Dear Editor,
While the health care crisis in America has been a prominent
issue in the current presidential campaign, here at UCSD it seems to be all but
irrelevant. Since all students have medical coverage, either through the
university or private insurers, this is understandable. However, what happens to UCSD’s 26,000
students when they graduate and enter the real world, where there is no
built-in health safety net to catch them?
A single person’s yearly health insurance premium is, on
average, about $4,300. That’s more than most recent graduates will make in a
month (or two, even). Instead of saving up to some day own a home, raise a
family or simply move beyond a top-ramen diet, alumni from UCSD and every other
university in the country will have to sacrifice financial health to help
ensure physical health.
This is (obviously) no fault of the universities, but rather
another example of why the U.S. health care system is seriously faulty and must
be radically reformed.
If the proud owner of a hard-earned college degree has to
move back in with mom and dad to pay his premium, then one of two things must
be true: either 1) health care costs in the United States are obscene, or 2)
college is a waste of time (isn’t the whole point to get away from the folks?).
Universal, single-payer government-sponsored health
insurance would solve much of what ails health care in the United States.
It would drastically reduce administrative costs (currently
about 1/3 of the total cost of insurance), since there would be only one
insurer instead of several scrambling to send, receive and organize incomplete
records about the same patient. Administration itself would become much more
efficient as well. Furthermore, single-payer insurance does not mean a
“government takeover” of hospitals, clinics and private practices.
Doctors, nurses and other health care workers would still be
paid and managed solely by their current employers. Instead of spending hours
on the phone begging a for-profit insurance company to pay for their patients’
surgery, they could spend those hours actually performing the surgery.
That should please students at the UCSD School of Medicine,
who probably are in school to become doctors, not solicitors.
Health care reform might be a phantom issue to college
students right now, but in just a few years it will become extremely relevant —
unpleasantly so. Covering it now will give students a chance to act and help
change the system before it swallows them whole. Or, at the least, let them
know they should start saving up.
— Kevin Wolfman
Eleanor Roosevelt College junior
