Make Social Change A Reality

* I am in debt. In retrospect, my undergraduate career seems in part a veritable mission to accumulate debt. Since graduating I’ve stressed about debt, worked a couple of undesirable second jobs to repay debt, and I’ve even been known to defer debt, allowing it to simply growl beneath the bed from the back of my mind. I have nightmares where bill collectors show up at my back door with pitchforks - the only consolation being that so many of my peers are in the exact same situation. This country is teeming with twenty and thirty-somethings struggling to manage educational debt, with a long string of people in their late-teens and early-twenties prepared to join us. According to the Project on Student Debt , a nonprofit devoted to the issue, the portion of graduates in debt jumped from less than half in 1993 to over two-thirds in 2004. Factoring in inflation, debt levels for graduates rose 58% in that decade. The average public university graduate now finds him or herself owing o...

Hospitals are charging self-pay patients two, three, and four times what they accept as full payment from insurance companies, simply because they can. Medical debt saddled 72 million adults in 2007 and caused HALF of all personal bankruptcies in 2005. With the recent surge in jobless claims the number of uninsured and under insured self-pay patients is steadily rising and hospital ERs are seeing more patients seeking primary care. Those whose income disqualifies them from community assistance programs even by a hair may face unfathomable costs for their stay at the hospital. While insurance companies fork over a reasonable amount over the actual cost of care to the hospital and Medicare even less, people who can least afford to pay are charged the most. A procedure that may cost the hospital $6,000 would retail to the insurance companies for $8,000 and to a self-pay patient for $12,000! Talk about kickin ’ ‘em when they’re down!! And it’s all legal. A typical hospital bill for ...

Since I’m new to this blog, I’d like to open up with a post about why I feel personally vested in its mission. I’ve been laid off, twice. The first time was with two years notice, the second time was at 5:00 pm on a Monday with not even a sideways glance as warning. I received a severance package the first time, a pretty generous sum that gave me a nice cushion while I looked for my next job, enough to pay rent, groceries, maybe even take some time off. I put on my sneakers and corduroys and checked out for the next month. I figured I’d apply for a few jobs and temp once my severance ran out. The severance ran out in three weeks and I had clocked a total of four hours of temp time. No one replied to my solicitations, and my rent was due. So I decided to move back to mom’s house in New York. I should mention that I had conjured a formidable debt monster while living on my own (mostly resulting from three $1000 mattresses that I bought after each failed to conquer insomnia). In New ...