Today’s rising healthcare costs have started a trend toward do it yourself treatments. It sounds laughable, but there is a new trend, especially with younger people, that is raising concern among many in the medical profession. Do it yourself healthcare. If you have ever borrowed someone’s leftover prescription drugs, attempted to self-diagnose ailments online, stretched your diabetes or asthma medication for as long as possible or even tried to set your own broken bone, you’ve practiced do it yourself healthcare.
Among many younger people the practice has become very popular. And the rising cost of healthcare and expensive insurance policies is helping the trend to grow. Young adults, mostly in their twenties, are the nation’s largest group of uninsured. There were 13.2 million of them nationally in 2007. That’s twenty-nine percent according to the latest figures from the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit research group in New York.
Alanna Boyd, a twenty-eight year old receptionist, recalled that after spending forty-six hours in Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, suffering from a bout with diverticulitis, a digestive illness, she was charged $17,398. This included a $13 fee for the use of a television. “I was tempted to start laughing-I just kept saying, ‘no way, no way’.” “I could have gone to a major university for a year. Instead, I went to the hospital for two days.”
Community Catalyst, a Boston-based health care consumer advocacy group, released a report this month urging states to ease eligibility requirements to allow adult children to access their parents’ health care coverage. Governor David A. Patterson of New York has proposed allowing parents to claim these young adults as dependents for insurance purposes up to age twenty-nine, as more than two dozen other states have done in the past decade. If Governor Patterson’s proposal is approved, an estimated 80,000 of the 775,000 uninsured young adults across New York State would have access to their parents’ insurance plans. That would leave hundreds of thousands to continue to rely on a scattershot network of improvised and often haphazard health care remedies.
For thousands of young people across the nation the challenge of trying to survive and in a high priced economy on low-paying jobs and staying healthy is a high stakes crapshoot with no safety net. The practice of do it yourself health care has become popular because there are so many out of work Americans who cannot afford health care insurance; and with medical cost skyrocketing, it appears this is a trend that is sure to grow.
