I’d like to talk with you all about my feelings about losing two friends of ours: I’ll call them Todd and Andy.
Soon after graduating from college, Todd got a job at a small store in NH. Todd held that job for 17 years. The store could not afford to provide benefits to any of its employees. None of the employees could afford to purchase health insurance on what the store was able to pay them. The owner had insurance through his spouse. No one else had any.
This is a common problem in NH. In my county, for instance, half the jobs do not pay a living wage. We have a big tourist industry. The pay scale starts at minimum and goes up to a princely $12 or so for the ‘better paid’ jobs. There are not a lot of useful health insurance options here for those of us earning in that zone.
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