Emergency Relief

We've all heard it a thousand times already. A young, healthy working person, with enough income to be able to afford health insurance, chooses not to do so. These are the people who are supposedly ruining our health care system because they are young, foolish and think they are bullet proof. Then, the story goes, they come up with an unexpected health crisis and promptly head to the emergency room where they will be treated regardless of their lack of insurance. They then skip out on the bill, leaving the cost to be swallowed by the hospital and eventually all the rest of us who have insurance and see that our bills get paid. "We're paying for it already!" is the hue and cry. And the solution is get that young person to begin substituting preventative health care for those trips to the emergency room. As a liberal blogger once admonished me, ".. what costs more? A birth or birth control? a mammogram or chemo and radiation? a blood pressure test or a heart attack?"

Well there's certainly no doubt those first options are definitely cheaper than the second ones, the problem however is that they are seldom available to trade off so perfectly. But beyond the difficulty of trading off these alternatives, exactly how much of this stiffing of the emergency room is going on? I heard David Axelrod claim to day that those young slackers who don't buy insurance are the problem. But how much can this happen? Their claim is that billions and billions will be saved. Wait, I thought these were the healthy ones!

I want to see some numbers. I don't believe it.