Interesting Question — What About Those Who Don’t Want Health Insurance?

This week I found an interesting article in Kaiser Health News entitled, “People Who Choose Not To Have Health Insurance”. This caught my attention because one of these key debates in health care reform is making it mandatory, meaning everyone would need to have it. As someone who has health insurance, immediately I thought this was a good thing, but I never honestly thought about people who would voluntarily choose not to get health insurance even if they could. That’s what this article looks into.

According to the CDC’s 2008 National Health Interview Survey, two percent of uninsured people said they didn’t want insurance, for example. Others say people don’t get health insurance because they can’t afford it. Other experts say the amount of people who can’t afford insurance is overestimated. According to an Employment Policies Institute study, 43 percent of uninsured people make enough money to afford insurance, but they choose not to, classifying them as “voluntarily’ uninsured”. There are other factors at work here, sure, but it raises interesting questions.

The article also goes into “young invincibles” who are between 18 and 34 years old and, according to Lisa Dubay, a Johns Hopkins University professor, refuse employer-sponsored insurance nine-percent of the time. These numbers show that, even if health insurance does become mandatory, not everyone is going to jump on the bandwagon.

However this issue gets resolved, the people who are crafting health care reform should keep numbers like these in mind. It could lead to a possible backlash in mandatory health insurance that lawmakers probably want to avoid. Whatever happens, it’s hoped that by making insurance more affordable, less people will be inclined to voluntarily avoid it in the future.