While most 19-year-olds are focusing on their college experience, Jessica Mareau is focusing on earning enough money to pay for her medical procedures. She cannot attend school because she works three jobs to pay for her health care.
“I want to go to school but I have to work, I don’t have a choice,” Mareau said.
Mareau, a Dallas resident, has been financially independent since she was 16. She must work full time in order to receive health insurance. She works at Kids Cooking Company, Chili’s and Toy Maven just to get full health coverage.
Being financially independent means Mareau must pay for her rent and all bills, including her medical bills. She works full time in order to receive health insurance to help cover the costs. Without it, Mareau would be paying even more.
Many Americans share Mareau’s concerns. Health care is a major issue for every candidate in the upcoming presidential election. SMU Provost Paul Ludden recently enlisted a group of faculty members to get together to discuss the future of health care.
SMU law professor Tom Mayo, along with other numerous colleagues, is creating a voters guide of facts about significant topics like health care, political reform and improving equality.
Mayo hopes the guide will better inform SMU faculty, students and staff about prominent issues regarding health care and health care coverage.
“His [the provost] goal for SMU is to say something important about important issues,” Mayo said.
The guide will be available on the SMU Web site by the end of May.
“We can have a guide to health care issues that can clarify, demystify [and] correct issues that are out there,” Mayo said.
Socialized medicine, which is different from universal health care coverage, is one of the major issues discussed in the guide. Mayo says his goal is to back up the facts in the voter’s guide with research papers written by faculty members and graduate students. After compiling the research, the guide will be made into a Web page for reference purposes.
“The bottom line is to use the provost’s charge to us as a launching off point to create a more permanent health care reform presence on the SMU campus,” Mayo said.
Another major problem in America’s health care is the people who are uninsured or underinsured. He says about one-third of Americans have no health insurance. This is particularly important to the state of Texas. According to the Texas Health Institute, Texas has the highest number of uninsured people in the nation, at 30.7 percent.
“One really bad illness could wipe out your insurance coverage,” Mayo said.
Tim Woodard, a full-time employee at Hotel Palomar in Dallas, believes there is a strong need for health care reform.
“I’ve been paying it [health insurance] for years now and I haven’t had anything wrong. I’m tired of paying it,” Woodard said.
Woodard is 19 years old and must work full-time to support himself. He said he is relatively healthy and hardly goes to the doctor so he finds it difficult to pay for health care because it’s expensive and he doesn’t use it. He believes health care costs should be relative to the amount of medical attention one needs.
Unlike Woodard, Mareau has dealt with several health scares due to her chronic heart condition. She described a time when she had to go to the hospital after collapsing at a track meet. The doctors told her that she needed a heart transplant.
“The health insurance wasn’t going to cover all of it…I ended up not getting it because I knew I couldn’t afford it,” Mareau said.
She says even minor checkups can add up. She explains that there are times when she must decide to pay for rent, electricity or her health insurance.
Mareau dreams of being in school; she wishes she could be in class instead of at work everyday. She feels she misses out on a great deal of experiences and qualities of being young and carefree.
“I definitely want to go back to school to make a good life for myself so my children won’t have to deal with the problems I’ve had to,” said Mareau.
