A friend of mine is working on a project for a small vitamin company. It’s, in no uncertain terms, an extremely annoying project. He really doesn’t want to do it, but unfortunately, his wife just had surgery plus Christmas just happened, so he HAS to. And that’s when it all became clear.
Students right out of school, before they even apply for a job, have $400+ per month to pay in student loans. Mine were $450/month. Try saving for a move to the big city with that monkey on your back. And if the job they do get is freelance, or just plain doesn’t offer health insurance, they’re either on their parent’s plan, or paying for health insurance premiums out of pocket. If you happen to be over 26, you most likely owe at least $400/month in student loans STILL and now, have no option but to use an exchange and hope to get a subsidy. I did that when the show I was working on got cancelled and my monthly premium was $200 for the United HealthCare Piece of Shit(tm) Plan. And pray you don’t get hurt cause that $6600 deductible is NOT any comfort.
Now you actually need surgery and the deductible is so high that you end up paying all of the $4000 that it costs (with insurance discounts, of course). Being that the average person under 35 years old only has about $6000 saved, there goes most of your savings. And you had absolutely no choice in the matter.
What a genius plan. Put people who are just out of college into extreme debt with extremely high monthly payments and make Health Insurance prohibitively expensive unless you work for a major corporation. Wow. The country is basically MAKING you work a retail/menial job or else you:
- Default on your loans
- Pay Extremely high monthly premiums
- Go into even more debt by committing the cardinal sin of getting injured.
The obsession with work as a virtue in this country has gotten out of hand. It’s basically indentured servitude to the corporations. After all, how else will they get college-educated, white, suburban kids to work at Apple Retail or GAP or at the many other menial jobs that major corporations require to function? Seems to me the best way to do it is to set up a system where they’re paying for their wonderful education for the rest of their lives so they have no choice. They’re in so much debt they can’t even save to go out on their own! Unless they’re rich enough to pay it off, then those kids can go ahead and start a venture, make a business for themselves, try to innovate.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate hard work, but forcing bright-eyed, head in the clouds kids who aim high and dream big to NOT take that big Internship, to NOT work on that project that they have no time for, seems just plain wrong to me. Who knows where I’d be if I was able to take that Editing Internship when I first moved to New York City? Probably in debtors prison with a broken arm because I had $450 in loans a month and no health insurance. Luckily Apple hired me full time at their Fifth Avenue store and it was two and a half years before I could work anywhere else. But six months as an intern at an editing house? Who knows.
People always talk about Student Loans as a total. $60K, $90K, whatever. But those numbers mean nothing. You gotta look at the monthly totals. $450 per month is obscene! I’ve talked to teacher friends of mine who pay $1000/month, $750/month. TEACHERS. I’d say forget about Student Loan forgiveness. Instead, let’s cap monthly payments. Let’s make $200/month is the maximum the banks are allowed to ask for per month. And you pay it until it’s done. Who cares if it takes your whole life, it was going to take that long anyway. At least you have that extra $250, $500 or $800/month to spend on living, to add to the economy, to take care of a child, or to take that one or two days off a month to work on that passion project that will actually make you enough money eventually to pay them off!
Hillary last week claimed that a fight for Medicare for All would be too risky. But no matter the risk, the extremely high monthly payments for the Underinsured is something that cannot be ignored! The longer we wait, the more likely it is that we’ll go further into debt, or will actually get hurt and wipe out our meager savings. When I think about America, I think about entrepreneurs. People innovating, starting a business. When you can’t even use your starter jobs right out of college to save for the future, to start that business, then we’re lost.
Cap student loan payments per month and stop this prohibitively expensive health care system we have. Only then can we Make America Great Again(tm).
-Dan DeStefano