Regional
(2008-05-05)
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Marc Ringel, M.D.
KUNC May 5, 2008
I always ask men who are my age what they did about the military draft that it was our generation's fate to face during the conflict in Vietnam. We all have our stories, either about service in the armed forces or about how we got out of it. (I attended medical school during much of the period when I would have been draft bait, for example.)
There was no end to what some of my comrades did to avoid the joining the army. They volunteered to teach in inner city schools; joined the National Guard; got doctors to write letters to the draft board about their asthma or football knee injuries; confessed to bedwetting; amputated their trigger finger; and even went so far as to get married.
Today, the stories about what people do to obtain health insurance are beginning to sound like the tales my cohorts tell about their adventures with the draft board. And the stakes can be just as high, life and death.
Folks are even marrying for healthcare coverage. The Los Angeles Times reported last month on a poll commissioned by the Kaiser Family Foundation which found that 7% of Americans admitted someone in their household had married in the last year so they could get healthcare benefits via their spouse.
To put this issue in perspective, the same survey found that medical costs were of greater concern than levels of credit card debt or the price tag of housing and food. (Only the cost of gasoline caused more immediate anxiety among the respondents.) Fully 28% said they'd experienced serious problems related to the cost of healthcare.
For years now, medical expenses have been inflating at about double the rate of economic growth. The climbing cost of health insurance has placed it beyond the reach of many employed Americans. According to the National Coalition on Health Care, 20% of our working population was uninsured in 2006. That number just grows and grows.
How many people do you know who would change jobs today if they weren't afraid of being caught without health insurance? How can we even begin to estimate the overall damage to morale and productivity that this big slug of stuck, unhappy workers inflicts on the U.S. economy?
I suppose it's still better for folks to make their health-insurance decisions based on where they work rather than on who they sleep with, til death do they part. Some of the younger uninsured could even follow a path opposite to the one so many of my Vietnam era friends did and actually choose to join the military, which would guarantee them health care, food and shelter so long as they keep taking orders, don't wet the bed and hang on to their trigger fingers.
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