Forced Invincibility

Here’s a choice passage from yesterday’s Times article about twentysomethings trying to get by in the Big Apple without health insurance.

“My first reaction was to start laughing — I just kept saying, ‘No way, no way,’ ” Alanna Boyd, a 28-year-old receptionist, recalled of the $17,398 — including $13 for the use of a television — that she was charged after spending 46 hours in October at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan with diverticulitis, a digestive illness. “I could have gone to a major university for a year. Instead, I went to the hospital for two days.”

The article goes on to describe how the hip and uninsured are resorting to diagnoses via the Internet and treating themselves with expired medications. New York’s governor is proposing a change in law that would allow young adults to remain on their parents’ insurance policies until age 29, but that won’t be of much help to the vast majority of the state’s uninsured young adults. Most of them also make too much money to qualify for Medicaid, even if they work a minimum-wage job.

As Dr. Atul Gawande pointed out in his terrific article on health care reform in The New Yorker, “In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty.” The fact that a short hospital stay can saddle a young person with crushing debt is only one of the many cruelties to be found in our current health care system. President Obama has promised to make health care reform a major component of his forthcoming budget plan. Let’s hope it makes life a little less cruel for the folks in this article and everyone else coping without health insurance.

One other interesting note about the Times article: it mentions a young woman who got hit by a car and subsequently turned her experiences into a one-woman show called Hot Cripple. I just want to point out that she totally stole the title of my planned memoir.