Is Baby a Luxury?
On being pregnant and uninsured—too rich to qualify for state-funded health insurance, too poor to afford private insurance:
“We looked into purchasing private insurance. Andrew could get insurance for himself as a small business owner and I could be included in his plan as his wife, but the pregnancy wouldn’t be covered. I found this stunning, but it is common: insurers can and very often do deny coverage to uninsured moms-to-be by defining pregnancy as a preexisting medical condition. This meant that my husband and I both would have to purchase our own separate insurance, which, we learned, would cost up to $275 dollars a month each and did not include copays at the obstetrician’s office or significant deductibles ($2,000, or more). To some people, $550 every month isn’t much to stress about, but we could not afford these plans. After rent, utilities and groceries, we had almost nothing left. Covering the premiums wasn’t just difficult, it was impossible.”
The Way Life Should Be: The House of E. B. White
A writer goes searching for the Maine home of E.B. White:
“I knocked on the front door. No one answered so I knocked again, harder. There was a barn just off the side of the house, so as Andrew and the dogs watched wide-eyed from the car, I tiptoed around towards it. That’s when a dog that wasn’t mine barked loudly and rapidly and I became painfully aware of the fact of what I was doing and how quickly I’d been discovered: I was trespassing, and not just trespassing, but trespassing in Maine.
“‘I’m coming out,’ someone called. My heart skipped. He said something else, words I couldn’t make out over the dog. I felt like a jerk, and I stood there feeling that way for what felt like twenty minutes before a tall, owl-faced man pushed open the screen door. I mumbled some kind of jumbled explanation and speedy apology. The man frowned. I kept rambling and after I mentioned I was a writer, he turned and motioned Andrew to get out of the car.”