by Nick Jacobs

As a sophomore in high school biology, I was first introduced to the smell of formaldehyde. My initial rendezvous with a scalpel and a frog’s underside followed shortly thereafter. Having grown up near the woods, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, and it surely allowed me to begin to completely grasp the concepts of dissection, categorization, classification and itemization.

Charles Lauer, former vice president of publishing and editorial director of Modern Healthcare wrote an article this week entitled “The Human Cost.” In this commentary he carefully dissected the 47 million uninsured American’s by category. In fact, he acknowledged the Kiplinger Letter for the actual research that was done for his article. Although there were some very troubling numbers, there were also some extremely revealing statistics. For example, over eight million people are in fact eligible for some type of government program but they either do not realize that they are eligible, do know how to sign up for the program, or do not have the proper documentation to permit them to sign up for this assistance.

During previous itemization discussions, we have often asked the illegal alien question. How many illegal’s are there in this country? Do they have employer based insurance? Are they putting a strain on the system? According to Kiplinger and Modern Healthcare, there are approximately 10.2 M noncitizens in the mix of 47 M, but only 20% are illegal. That one seems a little doubtful to me. We have seen numbers ranging from five to 20 million illegal aliens? When you read the statistics of Texas, California and other border towns where emergency room visits are at near crisis levels, those numbers seem suspect.

Several of the uninsured are still young enough to mistakenly believe that they are invincible. This super hero phenomenon is nothing new to our society. These nearly eight million people are living without a net because they either can't pay for the insurance or believe that they will never need it.

How about those of us who are getting older, but are not old enough to collect Medicare, and the pre-existing conditions uninsured, those individuals who are rejected for coverage because of a health problem that disqualifies them from the insurance pool? There are about eight million people in that 47 M number who are retired or unemployed and everyday run the risk of bad luck or poor health.

Nearly 40% of the uninsured are putting off treatment or going without care, and that is not a good thing. It’s always better to maintain the engine before the plane falls out of the sky.

It is an absolute fact that the high cost of healthcare is serious stuff. As our employers attempt to compete internationally and the rest of us try to make our monthly deductible payments, the healthcare costs have a negative impact on our economy. For those who cannot afford insurance, we face that unique dilemma of hanging on the ledge by our fingernails as the window is being closed.