Costs depriving many of healthcare benefits
By Michael P. Regan
Associated Press
NEW YORK — When Arnaud Durieux needed to get his teeth fixed about six months ago, the freelance Web designer caught a flight from New York to his native France.
Since he has no health or dental insurance, he figured this was his best option to get good care at a good price, even factoring in the cost of the airplane ticket. The French dentist charged him about $500 for the crown, compared with the $2,000 he says it would have cost him in New York.
"I usually go back (to France) about once a year. So while I'm there I get my medical checkup and any dental work I need," said the 37-year-old Durieux. "It's still cheaper for me to get all that work done in France than getting insurance here and doing it the American way. It's unfortunate, but that's how it is."
Durieux's is one of many unique strategies that the 45 million uninsured people in the United States employ in an attempt to keep themselves healthy without going broke.
Premiums for family coverage in employer-sponsored plans rose 59 percent between 2001 and 2004, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, compared with a 9.7 percent growth in consumer prices.
The escalating costs are expected to keep the ranks of the uninsured growing for years to come. A study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, published Tuesday by the policy journal Health Affairs, predicts that 56 million people in the United States — more than one in four American workers — will be uninsured by 2013.
For many younger people who are uninsured, the good health that usually comes with youth makes the risks tolerable. But as middle age and the aches and pains that come with it encroach, so do fears of huge medical bills from a catastrophic illness or accident.
"It worries me all the time. It doesn't settle well with me," said C.J. Holm, a 42-year-old New York woman who is looking for a part-time job that offers health benefits until her new catering business brings in enough money for her to afford coverage.
She beat ovarian cancer in the 1980s — but has had to skip regular checkups because she can't afford them.
"When I think about it, I feel really guilty," she says.
For Nancy Twigg, a 38-year-old author and newsletter publisher in Knoxville, Tenn., being uninsured means looking up her symptoms on the Internet when she gets sick, peppering friends who are nurses and pharmacists with questions, and treating whatever she can with over-the-counter medicines.
If disaster strikes, she has faith she'll be covered by Samaritan Ministries, a group of Christians who send money each month to members of the network with high medical bills.
Experts say most of the uninsured population is composed of people whose employers don't offer benefits, but who make too much money to be covered by public-health programs and not enough to afford their own coverage.
Yet there is a significant number who simply gamble they won't incur medical bills high enough to justify the soaring costs of insurance.
Paul Keckley, a healthcare economist and director of the Vanderbilt Center for Evidence Based Medicine, says research shows this group of gamblers is about 15 percent to 18 percent of the uninsured population and is definitely growing.
For some, "I think there's maybe a suspicion that modern medicine, quote unquote, is like modern food: There's a whole lot of chemistry and technology involved and if you can get natural in your approach, perhaps you're better off," he said.
