She had brought her own dinner because she couldn’t eat what we were serving. Instead of the chicken and the pasta, she would eat mashed potatoes and a salad consisting of little more than lettuce. She couldn’t eat more than that because she couldn’t chew more than that; three of her teeth, including two crowns, molars, had crumbled. And the obligatory dentist appointment was still a few days away.

The teeth had been bothering her for some time. But there had not been a visit to the dentist, for there is no dental insurance. And apparetly they dreaded the possibility that they would have to pay what will amount to many thousands of dollars in order to have these teeth fixed. But now there’s no getting around it; it wasn’t, after all, as if the teeth were going to fix themselves.

And as to where the money comes from, that is impossible to say. It’s not as if they have large piles of it sitting around. It will probably go on the credit cards, at - what - 9 percent interest, 14 percent interest, whatever they’re paying. Which means the hole gets dug a little deeper. Which means the constant worry that goes with that, the stress.

Could they have afforded dental insurance? Theoretically. But you know how that goes. It costs a significant amount of money, and when the budget’s tight as it is you make choices. In a rational world everyone would choose to have insurance, would realize what a godsend it can really be. But we don’t live in a particularly rational world, we are not particularly a rational people. The choices these folks made is not so different from the one many people make, many feel forced to make. It’s not as if people don’t want to be insured, or to make sure their kids are. But when the premiums are high - and for health insurance, when you’re talking kids, you’re potentially talking a thousand or thousands of dollars a month - even the best-intentioned sometimes can’t swing it. And those who were foolish or just didn’t think ahead often have no hope whatsoever.

The funny thing is, she is apt to mete out the occasional lecture on the evils of socialized medicine. She doesn’t think people like her should be forced to pay for people who make bad decisions. And to be fair, she’s never suggested the government should be paying for her visits to the dentist. But what we will see, in her case, is what happens when the system we have constructed continues as it is. Her credit card debt will rise, yet again; the already heavy burden of debt gets heavier. Because maybe she did make bad choices; and in our Darwinian society, people get punished for that.

Conservatives seem to believe that the reality of this punishment will lead people to make ”better” choices. We see little evidence that this actually happens. And as the cost of health care continues to shoot skyward, those who have not or can not purchase health insurance on their own find that it becomes even further out of reach. If you can’t fit $1,000 per month into your budget this year, how are you going to fit $1,200 into the budget next year?

And so people do fall through the cracks, and the cracks get bigger. And the haves smugly say, well, those who have not could have done things differently. Indeed, many of them could have, and perhaps should have.

But shall we be a punitive society? Shall “Too bad” be our official policy? Right now, for a growing number of Americans who probably consider themselves solidly middle class, it is. Which is how the middle class slips, how it’s prosperity is undermined.

A nation that sits back as its middle class sees its prosperity undermined - perhaps even by its own lack of foresight - is a nation not on the way up but a nation on the way down. A prescient nation does what it can to buttress middle-class prosperity. But we are not that kind of nation, or we are no longer that kind of nation. We seem to care more about our collective tax rate than the well-being of our citizens. We are damned resentful at the notion that we should be our brothers’ keepers. Our brothers screwed up: Let them deal with it.

Let them eat cake.

So long as they can chew it.