Health insurance comes as second nature to many of us. We grab that blue and white card and put it in our wallet behind old Irving fill-station receipts and forget about it until we are sick or injured. When this happens, there it is, cushioning our fall like the extra padding it provided to cushion our wallets. This is not the case with everyone, however. Many Americans have no cushion to fall back on, no blue and white card to show the emergency room when they have an unexpected health concern. No HMO with a convenient co-pay amount when their son or daughter develops an ear infection. Medicine and other health services are expensive without these important conveniences that many people lack. These people have been “falling through the cracks” in U.S. health care for years, leaving many citizens wondering: why would our country do this to us?
Our great and powerful nation, the United States, a country that much of the world views as the most highly developed nation in the world, is the only industrialized country that does not provide its citizens with universal health care, according to a report by the National Rural Health Association (NRHA 1). Being that we are a capitalist economy, perhaps the government feels it is the duty of the people to make sure they are taken care of. This makes sense, doesn’t it? We are all smart individuals; we can make decisions and take action for ourselves. But what can the individuals do when the cost of insurance and health care is too high for them to handle?
In the United States, the answer is nothing. A 2002 census published by the Public Information office showed that there are 41.2 million Americans who do not have health insurance (Bergman). That amounts to a startling 14.6 percent of the population, up from 14.2 percent in 2001 (Bergman). This may seem like a small percentage compared to the 240.9 million of insured people living in America right now, but it’s a huge...
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