How can she afford health insurance?

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Dana Dwyer, 24, had just quit her first job after college as a manager at a Ralph Lauren store in Miami and hadn't started her second yet when, wham!

She was in a car wreck. Her front teeth were knocked out, and her palate was broken. In between jobs, she had no health insurance.

"I was in the hospital," she says. "It was horrible."

Worse, though, was the $16,000 bill. Dwyer was forced to use her savings and work out a deal with the hospital to pay $200 a month.

"I paid $2,000 upfront to have my teeth fixed," she says. "You have to have teeth."

You really need to have health insurance, too, even if you're young and in good health.

But many twentysomethings don't. They either work for a company that provides none, haven't worked long enough to qualify or feel they can't afford to pay for an individual policy.

Adults under age 35 are nearly twice as likely as those 45 and older to be uninsured, according to the Actuarial Research Corp.

Twenty-seven percent of twentysomethings have no health insurance, according to a poll by USA TODAY and the National Endowment for Financial Education. Of the 901 people polled, 9% said their parents were helping pay for their health insurance.

Dwyer says her parents would help, too, but "I've been out of school for a couple of years. I should stand on my own."

As she's finding, it isn't easy. Her medical debts hit hard because at the time she was already carrying about $12,000 in student loans and more than $15,000 in credit card debt. She graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana, Pa., in 2005 with a degree in fashion merchandising.

Her credit card debt, Dwyer says, is killing her. She realizes now that she racked up far too much of it while in college.

"I didn't work a day in college; my dad was helping me," she says. "I was like 18, 19 years old and I'd say, 'I like this shirt. I want it.'"

And she'd charge it.

"If I'd known when I was 19 that I was accumulating all this debt ..." She says she's since cut up her three cards and isn't charging anymore.

Dwyer, who now works as a bartender in Miami six days a week, makes a good salary for someone her age: about $65,000.

But those years of buying whatever she wanted whenever she wanted have caught up with her. Dwyer and her boyfriend share payments on a car, and she says that with student loan, credit card, medical and car payments, she can't keep up.

On top of that, her computer just broke, she says, and she needs a new one. Dwyer works part time for a friend who is starting her own line of clothing and says, "We do everything online."

"I need to get ahead of myself, and I can't seem to do it," she says. "There's always something."

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