My health insurance letter to my Congresspeople

I usually don’t write Congresspeople these days or even send those automated messages, but after Obama’s health care speech tonight, I was pretty moved to write the following. I hope others in my generation will write as well, because I feel we are pretty underrepresented in the health care debate, even though it greatly concerns us.

Dear Senator Gillibrand,

I recognize that you have supported efforts to provide a public option to millions of Americans who do not have health insurance or have unaffordable insurance, and I thank you for that. I am writing you tonight to remind you what is at stake for myself and other members of my generation, who are underrepresented in the current debate.

As I write this, I can safely say that many of my friends are looking for work. They are people who just finished college or graduate school but are having trouble finding jobs in industries that were affected by the recession.

Many of my friends have some kind of income but cannot get insurance because they do not have fulltime jobs with benefits.

Those of us in our twenties face many of the usual anxieties that our parents and our grandparents faced—what kinds of careers to embark upon and whether and how to make big life changes, like relocating for a job or school, or starting a family.

However, we are embarking on these potentially unstable life changes in a backdrop of very unstable times. Young people shoulder education loans today the likes of which my parents’ generation never knew. Because of deceptive credit and debit card practices, young people are often encouraged to take on debt that they cannot afford, or, we have no choice but to charge costs like medical bills to high interest-bearing credit cards. What’s more, we just ended a presidency that brought us the highest deficits in American history, money that my generation will have to pay down.

And more and more, we feel that we are in this on our own. I know from reading about past times of struggle in America’s history that our government has had to bring its citizens together to prevent against the possibility of even greater instability. We have to do this today for my generation, which faces great uncertainty in so many areas.

If I lose my current job, I know I will have trouble getting affordable health insurance because of past health problems. This has happened to a number of people I know. People often say the young elect to go uninsured because we don’t get sick. The only people I know who are uninsured did not elect to go uninsured. If they forgo it, it is because they are considered sick, that is, having preexisting conditions by insurers, due to psychological or physical problems. The sorts of costs we have to bear in the prime of our lives, when we should be saving as our parents could for future families or home purchases or travel, have become or threaten to become exorbitant and stultifying.

I believe private enterprise works for many things. It works especially well when businesses compete to bring better options to consumers. The problem is, insurance companies have become strong enough that they have figured out a way to profit off of the hardship of others. In this case, private enterprise is not working for consumers.

I actually do not think most people in my generation are skeptical toward government and its abilities to do this. After all, the huge organizations that give us the biggest grief are private lenders, private insurers and private credit card companies.

I know that there are certain things individuals like me cannot expect from a public option: we cannot expect a plan to conform perfectly with our ideologies. We cannot expect to get health care for free. Health care always has a cost, but those costs should be manageable. I welcome a serious discussion about how to fund expensive medical procedures and which ones to fund, and I welcome politicians coming before constituents with some of these choices. I don’t want you to think that because I am young, I am naïve and expect free health care.

However, I would like to see the adults in Congress set an example for the younger adults like me by providing a public health insurance option and standing up to the people who are misrepresenting what this option is all about.

Sincerely,

Elaine Meyer