You've got to read this article. It’s about the tens of thousands of young adults—or, ‘young invincibles’—living in New York City without health insurance. It’s a harrowing story.

It’s also great journalism. Few magazine or newspaper articles come as close as this one to presenting the complexity, convolution, and human and economic toll of our broken health care system. It does so by focusing on a group that typically goes without insurance—an uninsured group that has very few advocates: young adults.

Here’s the nut of the story (I know this is a huge blockquote, but there was nothing I could cut from it).

Compared with small children, uninsured young workers are generally ineffective as political sympathy-generators and are therefore typically viewed as a footnote to the debate. But health-care analysts will tell you that insuring children, while certainly noble, is a relatively easy goal. “What a lot of people don’t realize,” says Peter Cunningham, a researcher at the Washington, D.C.–based Center for Studying Health System Change, “is that most children are already eligible for some form of care. They either qualify for Medicaid or can be insured under their parents’ plan. So in many respects, it’s a matter of making the paperwork clearer, not overhauling the system.” The young invincibles, on the other hand, are an example of how the system bypasses some groups altogether. In this they are not alone—the poor have a long history of inadequate care, and increasingly, middle-class families are finding themselves priced out—though to understand their bind is to see just how ineffective the current system has become.

Many people in the insurance industry gripe about media coverage of insurance issues. And occasionally they have a point. This article is an example of the kind of reportage the insurance industry should champion.

Read the article.