According to CBS News, it's the one-two punch of large, unexpected medical bills from an accident or illness combined with the absence of health insurance that most commonly sends young adults into the financial abyss that will mar much of their adult life. Sadly the trigger points for this financial crisis are worsening.

• The Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation conducting independent research on health issues, says the19- to 29-year-old age group represents 30 percent of the uninsured non-elderly population. It's the largest and fastest-growing group without insurance.
  
• Fewer and fewer employers (the major way Americans receive their insurance) are offering health insurance as a benefit of working. Between 2000 and 2005 alone, the number of employers offering health insurance to new employees fell from 66 to 60 percent. Many new jobs are being offered on a consulting, freelance, or contract basis and lack benefits.  

Other factors are contributing to the rising tide of the young and uninsured: over the past decade the cost of health insurance has risen 10 to 15 percent per year, the purchasing power of entry level jobs is lower now than it was a decade ago, today's college graduates finish school with an average debt load of $20,000, and many young adults past the age of 19 have been dropped from their parents' policy.

Consequently many twenty-year-olds look at the cost of insurance, their wages, their debt, their history of being healthy, and they opt to roll the dice: They gamble that they're going to remain healthy and that paying a lot of cash for health insurance is money down the drain.  Click here for more about why so many of your peers are uninsured.