So there are many "side-effects" of being in graduate school with yes, younger students than I, though I have to say this nonprofit master's program at uwm is gracefully well-distributed I'd say across ages. I also know quite a a few artists, entrepreneurs with small businesses, and adjunct teachers of the arts.
They all have a disturbing thing in common, ...they have no health insurance.
There is a heavily populated club with zero health insurance, mostly boys and men. Women tend to take terrible jobs that have some health insurance, with the specific knowledge they would quit if they could find healthcare elsewhere. Then there are the women who work for Catholic-owned or operated subsidies who don't get birth control covered under their plans, so they seek public health clinics for samples and free prescriptions.
I haven't done my own study within Milwaukee, because I kind of thought the numbers of people without health insurance was a "believable" statistic we get from folks who make the big bucks figuring that out. But I'm thinking...this is a lot of people just in my little circle.
As a parent, it lets me know, too, that if I want to know my child is safe, at any age, I need to be prepared to pay (or have them pay, or at least facilitate the arrangement of and deduction for) health insurance for my child until I am no longer capable of talking on the phone or emailing said child to find out if she/he is covered.
The repurcussions of not having health insurance, as I understand them, are huge. We always hear the wrong figure from the government. They talk about the "cost of the uninsured" in the same way the signs proclaiming "Shoplifting steals everybody's money!" do. What they should mention and don't is, "If you get sick and can't pay for it, it is bigger than just you. We will hunt you and your family down like a dog (or Dogg, the Bounty Hunter) and repossess your assets. Then we will cover your expense and it will cost the taxpayers money." Less of course than the bailout.
I hear lots of people say that if healthcare were national, after a few years we would save, as a nation and as citizens, lots of money.
I hear the exchange student from Germany talk about the healthcare plan that covers him while he's a graduate student - it was hard even to get the idea across that he would need to pay for his own healthcare if he wanted to be able to go to the hospital or see a doctor for a cold.
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For now, I make this point. There is a sea of uninsured people living among us, my little family would be in the same situation if we didn't take out a loan to cover the cobra (extended coverage after a job loss) payments. It is a huge liability for families to have a member of the family out there in the world "roughing it" for a while, because if he/she God forbid gets hurt, it could be a devastating occurrence.
