefit others but not them, even if the cost is trivial. I am all for anything which even incrementally divorces health insurance from employment, which this does for those under 26, though not necessarily for their parents.

            We are stifling so much ability and innovation by tethering health insurance to employment.

         2. Because they are taking all young people out of the Marketplace insurance pool. Yes, young people paying into the pool does balance out the older folks who need more care. So it drives up the cost of Marketplace plans for everyone. And it drives up the costs of private insurance, because obviously more people are getting covered. And you are still talking about millions of young people aged 18-26. Even if they are paying low premiums, they are at least paying something.

            And the only young people who are able to take advantage of this benefit are young people from a higher socioeconomic strata. The children of working parents who have good jobs with excellent health insurance. It does not help poorer children aged 18-26, many of whom don’t have the social safety nets that our children do because their parents don’t have this benefit.

            1. I posted about my pre-aca experience above and I flat out didn’t get insurance between the time I aged out of my mom’s plan and the time I got my first job with health benefits post law school. I think a lot of young people would just flat out not get insurance which doesn’t benefit society as a whole if they i]end of needing care in the ER etc.

            2. Young people I know who are not on parental insurance just pay the fines; they don’t go out and buy marketplace plans.

               From an insurer’s perspective, I would imagine the middle class young people are a safer risk to take insofar as they live in comfort, eat square meals, go to their check ups, etc. The healthcare needs of children who grew up without all their needs met are going to be higher.

            3. There are no fines for not having insurance anymore

         3. Probably a misunderstanding of the economics combined with the generational “young people these days have it too good and it’s made them soft.” Classic conservative arguments.

   4. Way back in the 1990s when I was in graduate school (hard science, PhD program), the only way you got insurance was if you were included on your PhD mentor’s grant as staff. Then you qualified for insurance through the university because you were an employee. If, however, you got a “prestigious” fellowship from, say, National Science Foundation, you weren’t staff, so you couldn’t get insurance. Most of us were in our 20s and decently healthy, but we had students with chronic conditions turning down these fellowships because they couldn’t afford to be without insurance.

      I was part of a group of students who worked to get group coverage for grad students at the university. I don’t remember what it covered, but I think it was adequate to cover catastrophic care, more or less. For regular care we could go to student health, but there were people who needed more care.

      1. I have the impression that chronic conditions (sometimes very rare or obscure!) seem overrepresented in graduate cohorts; definitely PhD students need insurance one way or another.

         1. It does seem that way, doesn’t it

         2. Yep, before ACA needing health insurance, having preexisting conditions and being unable to find a job that offered insurance was part of the reason I went to grad school.

            1. It’s also why folks with chronic illness gravitate to government jobs… abysmal pay but generally excellent health insurance.

   5. You can afford to help your “child” buy insurance on the marketplace, if they don’t qualify for health insurance through their school or via Medicaid.

      Can’t you see how it seems unfair that you/your child has this amazing benefit, while every other 18-26 year old “child” that comes from a poor family or from parents who don’t have jobs with good health insurance doesn’t benefit. It is another way that social inequity is propagated. It was a give away to the upper class.

      1. Sometimes I’m reminded that there’s no IQ test required to post here.

         1. +1000000

         2. Explain?

            1. It’s a dumb post.

            2. But what is your argument?

               I agree that a public option for all is a better and fairer situation. But that will be a problem as those with better benefits now tend to not want to give them up. But with the exponential rise in health insurance costs, something has to give.

         3. Why is it more unfair that some have coverage through their employers and some do not, or some employer plans are better than others, or that some people earn more and can more easily afford the employee contributions? It’s all “unfair” if you try to compare against others.

            1. For things like healthcare, some people believe it should be a basic human right that is affordable and more equitable for a society. Obviously that belief is in the minority in the US, and in the democratic party.

            2. I wouldn’t object if companies want to offer coverage for adult kids through 26, or any other age, as a competitive benefit to try to attract and retain talent, same as they compete in other spheres. I don’t think it’s the right use of governmental authority to require that.

      2. i can definitely see how what we really need is something that allows those who don’t have parents who have good health insurance to get affordable health insurance and while i agree that being allowed to stay on your parents’ insurance until age 26 can be seen as a ‘give away,’ a band aid to a much much bigger problem and may seem unfair… in and of itself it isn’t adding expense to tax payers

         1. There’s not a direct taxpayer cost; but there is a (minor) indirect one — employer-provided health insurance is tax advantaged, incentivizing companies to pay for more expensive health insurance vs. simply paying the employees more in plain dollars. This is part of why insurance remains so tightly tied to employment.

