At present, I cover health-care reform and policy for MinnPost.com, a nonprofit, nonpartisan online news publication founded in 2007. At one time, I covered workplace issues for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, where my interest in health policy began while covering unemployed workers who no longer could afford health insurance.
If Congress and President Barack Obama decide the responsibility for health insurance falls on the shoulders of individual Americans, all of us might want to pay more attention to what's going on now in the individual insurance market and to what's promised in the legislation. If having no insurance is considered rock-bottom, having individual insurance is the next floor up. Some call it "house insurance," thinking that by having it they won't lose their homes to pay for a catastrophic illness.
This story attempts to bust through the stereotypes about uninsured people in Minnesota, which has one of the lowest uninsured rates in the nation.
