Even after Obamacare mandate, many millennials cannot afford health insurance

Health care expenses have proven too high for a larger majority of the millennial generation, which has continued to resist purchasing health insurance for a multitude reasons, largely due to affordability.

According to a recent Harris Poll surveying more than 1,000 millennials, “One in five adults ages 18 to 36 said they cannot afford routine health care expenses,” CNBC’s Berkeley Lovelace reported. “Many of those millennials are uninsured because of the cost. An additional 26 percent said they can afford routine health care costs, but with difficulty.”

A Commonwealth Fund report released last May observed trends in health insurance between the years of 2003 and 2014, Newsweek‘s Jessica Firger reported.

It “found that a quarter of adults with at least one chronic condition who met the criteria for being underinsured didn’t fill a prescription or skipped doses due to cost, compared with 7 percent of those who did not meet the criteria for underinsurance,” Firger said.

Paul Yeagar is one of many Americans who are not able to pay monthly health insurance costs. Yeagar suffered neck and back pain after a car accident, but resisted treatment as he was coming off of his wife giving birth and earning his master’s degree, Lovelace noted.
 
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