      3. CHIP should have been extended to age 26 as well.

         1. And also parents having a job that offers health insurance doesn’t mean they can afford to buy a private plan for their young adult kid, obviously

            1. Or that they are upper class.

   6. To answer your question: one element driving up cost for insuring 18-27yr olds is moral hazard. Basically if someone knows they’ll need insurance, they tend to get it and they tend to use it. Back in the dark days, there were exemptions for pre-existing conditions and caps on how much insurance would pay out (which means that if you’re diagnosed with cancer, your insurance company had a lot of routes to deny you coverage, even if it caused you to live less long)

      ACA tried to account for this by taxing people without insurance, to encourage people to get insurance and push down the cost per person for the pool of insured people. Keeping relatively cheap kids on their parents plans on aggregate isn’t that expensive, unless it really really is (say, one of your coworker’s kids gets cancer and needs multiple millions of dollars of coverage- all of your coworkers’ insurance premiums will go up next year).

      To answer your fundamental question- it’s baffling to me the level of hostility to ACA on this board sometimes. Healthcare is literally lifesaving: I had a friend die of type 1 diabetes because he couldn’t afford insulin before ACA. And yet the general take is that if it doesn’t benefit me in particular, I don’t see the benefit.

      1. Agreed. So many people here are focused on money and status symbols and getting their kids into college and not helping out our vulnerable neighbors. For Shame.

   7. I think it’s another way to kick down single and childless people to allow only spouses and kids on your health plan. OP from the morning thread wasn’t using those benefits, so she should be able to add her mother. I don’t see why this is controversial.

      1. You could anti-select and pick your sickest family member or friend if choosing was an option.

         1. Which would help the people who need it most… and whatever we do, we can’t have that.

            1. If a lot of people did it, it would make health insurance unaffordable. Google death spiral.

            2. I meant to say “unaffordable for everyone”. Companies would stop offering health coverage altogether. Google anti-selection.

            3. It’s almost as if health insurance should not be provided through employment!

            4. Sorry, I meant to say “insurance companies” would stop offering coverage. The ones who remained in the commercial market would have to raise rates to where people could not even afford the employee share. It’s like if you have a lot of car accidents, your rates rise so high you can’t afford coverage, but you need coverage, so there are state high risk pools. Should someone who has a dozen car accidents pay the same as someone who never had an accident? I understand getting sick is not a person’s fault, but the economics are the same.

            5. Yes this keeps happening as the cost of meds increases; companies can’t afford the rates that insurers set once they see the utilization.

      2. In general social policy is pro-birth (I’m not talking about the current Christianist pronatalist, tradwife encouraging society, but even previously in a more open, liberal society). I mean, Social Security would entirely collapse if no more kids were born, not to mention we need babies born today to care for us in nursing homes in 30-50 years. I’m sorry that childless people find that unfair.

      3. I can see the argument that a single person doesn’t have a safety net in the way two spouses do, but to say this is kicking down childless people is nonsense. Children cost a lot of money to raise, plus the insurance premiums and copays – no one is having them to get employer insurance benefits?? Childless people have a leg up in that they don’t have extra people to provide for.

         1. “childless people have a leg up” LOLOLOLOLOL

            1. How exactly do you feel childless people are struggling more than people with children?

            2. The tangible benefits that parents get (tax deductions, etc) come nowhere near to offsetting the financial cost of raising children, not to mention the emotional work or mom penalty. There are intangible benefits for sure, but I am also genuinely curious as to why you think having children gets you special insurance privileges…

            3. Yeah I love my kids and don’t regret having them but the tax breaks are microscopic compared to the cost of raising children. I’m pretty sure the tax breaks don’t even cover the extra food we buy for my kids, to say nothing of childcare, activities and college, which are the big ticket items.

      4. You’re right, we as a society should just agree that everyone needs health insurance that isn’t tied to familial relationships and employment and offer a viable single payer option.

         ACA was a huge improvement but at its core is a heritage foundation plan

         1. Personally, I wish we as a society would device everyone needs health care, and then kick the insurance industry to the curb.

      5. That’s what Medicare is for. If her mom isn’t old enough for Medicare or disabled enough to be on disability, she’s young enough to work and get her own insurance.

         1. I wish people knew what a living nightmare it is to try to prove disability when severely disabled. Doctors don’t exactly do house calls anymore. I have a previously high earning friend who is now severely disabled and their very limited energy is now given over to doctor’s appointments and medical testing just to document the fact that they continue to be disabled from their incurable progressive condition so that they can continue to qualify for Medicare and retain access to the treatments that keep them out of the actual hospital. And doctors seem to truly hate dealing with the paperwork even when they absolutely believe and witness the patient is too disabled to work. Anyway it hurts to see people sum it up as if the system works well or is ever simple. To me it appears aggressively punitive towards people whose time is already being cut short.

