The Truth About Uninsured Youth

I’ve posted sev­eral times about just who the heck really, truly, has no access to health care in Amer­ica — see:

• Demo­c­ra­tic Denial­ism About The Unin­sured Costs Lives
• Demo­c­ra­tic Doc­tors and Dis­tor­tions about the Unin­sured in America

It should be clear by now that the The Left’s obses­sion over health care has lit­tle, if any­thing, to do with the unin­sured, i.e., it has every­thing to do with even­tu­ally giv­ing the gov­ern­ment total con­trol over 1/6th of the Amer­i­can econ­omy.

Nev­er­the­less, on the eve of the Sen­ate pass­ing what’s prob­a­bly the worst bill in his­tory, it’s instruc­tive to look at the nature of unin­sured youth in America.

This is the face of unin­sured youth in Amer­ica who have sadly bought the false promises of big­ger gov­ern­ment lib­eral health care reform:

Unin­sured in Amer­ica : Transcript

Faye Chao (Unin­sured 26-year-old):
My rent cur­rently is $475 plus util­i­ties. In total, my cost comes out to about $530 a month.

Stu­art Brown­ing:
What’s your aver­age monthly income?

Faye Chao:
On aver­age my monthly income is twenty three hun­dred. And it’s not taxed. Some­times, you know, it varies. I save almost a thou­sand dol­lars a month.

Stu­art Brown­ing:
So why don’t you have health insurance?

Faye Chao:
I’m young right now and cur­rently don’t need health insur­ance. Prob­a­bly don’t want to spend $200 a month.

Stu­art Brown­ing:
In this state, a 26-year-old non-smoker with no pre­ex­ist­ing con­di­tions can get a pol­icy for $96 a month.

Faye Chao:
It’s 96 dol­lars a month, but that’s twelve hun­dred dol­lars a year you’re spend­ing on health insur­ance. And hon­estly, I feel it’s ridicu­lous that we live in a first world coun­try where I have to pay for basic health care.

Stu­art Brown­ing (off cam­era):
What do you think that you spend each month din­ing out?

Jason Dusek (Unin­sured 25-year-old):
I spend about $300 a month on aver­age. I go out to eat about twelve times a month.
Jay Her­rara (Unin­sured 23-year-old):
I spend three to four hun­dred dol­lars a month going out to clubs and bars for entertainment.

Stu­art Brown­ing (voice over):
But, what if they get sick or injured and they don’t have any sav­ings? They know that the U.S health care sys­tem will still give them med­ical care.

Faye Chao:
I bike every­where in the city, so I have got­ten hit by dri­vers twice — and one time I ended up in the hos­pi­tal. No, I didn’t have health insur­ance, but I was treated — and billed for it later.

Stu­art Brown­ing (off cam­era):
Umm hmm. How much was the bill for? Do you remember?

Faye Chao:
Hon­estly I don’t because I didn’t bother to pay for it.

Stu­art Brown­ing (voice over):
And across the nation there’s an exten­sive sys­tem of low or no cost com­mu­nity health care cen­ters and free health care clinics.

Chan­dra Nalaani (Unin­sured 27-year-old):
One of the things I found is that they have amaz­ing resources for peo­ple with­out insur­ance here. One of the places I’ve gone is the Lyon-Martin’s Women’s Health Cen­ter. And — I got an annual exam, they tested me for a bunch of things, and I mean as long as you’re within cer­tain income lev­els and in this case, if you’re a woman — but there are other resources depend­ing on what you are. And they’re just friendly, they treat you like a per­son, and they’re like OK — what do you need? What can we do for you?

Stu­art Brown­ing (off cam­era):
And what do they charge?

Chan­dra Nalaani:
It’s slid­ing scale … in my case, because I wasn’t mak­ing much at the time, it was free.

Now we’ve cor­rectly framed the issue, watch the mon­u­men­tal igno­rance of Rock The Vote’s new approach in sup­port­ing DemiCare:

Hot Air’s Ed Mor­ris­sey nails it:

Why igno­rant? First, the young peo­ple to whom they’re preach­ing largely avoid buy­ing health insur­ance, and for good rea­son. They don’t need to spend $3600 per year (Minnesota’s aver­age in 2007) to cover a cou­ple of doc­tor vis­its every year. They’re bet­ter off buy­ing cat­a­strophic health insur­ance, rather than the man­dated com­pre­hen­sive cov­er­age under Oba­maCare, and use HSAs to pay for their health care with tax-free cash. That’s what Keith Olber­mann does, after all, and he’s a lot older than the RtV tar­get audience.

Who ben­e­fits from this push? The young adults don’t; they’re going to pay a lot more than they receive. Insur­ance com­pa­nies will ben­e­fit by forc­ing them into the sys­tem, reduc­ing the risk and spread­ing the costs over a wider base. I don’t con­sider insur­ance com­pa­nies evil, but many of the Oba­maCare advo­cates do — and yet they’re push­ing their fol­low­ers to sub­si­dize slight declines in health insur­ance pre­mi­ums for the older gen­er­a­tions in Amer­ica. It’s just like Social Secu­rity, only with a worse pay­off in the end. (Rock the Vote tries out new strat­egy for Oba­maCare).

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Bet­ter, more afford­able health care requires free-market reforms: the free­dom to pur­chase health plans across state lines; tax reforms like “large” health sav­ings accounts; mak­ing health insur­ance portable, con­trolled by the indi­vid­ual rather than gov­ern­ment or an employer; mak­ing med­ical licenses portable, and more.

To read more about real solu­tions to the prob­lem of ris­ing heath care costs, see:

Pro-market Alter­na­tives to Demo­c­ra­tic Health Care Reform

See also:

• Why Isn’t Gov­ern­ment Health Care the Answer?
• What Should Be Done?
• FAQ: Consumer-Directed Health Care

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Tagged as: Liberal Health Care Reform, uninsured