The financial magazine Kiplingers is the latest publication giving advice to young people...ready...you need insurance in case you get sick...uh duh. (http://www.kiplinger.com/columns/starting/archive/2008/st0409.htm)
Instead of any real advice, the article uses the elitist and passe thinking that young people can get employer-offered health insurance and have those amounts comfortably deducted from their paychecks and continue living without worries. Boy, Kiplingers must cover its employees nicely!
The reality is that the cost of health insurance is expensive for everyone because insurance companies do not want to INSURE they want to collect premiums to promote policy and education in the euphemism of "PREVENTION".
If all medical crises can be prevented then people don't need insurance. Based on the lower risk that young people will utilize medical services for no more than routine exams, health insurers should be scrambling to offer low-cost policies...but not in today's world. Health insurers have a stranglehold in our economy and with their unfettered power comes the arrogance that allows them to refer to young people without their own overpriced insurance policy as SLACKERS. (http://conoutconsumer.blogspot.com/search?q=slackers)
Kiplingers has a bully pulpit that could be used to actually provide constructive advice for young people rather than putting a smiley face on one of the biggest crises of their generation. With less emotion than people write about recycling, the article advises young people to shop around.
Legislative mandates are a logical solution to the lack of insurance for young people. Young people do not have the power to battle insurance companies on an individual basis. And for those whose knee jerk response to everything governmental is no more government, at least have enough brain power to call your insurer and ask why they're referring to the cash cows of the younger generation as SLACKERS? Wouldn't SLACKER dollars help you?
Young people can not put aside enough pre-tax dollars into health savings accounts to cover them in the event of illness. Young people cannot rely on the possibility of employer-financed policies (note to Kiplingers, are you not reading any information about the erosion of employer-sponsored health insurance?) and young people know that in the event of illness the COST of medical services will cripple them the same way it will cripple all the smiley faced morons arguing for perpetuation of our current system (Morons is okay since young people are called SLACKERS by insurance companies, right?).
Without support from one of the powerful players in health services industry, young people are being dragged down with the rest of us. Insurers and medical services providers want maximum dollar for minimum coverage, effort, and cost. It is only the government stakeholder that has the power and motivation to work on behalf of young people (because the governmental representatives work in gross numbers and want to counter the number of uninsured figure).
Every article published should address individual state representatives working on behalf of young people and their entitlement to access, affordability, and quality in their health care. But that would take more research and more backbone then advising, shop around, wouldn't it?
