“Million Young Adults Get Health Coverage under Law"

Letters to the Editor

San Francisco Chronicle

901 Mission St.

San Francisco, CA 94103

September 22, 2011

Dear Editor,
I greatly appreciated yesterday’s article “Million Young Adults Get Health Coverage under Law.” The fact that the number of insured young people has declined since the passage of Obama’s healthcare reform is evidence that the reforms are working and making an impact on people’s lives. As a 22-year-old student, I am very grateful that I will be able to stay on my parents’ insurance plan for another four years. Finding a job in this economy will be hard enough; I am not so naïve to think that I will be able to find a job offering healthcare quickly. While this provision of the healthcare reform is a great help to me and many other young Americans, there are still far too many who are uninsured – 49.9 million in 2010.1 What many people do not realize is that if more Americans had access to preventative care and treatment when they need it, we would be a more productive country with lower chronic disease costs. We must strenuously defend the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act against those who wish to limit Americans’ access to healthcare and indeed continue pushing for further reforms to ensure the economic viability of our healthcare system.

Sincerely,

Mara Constantine

1 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. Overview of the Uninsured in the United States: A Summary of the 2011 Current Population Survey. Sept. 2011. Web. 22 Sept. 2011.

(Here is the link to the article to which I am referring: http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-09-21/news/30183169_1_young-adults-health-insurance-adult-children)