CALPIRG Blog

There's been no shortage of news stories noting that seniors are the demographic least supportive of President Obama's push for health care reform.  But we're also seeing the corrolary -- pundits questioning why young people haven't been more involved in the reform effort.

Let's leave aside whether that's true or not, for the time being.  Why should young people care about health care reform?

In a sense, the answer is obvious: young people need health care, same as anyone else.  The common perception of young Americans as "young invincibles" who neither want nor need medical care is a persistent myth, but a myth all the same.  Indeed, the American Medical Association considers young adults of age 18-24 to be in a "high risk" period of their lives.

It's true that many young people are uninsured -- almost 30% of 18-24 year olds don't have coverage.  But that's not because they don't want it; it's because they can't afford it.  Most people with insurance get it through their employees.  But young people just starting out in the workforce have a hard time finding employers who offer health benefits; only 53% of young workers even get the opportunity to opt-in to getting health care through their employers (that number is 74% for older workers).

Student health plans, meanwhile, are offered by many universities as a backstop -- but the coverage they offer is frequently unreliable.  Some have huge deductibles that can require students to rack up huge medical bills before they provide a single cent of assistance.  A bigger problem, however, is when the plans set caps on how much they'll pay to treat any particular condition -- a GAO study has found that some can be as low as $2,500, meaning that a student who has to get medical treatment for anything other than a trivial illness or injury could face potentially unlimited costs (sadly, $2,500 won't get you very much in the hospital these days).

Taken together, it's clear that young people have as much, if not more, at stake when it comes to health care reform as anybody else.  Helping people whose employers don't offer coverage pool their bargaining power to get a fair rate on the new insurance exchanges will help young workers -- as will bans on pre-existing conditions and jacking up rates on the sick, which can lock many young people out of coverage completely.  And reforms that will bring the long-term rise in health care costs under control will help ensure that twenty and thirty yeards down the line, they'll still be able to afford quality coverage for themselves and their new families. 

So if they're on the front lines of the crisis, why aren't they on the front lines of the fight for health care reform?  Well, who's saying they aren't?  When the President went to the University of Maryland to talk about his health care plan, he was greeted by a capacity-crowd of students.  Here in California, CALPIRG's student chapters have been organizing young people in support of reform, and finding lots of them eager to get involved.

In the end, health care reform will help all of us.  Slicing and dicing poll responses and breaking down exactly what different demographics get out of the changes isn't enough to capture the movement in favor of fixing our broken system.  But young people know what's at stake -- and they're ready, willing, and able to fight for change.