As an informal litmus test
I recently sent an e-mail to a handful of people in their twenties asking three vague questions: Are you uninsured? Know someone who is? How has it affected your life? Forward it to anyone, I encouraged. I imagined I would get a fair number of replies—one in four New Yorkers is uninsured, so I wasn’t exactly shooting in the dark, and as a 27-year-old former young invincible myself, I had an undoubtedly skewed sample—but I was unprepared for the sheer volume of response: more than 100 replies within a couple of days, mostly from people I had never met.
There were complaints, conspiracy theories, details of unpaid debts, stories of untreated injuries, shoddy care, one insurance-inspired marriage (he needed surgery), and, in the case of a musician friend, wisdom teeth that should have been pulled years ago. The messages led to interviews with more than 50 uninsured New Yorkers. If there was a dominant theme to these conversations, it was that being uninsured has a distinct way of tweaking one’s perception of the city: New York becomes a kind of phobia-forming obstacle course, one navigated with the goal of keeping doctors at bay.
Nichole Schulze, a 31-year-old former publicist and current student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, was quick to rattle off a battery of quasi-logical preventive measures: “You won’t see me snowboarding or mountain biking or even jaywalking.