Young Adults Without Health Insurance

Young Adults Without Health Insurance

In rural America, it is not uncommon to find young grade school and high school students whose medical insurance is through their state Medicaid program. Rural America is farm country, and wages, farm employment, and other factors often leave families and children covered only by state Medicaid programs. Unfortunately, once those young people reach the age of 18 years old, they are often times surprised to learn that their eligibility for state Medical assistance has ended. The expectation is that they will transition form their school years to jobs that provide group benefits, and they will have health insurance. This is not just a problem confronting young people living in rural areas; it impact urban young people too. Unless they find employment that offers the hours of work to become eligible for the group health insurance, they, too, remain uninsured as young adults.

For young people living in rural areas, the line of thinking that they will become employed and receive group benefits presumes that these young people will leave their home towns in rural America for places where there is employment offering that coverage. It presumes, too, that they will not return to their home towns to live, because they cannot find jobs that pay health insurance benefits there. If these young people elect to remain in their home towns, it is often as uninsured young people. Compounding the problem is that they do not recognize being uninsured as a problem -- until they are confronted with the need for medical care.

For the young urban dweller, it presumes that they will find full-time employment immediately out of school, with a job that offers group benefits. The problem with this presumption is that many companies in the urban areas have become health insurance stingy, allowing young people hours that are just short of the federally mandated hours that would require the employer to provide mandatory health coverage to them. Or they are hired through urban work programs, that help them work while pursuing college, and in those instances the young person is deemed self-employed, a contract worker, and is not eligible for health insurance.

"Looking at ethnic composition, 52% of the uninsured were non-Hispanic white people. However, Hispanics and African-Americans were more likely to be uninsured than non-Hispanic white individuals. Four of five uninsured people are U.S. citizens. Statistics for the uninsured according to age groups, indicate that the nonelderly age group was the most likely to experience being uninsured with 49.6% of the 18 to 24-year-olds in this category and 32.7% of the 25 to 44-year-olds having no insurance (McLellan, 2003). However, more than 3 million adults ages 55 to 64 lack health insurance. Our youngest population group is vulnerable too, with 8.5 million children in the United States, or 12% of all children under the age of 18, being uninsured (Gallambos, Colleen, 2005, p. 3)."

The implication of this situation is, as employers look to defer more and more of the cost of health insurance to the employees, and as those jobs that provide healthcare benefits to employees become more scarce, the young people in America will not have access to care, and will suffer the physical neglect of that situation.

"In 1994, Congress failed to act on employer-mandated health insurance coverage. This insurance would have benefited mostly poor, working Americans -- those working in small businesses that did not provide health insurance. Medicare and Medicaid, for the most part, cover the older population and those on public assistance. Large businesses cover virtually all their employees. With few exceptions, people who are uncovered are employed by small businesses. Each year since 1994, over 1 million additional American workers, virtually all in small businesses, lost their health insurance coverage. This trend will continue because the proposed employer mandate never even came to a vote (Hirschberg, David, 2001, p. 82)."

This situation is particularly of concern when it comes to young people, whom are still in the processing of maturing and responding to the world around them in ways that make them physically vulnerable to certain health conditions. Right now, many of those young people are uninsured, and without care for conditions that can cause them to become severely disabled, to suffer early death.