Michael Schroeder of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reports on a study showing that a significant chunk of Hoosiers lack health insurance. The study looked at the years 2007-2008 and vary depending on whether you look at whether a person lacked insurance at any point during that period or during the entire period, but it was between 1.1 and 1.8 million Hoosiers under 65 years old; meaning up to about 29% of that population.
To me, this means that people are foregoing medical care until it’s too bad to be ignored any longer and then going to the emergency room without insurance and getting care in one of the most expensive possible ways. Our health care system is dysfunctional, poorly designed, expensive, and ineffective for a lot of people. Presumably enough people are getting rich off the system and enough of the right people are getting enough care that the system will be hard to change. But really, the system we have in place isn’t very good.
Doug – you left out the fact that people without health insurance automatically pay an additional 30% on that trip to the ER, doctor visit, etc.
I have insurance, but it does not cover any routine care, such as physicals, pap smears, inoculations, prescriptions, etc.
Nothing is going to change. There’s too much fear of “socialized medicine” and the people who could change the system have no reason to do so.