NY noping to stymie rise of DIY medical treatment.

Think you could set your own broken bone? That's what some of the millions of uninsured people in America end up doing when they need medical care.

I can personally attest to as to why you should not do this, but obviously some people have to resort to this kind of thing when they can't afford the hospital bills or don't have insurance. And the numbers of those people is most lively increasing in these hardened economic times. At least, it certainly is getting talked about more often.

They borrow leftover prescription drugs from friends, attempt to self-diagnose ailments online, stretch their diabetes and asthma medicines for as long as possible and set their own broken bones. When emergencies strike, they rarely can afford the bills that follow.

“My first reaction was to start laughing — I just kept saying, ‘No way, no way,’ ” Alanna Boyd, a 28-year-old receptionist, recalled of the $17,398 — including $13 for the use of a television — that she was charged after spending 46 hours in October at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan with diverticulitis, a digestive illness. “I could have gone to a major university for a year. Instead, I went to the hospital for two days.”

In the parlance of the health care industry, Ms. Boyd, whose case remains unresolved, is among the “young invincibles” — people in their 20s who shun insurance either because their age makes them feel invulnerable or because expensive policies are out of reach. Young adults are the nation’s largest group of uninsured — there were 13.2 million of them nationally in 2007, or 29 percent, according to the latest figures from the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit research group in New York.

Gov. David A. Paterson of New York has proposed allowing parents to claim these young adults as dependents for insurance purposes up to age 29, as more than two dozen other states have done in the past decade. Community Catalyst, a Boston-based health care consumer advocacy group, released a report this month urging states to ease eligibility requirements to allow adult children access to their parents’ coverage.
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The consumerist has a bit of good advice for those seeking insurance.

The good news is that by joining a group like Freelancer's Union you can get access to affordable health care, provided your industry meets the eligibility requirements. It's certainly better than the alternative, putting a $17,000 hospital bill on credit cards, or tying a split with one hand while turning the pages of a battlefield medic manual with the other.
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