Poor Brandy Coons.

In a front-​page arti­cle by Kevin Sack in today’s New York Times Coons, a 23-year-old wait­ress in Atlanta, man­aged to get her­self pinned up as the poster child for health-​insurance free riding. Sack writes,

She may not fully appre­ci­ate it, but her deci­sion to go with­out health insur­ance, like mil­lions of sim­i­larly sit­u­ated Amer­i­cans, has become cen­tral to the pre-​eminent policy dis­pute of the Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­den­tial campaign.

That policy dis­pute is over the ques­tion of a health-​insurance man­date. Hillary Clin­ton believes one is nec­es­sary; Barack Obama thinks it isn’t. The candidates’ argu­ment over the man­date is the real sub­ject of Sack’s story, which does a good job of explain­ing the ins and outs of the two poli­cies. Coons is merely there to give the piece a human face.

But there’s an inter­est­ing side­story here that’s worth bring­ing out, since it too will have a part to play in either candidate’s health-​care poli­cies. [Read more]