            1. But what is the option? we need to validate disability to avoid obvious fraud.

            2. Single payer, Medicare for all. If everyone is eligible for Medicare, there’s no need to prove eligibility.

            3. Life’s hard.

            4. There has to be a less costly option to avoid obvious fraud. Asking for unpaid work from physicians in particular who have patients they actually can help waiting for them when they’re spending time on redundant paperwork is hiding some of the costs. Honestly fraud is probably easier this way, since every single step of the process is easier if you’re not disabled?

               Apparently Medicare does offer a life time prior authorization so that the entire prior authorization process doesn’t have to be repeatedly annually since that’s so wasteful for something that medically isn’t going to change. Sounds great, except it’s per policy. So the insurance companies just make sure to retire the few policies they offer for <65 Medicare every year so that PAs have to be done annually anyway. The insurance companies are trying to circumvent the intention of the people who came up with this solution to lower the burden on both patients and the healthcare system. Their only apparent motivation is the hope that people will not manage to get every appt scheduled in time to meet PA criteria and will lose access to needed medication.

            5. I agree that the process for qualifying for disability is heart wrenching, and often unfair.

            6. Life isn’t this hard everywhere. Universal healthcare would remove any incentive to fraud just for Medicare access.

   8. Pre-ACA, I developed what would have been considered a pre-existing condition if I ever had to seek treatment while on a gap in insurance coverage. The treatment was prohibitively expensive without insurance and it would be curable if I kept up treatment. If treatment lapsed, it could be life threatening. As a teen and then a young adult, falling off my parents’ insurance and every job change meant pleading with my medical care team for an advance on my refills, free sample packs of medication, clustering my appointments so I wouldn’t need treatment before the new insurance would kick in, and hoping the new policy would not try to deny the treatment in favor of forcing me to go through generic versions first that had already failed me.

      Even though I don’t need to obtain insurance on the marketplace, I am incredibly grateful that we have ACA now.

      1. Post-ACA, every job change means pleading for an advance on refills, clustering appts as not to need treatment before new insurance kicks in, and hoping the new policy will not try to deny treatment in favor of alternatives that have already failed. What am I missing?

         1. Is that all post-ACA? I feel like those were pre-existing conditions (no pun intended….).

            1. Yes, that’s 100% all post-ACA. ACA removed pre-existing conditions as a reason to deny coverage. It didn’t remove all the other reasons that insurance companies come up with to deny claims. Whether step therapy is legal is state by state. But it’s common for policies to deny the treatment that works if it’s name brand or just if it’s also off formulary. Formulary exception appeals are time consuming and not always successful. My household member landed in the hospital for a week last year after an insurance driven non-medical change from an effective medication that was sustaining remission to a medication that failed to sustain remission. It’s also common for policies to require new proof of diagnosis in PA criteria, even if the testing would have had to have been done prior to starting treatment; this has come up for multiple people I know, and some have had to quit treatment to be retested while really ill to prove they need the treatment.

            2. I think she’s saying that the ACA didn’t cause those hardships – they existed before the ACA, too. So perhaps the ACA didn’t go far enough but it didn’t make things worse (on the whole)

            3. Exactly. They predated the ACA and they’ll postdate whatever the next law is.

         2. You are missing the pre-existing condition piece. If I had had to seek treatment while between insurance coverages, any future treatment I would need for that condition could have been forever denied by all future insurance.

   9. Pre-ACA I was covered until 26. It was great, actual services were cheap and it let me focus on school. I always worked, but not every job I had offered health insurance, plus I didn’t always work full time, which was the requirement to get it.

2. if one were to buy one new pair of jeans this year and she was leaning towards black, what silhouette?

   1. Bootcut

   2. Bootcut or a slim straight leg.

3. I like the shape but between the calf hair and the print, this just makes me think of cows.

   1. cow print was a big part of Y2K fashion where I grew up, so that tracks!

   2. They come in many other colors if you like them.

   3. I like cows!

      1. I do too. But the idea of wearing them on my feet is less appealing. But to each her own!

         1. If you wear leather shoes you definitely are though!

            1. LOL, right?

            2. All my shoes are made exclusively of lamb skin, so no.

               Kidding! But still don’t think that wearing what looks like a cowhide is a good look for most people’s hooves. You can agree to disagree.

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