Proud and prejudiced, or was Lot's wife the victim of a salt intensive diet?

It is a truth universally acknowledged here in the second decade of the twenty-first century that an unmarried middle-aged man without children and in possession of a good fortune must be in want of government mandated pediatric dental insurance.  Pediatric dental insurance is a marvelous thing; you can trace most of the world’s troubles these days to places where no one offers pediatric dental insurance, Brazilian bikini waxing, or daylight savings time as an energy saving measure; and having pediatric dental insurance will certainly ease many a concerned parent’s mind when little Janie or Johnny needs their first root canal at age four because they’ve gorged themselves on sugar and spice and everything nice to the point where their milk teeth have rotted away, but why an unmarried man without children and in possession of a good fortune would need the ease of mind conferred by having government mandated pediatric dental insurance is a little hard to understand, unless, of course, the purpose of requiring an unmarried middle-aged man without children and in possession of a good fortune to buy government mandated pediatric dental insurance is to separate the unmarried middle-aged man without children and in possession of a good fortune from as much of that good fortune as the government can get away with and still leave the  thoroughly plucked chicken enough to live on until they return to pluck him again next year. 

Similarly hard to explain these days is why a woman past her childbearing years would need to have insurance to cover the costs of her maternity leave.  This would appear, at first glance, to be something of a nonstarter, but I hear from those who know more about such things than I do that it does makes perfect sense. After all, as we see in the Book of Genesis, Sarah conceived Isaac when she was in her eighties or nineties, just as the angels said she would just before they moseyed off to blast Sodom, Gomorrah, and the rest of the cities of the plain from the face of the earth.  So if fertility was possible then, albeit with supernatural assistance, how much easier will it be in our scientific age for great-grandmothers to conceive and therefore need the access to the mandated maternity coverage, as well as the coverage needed to provide all the walkers, wheelchairs, and bassinets the new geriatric mom will need?  Clearly, the need is there, and being there, the government must meet the need, or better yet, have the mother to be meet the need. 

That the need is unlikely to the nth degree is neither here nor there; many things are unlikely, like Mariano Rivera blowing a save or my losing twenty pounds or the government requiring banks to loan money to people who can’t pay the loans back, but unlikelihood is scarcely a good reason for not doing what is right, necessary, and proper for the advancement of the common weal.  You could argue that such insurance is best paid by young people of childrearing age, but that would make you a racist or some other form of very bad person who doesn’t know what they are talking about.  Everyone knows that young people don’t have that kind of money these days, what with the economy being so anemic, the job opportunities in women’s holistic karma studies not as good as they used to be, and the weight of tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid student loans forcing our smartest young minds back into their parents’ basements to do what they do best: mope and bewail their fate on Twitter. There is an argument to be made here about whether requiring young people to buy overpriced government mandated health insurance when they don’t have any money to buy that insurance in the first place was such a smart idea, especially since, if I am to believe what I read in the press, the foundational idea of the former junior senator from Illinois’ reworking of the American health care system was that the young and healthy would be paying more in order to subsidize the older and sicker, who would pay less, thereby inverting the usual order of the insurance universe. I am sure this must be incorrect, as must be the reports that children, if that is the proper word, can stay on their parents’ insurance plan until they are twenty-six, since this would mean that young adults would simultaneously have to pay and not have to pay for their government-mandated health insurance.  Since both options cannot be true, I think it safe to say that neither is true, because the best and the brightest minds of this our Great Republic couldn’t be that dumb…

I do wonder, however, simply as an aside here, whether or not Lot was able to collect on his wife’s life insurance or if the insurance company, hewing to the strict terms of the contract, refused to pay, pointing out to the new widower and his now suspiciously pregnant daughters that the late Mrs. Lot was, first, responsible for her own demise; she did, after all, look back at Sodom after Lot specifically told her not to; and second, that her transformation into a pillar of salt is a classic example of that category of events known as Acts of God, said acts being uninsurable and therefore not covered by anyone’s plan, government mandated or not. It’s always important to read the fine print in any insurance plan: you can never tell what mischief the lawyers are hiding in there until you look for yourself