This New England

That Aetna, the Hartford-based insurance company, has just announced that it will cut 3 percent of its work force is a small signal of the decay of the U.S. health-insurance "system'' in the recession. Aetna is cutting back because companies and nonprofits are laying off people whose coverage was from group insurance programs mostly paid for by employers.

In America, if you lose your job, you usually lose you insurance, too.

The insurers are, of course, worried about the immediate loss of revenue from premiums.

But perhaps more, they worry that increased public outrage at the work-based insurance system will lead to demands that the for-profit insurance companies, with their 25 percent overheads and vast executive pay, be shunted aside in favor of Medicare for everyone. Medicare's overhead is about 3 percent.

(A reminder: Some insurance companies are not-for-profit, such as my own beloved Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island.)

For-profit insurance companies' scare tactics worked when they defeated health-care reform in the early '90s. The growing insecurity of the middle class will probably mean these tactics won't work when the next big push for health-care reform legislation is launched, this winter.

"Harry and Louise'' will be tarred and feathered.

Now it's on to the hospital emergency room, America's very own universal health care!

Meanwhile, poor Hartford's reputation as America's insurance capital will erode further. Its reputation as a stable, rather stodgy middle-class city started to go 40 years ago.

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Expenses of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences are being slashed 9 percent because of the economy in general and in particular the 22 percent ($8 billion) drop of Harvard's endowment (which had been put pretty heavily into some dubious, high-flying hedge-fund-style investments).

Whether the famous arrogance and superciliousness of some Harvard people will decline that much is unclear.

Also unclear is the fate of the World's Greatest University's (thanks, Alex Beam) plans to add billions more in building projects, especially across the river in Allston, much of which Harvard had bought up in splendidly sneaky real-estate transactions.

The trouble is that Harvard people presumed that, since they were Harvard people, that the good times would roll on forever. After all, they are the anointed ones.

And can the place maintain such delightful deals as financial aid for families making as much as $180,000 a year (average family income in the U.S. is about $50,000)?

Probably. As God's chosen, they deserve it!

 Tags  Aetna Allston Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences health insurance. Hartford

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