Lindsay Kline sits at her dining room table at her home in Tulsa with some of the medical bills that have caused her to file for bankruptcy. MICHAEL WYKE/Tulsa World
Lindsay Kline ignored the throbbing pain in the side of her face for days, until it became unbearable.
At 22 with a job as a waitress and no health insurance, Kline couldn’t afford a trip to the doctor.
But when she began vomiting uncontrollably and the swollen area on her face “looked like a softball,” Kline went to the emergency room.
Doctors in the ER told her an untreated abscessed tooth sparked a systemic infection that could have killed her if she had waited much longer. After spending a night in the hospital undergoing expensive treatments including MRI and CT scans, Kline was released the next day.
“They had to do a lot of things because I was at such a dire point,” said Kline of Tulsa.
That trip to the ER and other medical bills piled up over the next year until Kline was forced to file bankruptcy at age 23. Her medical bills totaled more than $18,000.
“I wasn’t a shopaholic and I hadn’t bought a car,” said Kline, now 29. “My credit was ruined at a young age.”
In the continuing national debate over the Affordable Care Act and health care, many pundits have dubbed 20-somethings such as Kline the “young invincibles.” Many in this demographic won’t sign up for insurance — as required by the law’s “individual mandate” — because they feel largely immune from the risk of being uninsured.
Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow with the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation, is quite familiar with the notion of “young invincibles” who believe they don’t need insurance. And she doesn’t buy the logic.
“I personally get a little irritated by it,” said Pollitz, who said she is also the mother of a young adult. “My young invincible son knows better.”
A popular prediction among critics of the sweeping health care overhaul is that a lack of participation by young adults in the law will bring down the whole system. Pollitz notes that, financially, the Affordable Care Act doesn’t rely on premium payments by the young.
“It’s really based on everybody. The young don’t pay as much. For the same policy, I’m going to pay up to three times what a young person is going to pay.”
Pollitz said the notion that many young adults reject the need for health insurance because they feel invincible may be due to some insurance industry practices.
Read more in Sunday's World.
