Health care, a question for rich and poor alike

Updated: Dec. 10, 12:24 p.m. 

No doubt, the current recession is an equal-opportunity offender, battering rich, poor and everyone in between. According to a recent report, “Affluent Market Insights,” produced by the Spectrem Group, the number of millionaire households in the U.S. plummeted from 9.2 million in 2007 — just before the economic slump began — to 6.7 million in 2008, the lowest level since 2003.

Wherever you turn, you hear another story about rich people losing their shirts. Look at celebrity photographer Annie Liebovitz, who once shut down the Palace of Versailles to snap a portrait of actress Kirsten Dunst posing as Marie Antoinette for a Vogue cover. Liebovitz, who has photographed everyone from Queen Elizabeth to Hillary Clinton to George Clooney, is now flat broke. She reportedly used her body of work — valued at $50 million — as collateral on a $24 million loan to refinance her mounting debts. She apparently is unable to make payments on the new loan. Now she could lose her life’s work.

Or how about Tavern on the Green, the Central Park symbol of Manhattan opulence? With debts estimated at $10 million to $50 million, the Tavern, famous for its mirrored walls and rarefied cuisine, recently filed for bankruptcy protection.
Many of the rich are so desperate that they’re reportedly hocking their precious works of art to stay afloat. In “Cash-strapped U.S. art owners hit the pawnshop,” Olivia Hampton of the AFP news service wrote recently, “Famous artists and high-end art collectors are joining a litany of victims from the crippling U.S. recession, pawning some of their most valuable works in exchange for much-needed cash.”

Why worry so much about the rich? Why not speak about the Bronx, where the poverty rate hovers around 44 percent? Or Allegany County in upstate New York, with its 37 percent poverty rate?