The Startribune recently published an article saying that young people don’t have an opinion about healthcare debate, and I couldn’t disagree more. The majority of young people do have an opinion and simply aren’t heard due to the fact that none of us have the means (i.e. giant bags of money) to make our opinions heard. CNN and Fox News and all those other giant media corporations aren’t there to cover people like us; they want to cover more important things like David Letterman’s sex life. Unfortunately for young people, this means that there’s no room left for us in the very tiny spotlight. You could say that none of them really have that much to say simply because most of them are on their parents’ plan, or perhaps they’re too wrapped up in school to realize they have a problem with it. However, I’m sure that a lot of them will have a story somewhat like mine. It’s nothing special, quite average in fact.

I myself have been without health insurance for quite some time now. I used to be under my parent’s plan under the condition that I was a full time student. The rule goes, with most health insurance agencies I’m sure, that you can stay covered under your parents plan if you’re a full time student until your 24 as long as you take so many units per semester. If you don’t take enough units, if you graduate from college early, or if you quit college to work full time because you’re sick and tired of having pointless classes shoved down your throat, the insurance companies wont cover you anymore. So when I decided that college wasn’t for me, I was kicked off of my parents’ plan. It didn’t bother me much at the time and I’m not complaining about it. I had a job and I was working full time. I wasn’t going to school nor was I stuck with a degree of some sort looking for a job so there really wasn’t a reason for me to be under my parents’ plan anymore. However, when you haven’t seen a doctor in upwards of two or three or four years, you start to realize that you’re gambling with your health. The certainty that I was a perfectly healthy guy began to wane and I started to realize that I was only hoping that everything in my system was running the way it was supposed to. I’m not sure how well I would cope with a complete lack of assurance that everything is running properly. At some point I might start to wonder if everything that my body is doing is normal. I might begin to analyze anything strange that happens within their bodily functions and try to guess what it could be a symptom of. What if get some kind of disease like tuberculosis and not show any symptoms and infect all my friends without them knowing. The risks of not having a doctor are very disconcerting, and yet there are millions of people across the country that don’t have one because they can’t pay for it.

There was a point where I had been working a minimum wage at a pet food store for a year, and they offered me health care benefits. Like most people, it was the only way I could afford it. I was working in San Francisco where the minimum wage is now $9.75. Working forty hours a week I made around 650 on every biweekly paycheck. That made for around $1,300 a month. Now when I saw my options for medical coverage I was floored. I could pay around 150 bucks a month for blue cross, or $350 bucks a month for Kaiser. Now lets say for instance that I didn’t have my parents’ house to live in. The cost of living in San Francisco is very high.  When you throw the costs rent, food, utilities and transportation all together you don’t have very much left over for blue cross’s 150 dollar health insurance premiums especially considering that that isn’t including copayments or other fees.

As far as Kaiser is concerned, well, I’m sure you already got the idea. For a company that made $38.7 billion dollars in total revenue in 2007 (according to their website) and still claims to be a not for profit organization, they sure do charge a hell of a lot for premiums.  I realize that part of the free market is to be able to charge as much as you want for goods or services, but the idea behind that is when you allow for that to happen you get competition, and thus makes for lower prices. This is clearly not happening with health care (as well as many other industries, but we wont get into that here) and I’m not just talking about Kaiser either. When you have companies that are making $37.8 billion dollars in “total revenue” and there are still millions of people going without health insurance because they can’t afford it then there’s seriously something wrong with the way things are going.

Weather they’ve graduated college early, dropped out of college, or if their parents never had medical coverage that covered them to begin with, I’m sure that most young people would agree with me that this debate over health care really should have happened a long time ago. I’m sure that even those of us who do have health insurance would agree that a public option is needed for all of those who don’t fall under the umbrella of people without preexisting conditions as well as the funds to pay for it. I’m all for having the health insurance companies forced to drop their prices in order to keep up with the competition of the government’s plan, for they’ve taken advantage of us enough as it is.