This is from the headline story in yesterday’s Denver Post: 1 in 6 uninsured in Colorado:
The Census Bureau figures found Aurora and Denver had the highest uninsured rates, 23.3 percent and 22.6 percent, respectively.
The rates are not a surprise to Aurora health care providers.
The wait time for a new patient to see a doctor at one of Aurora’s three community health clinics for the uninsured is nearly six weeks.
“Thousands of people are trying to get in, and we don’t have the capacity to serve them,” said David Myers, chief executive of the Metro Community Provider Network, which is receiving 8,000 phone calls per month from new patients.
The network includes 10 clinics in Denver’s suburbs to provide medical care for needy people.
Each of the system’s 25 doctors see 15 to 17 patients per day, including four to six new patients, said John Reid, vice president of development. Hundreds are turned away.
The majority of people who call the clinic seeking appointments are from Aurora or Arapahoe and Adams counties, he said. The network recently estimated there are 60,000 uninsured people in Aurora.
“If they don’t get an appointment at MCPN, you can rest assured that nine out of 10 will go to hospital ERs and wait there until they get treated,” Reid said.
The major driver appears to be low income. Insurance is not really a choice. Non-unionized retail clerks and shelf stockers can’t afford major medical policies, not even the high-deductible ones currently favored by the insurance industry.
Gary Horvath, managing director of the Business Research Division at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, said Aurora also has more lower-paying retail jobs that may not include insurance.
By contrast, Boulder has IBM and Jefferson County has Lockheed Martin as major employers, he said.
This is definitely a society where we have insiders and outsider, where insiders receive excellent care, where outsiders get little or no care and have to endure long wait times.
Denver city bus drivers, and area teachers, sanitation workers, police and fire fighters, though they are in relatively low-paid professions, have the advantage of being unionized and employed by government, and are therefore better insured than the average low-pay worker.
Piece of Mindful 
“If they don’t get an appointment at MCPN, you can rest assured that nine out of 10 will go to hospital ERs and wait there until they get treated,” Reid said.
This implies that we could take the money spent on ERs and fund clinic care for the needy. I suspect this is not the case.
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There’s a myth floating around that one can go the the ER and get free care. Only the poorest among us can do this. For everyone else, the ER will make a claim on your assets and income and pursue it to its legal conclusion, unless they decide that the benefit doesn’t justify the cost.
These are the working poor, and their only access to free or affordable care is via the clinics. The clinics ought to be increased in number and funded. The very idea that people go without necessary care in this rich country is absurd.
And remember, if John Galt goes on strike, nothing changes. If the trash collectors do, we’re in deep shit. Give them some health care, for Christ’s sake.
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I imagine the John Galts of the world could haul their own trash. On the other hand, high end metallurgists are a scarcer commodity.
Give them some health care
The notion that health care is free, or something given away, or something that can be delivered if politicians in Washington write certain words on a piece of paper, distorts the delivery of health care in a multitude of ways.
Maybe a better system would include storefront clinics run by nurse practitioners where most people could pay for their care out of current earnings.
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No one believes that health care is free. Should you get cancer, or ALS, or need a knee replacement, I hope you can pay for your care out of your current earnings.
Here’s how it is done: Since health care tends to be mostly routine, at any given time, few people need it. But those few people often have catastrophic conditions that exceed their earning capacity. We don’t know who will be struck. So we spread the risk by the use of insurance.
But private for-profit health insurance is fatally flawed. Insurers, due to adverse selection, can’t make money if only sick people want insurance. So private insurers do everything they can to avoid sick people, including use of the workplace as a market. It’s a system that cannot succeed.
So, as every other industrial country (and Costa Rica) have learned, the simple solution is to have government either provide the insurance (efficient) or the care itself (less efficient, but still better than our system).
The private sector has no solution for the health care problem. It’s functionally incapable of giving us what we need.
John Galt has never dropped out, never will. That’s a libertarian masturbatory fantasy. He would quickly find out how easily replaceable he is. All I’m saying is that we all work for each other, and the basic work of society, the trash collection and teaching and sewer professions, are worthy of health care, just as everyone is. Even stay-at-home Moms, the mentally and physically handicapped, children, all of whom who make no financial contribution to society, are worthy.
Health care is a right. The Declaration of Human Rights, which the U.S. signed, says so. The libertarian (not conservative) principle of unrestrained self-interest as a tool for betterment is fatally flawed.
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…the simple solution is to have government either provide the insurance…
There is still the problem of cost and moral hazard.
Health care is a right.
But on what moral basis are others required to pay for this right? We have a right to life, but does this mean anyone can get an armed security guard 24/7 payed for by taxpayers?
[John Galt] would quickly find out how easily replaceable he is.
Uhm, no. Modern technological society is built by outliers such as John Galt. Dispense with them at your peril.
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“We have a right to life, but does this mean anyone can get an armed security guard 24/7 payed for by taxpayers?”
Around here, we have armed police on duty, 24/7, paid for by taxpayers. So, uh, yes.
Health care, like policing, is a public good that benefits everyone. (Health is contagious, just as disease is: http://unreasonable.org/node/3109 http://unreasonable.org/node/2944 )
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